Can't disagree. Consistent efforts to water down those safe guards paid off.
And why discuss just the mortgage bubble? There are so many other damning independent events in the past 4 years.
1) The mess with LIBOR. If you want to improve spin and double speak, you can do worse than remember this line "LIBOR has become dislocated from itself."
2) The failure of mortgage managers to maintain chain of ownership, and the robo signing scandal. Which is a nice way of wrapping up flat out fraud with a different set of words.
3) The flash crash - fine lets call it teeting issues with new technology. But what about deals where GS knowingly sells crud instruments to its clients? Or the oversight that creates such lovely euphemisms like the "London Whale". I'm currently betting that the Citi CEOs ouster will add itself to this list.
4) Too big to fail - If we say "market forces will handle it", and at the same time create institutions which are too big to fail, then haven't we essentially given up on free markets as we know it?
What I find amusing, is how the narrative is divorced from the historical timeline.
Fannie and Freddie were great ideas for their time. They were terrible ideas for a time where they were used by people who considered scruples to be ballast to be discarded, and that risk would be "managed by the market".
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On a separate note - I think any discussion that ends up overlapping the finance industry with entrepreneurship is broken. The finance industry / wall street are so removed from the spirit and intent of the law compared to the tech industry and SV startup-land that the we need separate dictionaries.
And why discuss just the mortgage bubble? There are so many other damning independent events in the past 4 years.
1) The mess with LIBOR. If you want to improve spin and double speak, you can do worse than remember this line "LIBOR has become dislocated from itself."
2) The failure of mortgage managers to maintain chain of ownership, and the robo signing scandal. Which is a nice way of wrapping up flat out fraud with a different set of words.
3) The flash crash - fine lets call it teeting issues with new technology. But what about deals where GS knowingly sells crud instruments to its clients? Or the oversight that creates such lovely euphemisms like the "London Whale". I'm currently betting that the Citi CEOs ouster will add itself to this list.
4) Too big to fail - If we say "market forces will handle it", and at the same time create institutions which are too big to fail, then haven't we essentially given up on free markets as we know it?
What I find amusing, is how the narrative is divorced from the historical timeline.
Fannie and Freddie were great ideas for their time. They were terrible ideas for a time where they were used by people who considered scruples to be ballast to be discarded, and that risk would be "managed by the market".
------------
On a separate note - I think any discussion that ends up overlapping the finance industry with entrepreneurship is broken. The finance industry / wall street are so removed from the spirit and intent of the law compared to the tech industry and SV startup-land that the we need separate dictionaries.