Even after reading a lot of articles on the current economic crisis, it is difficult to get a grasp on just what, specifically, brought about the chain of events that have led to our current upheaval. The question is, who is responsible, and why.
Well, we know of someone who was not responsible. I’ll bet you’ve never heard of her. Her name is Brooksley Born. During the Clinton administration, she was in charge of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. She objected to these new derivatives and credit swaps and other nefarious instruments of economic bamboozlement. But she was overruled and marginalized by Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin, who were entranced and delighted with the possibilities raised by deregulation of the securities markets. (Rubin was later a director and counselor to Citibank, until January this year, when he went to work for Obama).
They saw lots of Enrons (then considered miraculously profitable) splashing money around making all their friends rich. Well, to be generous, they probably would like you to believe they thought any red-blooded American investor could get rich by investing in a company like Enron. All you needed was lots and lots of disposable money. Sure, anyone.
Today, everybody knows about Kenneth Lay and AIG and Eliot Spitzer and Britney Spears and even Susan Boyle, and nobody knows the name Brooksley Born. So here is my modest little tribute to a great woman:
Brooksley, you were right.
And she was not the only one who was right but didn’t receive nearly enough credit for it.
You were wise when everyone around embraced foolishness. Someone should name a large federal building for you. And remove the name “Greenspan”.
The world of high finance and banking seems to have been mainly a giant Ponzi scheme and those who were in on the backroom deals profited immensely and, so far, with near impunity.
No one will ever know exactly how complicit Rubin and Greenspan and the others were, but we do know that neither of them left their federal appointments to go work for Habitat for Humanity.
Do Americans finally get what’s going on? While they were all excited about this incredibly expensive military adventure in Iraq that would cost nearly a trillion dollars– to prevent America’s interests from being harmed by nefarious Islamic foes– American’s interests were harmed by the same fat cats that sponsored Bush in the first place, the ones who got all the tax cuts, the ones who urged you to keep America safe by voting for a strong military.
They are counting on your ignorance, your indifference, your confusion. They are counting on you believing that our economic systems is fundamentally sound and fundamentally serves your interests in spit of what appears to be looting on an unimaginable scale, of your pensions, your insurance, your mortgages.
What Actually Happened and Why it Should Not Have
Do you get what actually happened? This is what I understand went down: banks and other financial institutions conspired to set up these huge funds– derivatives– which consisted of bundled mortgages and loans amounting to trillions of dollars. They resold these packages to investors and then, to eliminate any risk, set up entities to back the loans called “credit swaps”. The credit swaps guaranteed repayment of the loans if the borrowers defaulted, essentially giving investors all the benefits of risk — high payments– with none of the actual risks. These credit swaps were fraudulently presented as some kind of magical black box which could never fail to produce bunnies, when, in fact, they were never responsibly vetted by any authority. It was the duty of the government to vet these instruments– it failed.
These funds spread like wildfire throughout the financial industry until nobody even knew who was really holding what. When the mortgage bubble burst and housing prices began falling catastrophically in the U.S., buyers started defaulting on their loans in massive numbers, bleeding the magical system dry, and sucking up all of the liquidity in the entire financial system.
That’s my understanding as far as it goes.
The most frightening thing about the bail-out is the number of people, like Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson, who were involved in the original sin who are now involved in the massive attempted “redemption” of the world economy.
Can the same people who steered us into the ice berg rescue the passengers from the life boats?
Much as I would like to lay this at Bush’s feet, it is clear that the era of deregulation began under Clinton and that Bush merely carried on in the same general spirit.