"Even the supporters of our existing financial structure – men like former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr... the White House economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers... and JPMorgan Chase's chief executive, Jamie Dimon – concede that big crises occur every five years or so. What hit us in 2008-9 was not a "once per century" event. Rather it was the latest, and scariest, in a series of regular global crises going back at least to the 1970s."
-MIT's Simon Johnson takes a stab at explaining why huge financial institutions are self-serving and a menace to those of us who aren't them.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
6
1. They have enormous piles of people's money and/or "wealth."
2. Like most any organism that declares itself self-interested, it behaves instead selfishly, getting away with all it can, while it can;
3. When it gets caught, or breaks something, it cries #1 above and we vigorously nurse it back to health.
To take us for another spin on the merry-go-round.
These are simply the normal ebbs of flows of a vibrant, dynamic, monstrous beast.
You're all about the Leviathan today, huh? I expect a 1500-word essay on Hobbes on my desk by noon.
GOD I would love to.
Considering the most recent allegations against Goldman Sachs, an argument could be made that they're a criminal enterprise and they could probably be dismantled under RICO, but unfortunately as the article and others have noted, they're just too politically connected.
"Now that I can see it all as from a lonely hilltop, I know it was the story of a mighty vision given to a man too weak to use it; of a holy tree that should have flourished in a people's heart with flowers and singing birds, and now is withered; and of a people's dream that died in bloody snow."
-Nicholas Black Elk, on the Battle at Wounded Knee
I read that on a subway sign. I had to cross to the other side of the car to get the attribution because it was obscured by the curvature of the car from where I was standing.
"Nicholas Black Elk, eh? Hot damn, that's a strong American name," I thought. People really listen to a man with a name like that. Which only partly explains why I'm reading it right now from a plastic sign affixed to a number 5 subway car.
Of course, Nicholas Black Elk was talking about the massacre at Wounded Knee. But for us, today, he could just as easily be talking about anything from rich bankers fucking over Joe and Jane Worker to Goldman Sachs and too big-to-fail to the Death of Capitalism itself.
I asked my friend Megan what she thought about this news that the latest financial crisis is just one more pebble in the pond.
"Nothing surprises me anymore," she said.
I guess It's easy to be hard and cynical about the whole thing. For every singular mighty vision granted man, there's a horde of hateful weaklings standing by only too ready to urinate on it for little to no reason at all save for the exchange of whatever form of currency happens to carry sway at the time; a tulip, a gold coin, a piece of paper worth only as much as whatever centralized banking institution happens to be in charge at the time deems plausible.
When I consider how little I care about what bankers, financial engineers or hedge fund titans do, I like to imagine it's not born of hard cynicism, but a vague apathy, because almost everything they do surprises me and yet I still don't care. In my mind, it's the spent and jaded, hard-worn lack of surprise that constitutes modern cynicism.
Nicholas Black Elk saw nearly 150 people, almost half of those women and children, massacred by twice as many heavily armed Cavalry troops. From the context of Wounded Knee, his words aren't cynicism, but a tragic, mournful observation. But from the safety of a subway car, it's a long way to Wounded Knee. Yes, it's easy to be hard and cynical. Safer, too.
I asked Megan, "Would it surprise you if some dude from Goldman Sachs appeared live on TV and ate a dachshund, just because he could?"
"Nothing surprises me," she replied.
I believed her.