Eugene Robinson: So Much for the ‘Masters of the Universe’

[marmar]

from Truthdig:




So Much for the ‘Masters of the Universe’

Posted on Sep 22, 2008
By Eugene Robinson



The über-capitalists of Wall Street are all socialists now. Free-market ideology, it turns out, doesn’t pay the mortgage. That appears to be a job for, ahem, Big Government.

Let’s be clear about why we’re facing a crisis that could pull down the global financial system. The irresponsibility of individuals who bought houses they couldn’t quite afford pales in comparison to the irresponsibility of the financial wizards who built on those shaky mortgages a towering edifice of irrational faith. Someone in the government should have looked at all those trillions of dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps and demanded that Wall Street prove that all, or even most, of this purported money was real. But we’re in the eighth year of the Bush administration; adult supervision left the building long ago.

Now that the whole highly leveraged structure is threatening to fall, some kind of government bailout is necessary and inevitable. But Congress shouldn’t approve Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s $700-billion rescue plan without insisting on some measure of equity and accountability.

See, neglecting such details as equity—in both senses of the word—and accountability is what got us here in the first place.

Congress should have learned by now what happens when this administration is given a blank check. Unlike the run-up to the Iraq war, at least this time there’s a genuine emergency—we came within a whisker of a financial meltdown last week, and we’re still way deep in the woods. No one thinks that delay is an option.

Not Barack Obama, who introduced legislation in 2006 to address lax mortgage lending practices and in March proposed a new regulatory framework for the financial markets. Not John McCain, who has been all over the map. Within one week, McCain has gone from saying the “fundamentals of the economy are strong” to declaring that “we are in the most serious crisis since World War II.” ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080922_so_much_for_the_masters_of_the_universe/?ln

[ixion]

1. Damnit... people need to quit saying it's "inevitable"

that makes it sound like it's actually a viable option, which, in truth, it simply is not.

[bemildred]

2. The bailout is neither necessary or inevitable.

These companies need to accept the consequences of their own stupid decisions. There have been warnings about exactly what is happening for years and years now, and those warnings have been attacked and denigrated. The notion that the rest of us cannot manage our own affairs without the constant meddling of these fuckwits is fatuous. The very notion that they think they can still make threats and demands after a fuckup on this scale beggars description. They ought to be begging, they ought to be willing to do anything we like to get help. Would Mr Paulson himself accept the sort of bums-rush that he is trying to give the American taxpaying public?
:puke:

[hedgehog]

3. The problem is assigning the pain to where it belongs without

bringing everything to a crashing halt. I think Robinson makes some good points. As for Paulson's claim that limiting executive salaries means that firms won't accept a bail-out, I say Good! Let's see how much those bastards make once their ships sink!