I have been trying—desperately (well, not really)—to understand the current financial situation. At first I chalked it up to Voodoo, but it turns out the answer is much simpler: Pure, unregulated greed—or, as I like to call it, crapitalism.
I think I’ve got the gist of the situation figured out, at least.
1. People want to buy houses.
2. Banks offer mortgage loans to everyone, including the recently bankrupted, recently unemployed, and recently dead.
3. Housing prices increase significantly as a result of…lunar cycles? Ergotism?
4. Banks continue to hand out loans on a first come, first serve basis.
5. Our robust economy catches a cold.
6. The cold gets worse and becomes a sinus infection.
7. Banks begin handing out mortgages whenever anyone opens a new account.
8. The economy does not respond to antibiotic treatment and develops pneumonia.
9. Mortgagors stop sending in payments because their kids want to eat.
10. Banks get angry and foreclose on people’s homes.
11. Banks realize that their new houses won’t sell. Consumers laugh until they pee themselves.
12. Consumers stop laughing when all of the mortgage lenders that start with “F” implode.
13. The government—showing the sort of can-do spirit that’s going to bankrupt us all—proposed a bailout that 200+ university economists scoffed at. <http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/john .cochrane/research/Papers/mortgage_protest.htm> (Props to Paulson, though, for trying to get $700 billion and no oversight; that takes chutzpah.)
14. The bill passes after two votes in Congress. As far as I can tell, I don’t benefit directly. That’s right: I have no job, but the people making millions—and bad decisions—are getting bailed out.
15. Everyone decides to set up their own mortgage firms and hope for another bailout.
I know Shinola about economics, but I feel very impotently angry—as if I’m getting screwed over for reasons I don’t understand. Whom do I hold accountable? Who caused this to happen? I want to burn some effigies or write an angry letter or stone someone. I can’t even blame the terrorists (I think; I don’t know).
It’s enough to make me reconsider paying taxes.
(So, I thought up “crapitalism” on my own, but then I Googled it, and it turns out that others came up with the term first. Still, I’m pretty pleased with myself.)
