Stop whining

"...Ricardo Hausmann, a former Venezuelan government minister and former member of the board of the country’s central bank, who is now a professor at Harvard. In the FT this week, Hausmann urged the US to “stop behaving as the whiner of first resort”. In an echo of those Russians and Mexicans at Davos, he pointedly observed: “Many poorer countries with weaker markets and institutions have survived and benefited from an adjustment that involves a year of negative growth”. The US should face its “need” for that adjustment – which might be called a recession in less polite company – “with courage and reason, not fear”." Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Indeed.

How many of us knew that the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision* changed the rules? Did we know that the committee decided that "banks should be given more freedom to decide for themselves how much risk they should take on, since they are in a better position than regulators to make that call."** Pared right down to the bare facts? The industry gave itself permission to run roughshod over all financial wisdom, unencumbered by those pesky regulators.

Now those same bankers want us, the taxpayers, to bail them out. They changed the rules and now think they should not be either liable or responsible for their greed. They speculated and lost. We shouldn't be expected to bail their greedy selves out. For Congress to even listen to such a proposal is a demonstration of the cupidity, not only of the banks, but of our elected representatives.

Yes, I said cupidity. What does that mean, you ask? A concise definition from WordNet (Princeton University): "extreme greed for material wealth. syn: avarice." Well, well, well. Avaricious bankers? nooooooo! There are other words to describe the self-serving words of all involved in this sham: meretriciousness, speciousness, for instance.***

"Those who fail to learn from the past are destined to repeat it." Are these words familiar? Will The Fed rely on the same old sham fixes that have pumped up the economy, only to fail miserably, in the past? It's time to start protecting and investing the foundation, the workers and homeowners and laborers and middle class, those who hold this country together and make it run. Leave the super-rich to their own devices. They don't need us bailing them out. The banks don't need us bailing them out. Congress doesn't need us applauding their short-sightedness.

It's time to slap down the megabanks, the corporations enriching themselves at the expense of all living creatures on this earth, monstrous agribusiness posting more specious arguments for poor technologies, government officials playing fiddlediddle with special interests, federal agencies playing politically motivated games to protect special interests. It's time to stop.



* Group consisting of central bank governors from Belgium, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Britain and the US. The committee's purpose as founded was to make sure that banks regulated themselves in a manner that maintained capitalization sufficient to protect the interests of depositors.
** "Mortgage Fallout Exposes Holes in New Bank-risk Rules", Wall Street Journal
*** I, personally, love specious. It describes exactly what the committee's words were, are, and will continue to be: Having the ring of truth or plausibility but actually fallacious.