…of a patriot:
At a party the following evening, a partner at a private equity fund told the table about his banker friends. “They’re just outraged,” he said.
First, the administration had forced the bankers to accept government money to strengthen their balance sheets. Then it had excoriated them for failing to lend amounts that would have weakened their balance sheets. Now? The bankers just want the government off their backs–but the administration is refusing to let them repay the capital they had never wanted in the first place.
Why haven’t the bankers spoken out?
“These days,” the private equity partner replied, “the government owns the banks. Nobody’s going to speak out against his owners, right? That’s just basic business practice. At least that’s what the bankers are all saying to themselves.”
The last exchange took place a couple of days later at a business school. Lately, a professor explained, students and faculty had begun quietly approaching him. “Everything’s on the hush-hush,” said the professor, a senior member of the faculty. “But they’re looking for support. We’ve been thinking of starting a group like AA, only for people who believe in capitalism.”
Actually, I wish they’d say believe in free markets. “Capitalism” is a Marxist term, that is more ambiguous. Anyway, this is what freedom of expression looks like in Hope and Change America. There’s another word for it, though. It starts with “f.” And it’s not “freedom.”
Let’s all play a song for the bankers on a very tiny violin. The self-pity and delusion conveyed in this story would be funny if it wasn’t so offensive.
It’s only offensive if you buy blindly into the standard narrative.
I thought it was Warren Buffet who was buying up banks all around the place.
Please, please stop using the phrase “Government Money.” It is either taxpayer money or debt. The government does not make the money, it only prints it. And if it prints more than is on hand, that is debt.
Let’s all play a song for the bankers on a very tiny violin. The self-pity and delusion conveyed in this story would be funny if it wasn’t so offensive.
So let me see if I have this right. It’s bad for a private bank to fail because its failure costs you and everyone else plenty. But it’s ok for a government bank to fail because only bankers are hurt.
Please, please stop using the phrase “Government Money.” It is either taxpayer money or debt.
Rich, doesn’t matter where it magically came from. Money has no provenance, you know. All that matters is who gets to spend it.
Ah good old Jim, you see government control and destruction of rights is a-okay as long as it’s someone unpopular being pushed around.
Oddly enough, that’s another property of that F-word Rand talks about. All a coincidence I’m sure.
Ah good old Jim, you see government control and destruction of rights is a-okay as long as it’s someone unpopular being pushed around.
It sounds like the Obama administration is starting to go after the people with money in order to fund the bailouts. Demonization of these targets is easy since they are widely envied. But even if they weren’t, it’s not much of an effort to make them unpopular.
“First they came after the bankers…”
I feel an essay coming on. An anti-fascist, anti-Jim one…
The financial services industry collectively reaped over 40% of all U.S. corporate profits in recent years. They did so by taking on increased risk. Now that the risk has bitten them, and their risk taking has hurt the entire globe, and the rest of us are called on to bail out their broken system, they whine that their compensation is being cut?
Meanwhile, millions of non-bankers who did not play fast and loose with other people money, or collect lavish rewards for doing so, are on the unemployment lines. They are being punished for being part of an economic system that depended on those bankers not screwing up. But for some reason the pages of Forbes aren’t full of stories of how their lives have been crushed.
“First they came after the bankers…”
Wow. Just when you think the bankers’ self-pity couldn’t get any more over-the-top, Rand kicks it up a notch and compares them to Holocaust victims….
By your guy and his friends in Congress.
real free markets all the banks would bankrupt.
bernanke and paulsen went in on 8 trillion of credit guarantees.
> bernanke and paulsen went in on 8 trillion of credit guarantees.
With Obama cheering them on until he got his chance to do more of the same.
If Jack Lee actually thinks that what Bernanke and Paulsen did was wrong, why does he support the continuation and expansion of those acts?
Jim, it’s 9/11 all over again. Except instead of terrorists crashing planes into buildings, it’s “bankers” costing millions of jobs that would have been lost anyway. Every major power grab by government requires unsympathetic scapegoats. If the US government or the US public wanted gratitude and humility from bankers, they should have paid for it. You get what you paid for, sometimes a lot less than what you paid for.
Another valid way to look at it is that those millions of non-bankers enjoyed employment for the past five years due to malinvestment, brought on by false economic signals generated by unsupportable debt being issued.
They would have been unemployed years ago, were it not for the housing & banking bubble.
They would have been unemployed years ago, were it not for the housing & banking bubble.
This statement is obviously false. Unemployment is higher now than it was before the bubble.
The people being laid off now aren’t all in bubble industries, but even the ones who are could have found more sustainable employment in other fields if capital hadn’t been sucked up by the bubble.
“f Jack Lee actually thinks that what Bernanke and Paulsen did was wrong, why does he support the continuation and expansion of those acts?”
Andy
Please cite one instance where I ever backed any of the Wall street initiatives
by the Bush or Obama Initiatives.
I have been consistent, that all of this should be sorted out by bankruptcy judges. if Treasury needed to provide some DIP financing, okay, but,
start off by firing half of all the people there, liquidating assets, liquidating
CDS and Derivative contracts and hitting the reset button.
Chrysler is going through bankruptcy, Lehman went through bankruptcy,
let the rest of these useless C&*%Suckers do the same.
It has been the conservative right that has been sotto-voce on TARP.
How many CATO, AEI, Heritage blowhards have been calling for mass bankruptcy courts?
How many CATO, AEI, Heritage blowhards have been calling for mass bankruptcy courts?
I’m not aware of any “blowhards” at those institutions (that would be you), but pretty much everyone who works at them have been denouncing TARP (and Bush’s economic policies, other than tax rate cuts) and demanding proper bankruptcies. But you’re too stupid and clueless to notice.
> Please cite one instance where I ever backed any of the Wall street initiatives by the Bush or Obama Initiatives.
There’s the fact that Jack Lee continues to harp about the water under the bridge (Bush’s initiatives) yet largely silent about Obama doing more of the same going forward.
> I have been consistent, that all of this should be sorted out by bankruptcy judges.
Oh really? The strong-arming of the secured creditors didn’t get Lee’s support?