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Greed All Around
October 2nd, 2008 | Dean Arrindell
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I'm surprised I haven't seen Gordon Gekko's "Greed is Good" speech on television during the reporting on the credit crisis. More than twenty years ago in "Wall Street" Gekko said, "Greed..is good. Greed is right. Greed works."
But, greed didn't save the U.S.A. It's to blame for this crisis. Public opinion, from articles like this one, seems more concerned with the crisis on "Main Street," than the crisis on "Wall Street." Little attention is given to things like the lack of congressional oversight in the $700 Billion bail out. Most of the talk is about what's going to be done for Main Street (regular, working class Americans) and making sure those on Wall Street (greedy fat cats) are hung out to dry. It's not that simple.
Wall Street and Main Street are connected. If these big institutions don't get rid of their bad loans so they can start lending money again, the country will be ruined. Businesses won't be able to get loans they need to pay employees and buy their supplies. Then employees won't get paid and businesses will begin to go under. So, if Wall Street fails, Main Street fails.
By the way, those terms "Wall Street" and "Main Street" are troublesome to me. It's beginning to sound like people are talking about the actual Wall Street: the block with the stock exchange, along with the other banks and executives based in New York. Main Street sounds a lot like small-town middle-class Middle America. It's starting to sound like another front of the culture war: Innocent people from Main Street who have "Small Town Values" (for which the Daily Show couldn't find a definition) were taken advantage of by Wall Street who are city people with questionable morals. Urban versus Rural. City folk versus country folk.
It shouldn't be that way. Several groups from both "Streets" are at fault. Yes, there are the brokers and CEOs who were greedy. Many of them are in New York. The politicians in Washington let those CEOs do what they pleased. There are also the banks and the credit card companies located all over the country who allowed consumers to rack up debt they couldn't pay off. And don't forget the mortgage brokers located right on "Main Street" who looked at those buyers in the eye, knew those buyers couldn't afford those homes, but sold them anyway. They deserve some blame as well.
Finally, there are consumers: Those Americans who must have everything and have it now. No one forced all those homeowners to take mortgages they couldn't afford. No one forced all those shoppers to max out their credit cards. No one forced America to buy everything in sight without regard to the consequences. I hear very little discussion about homeowners being responsible for the bad decisions they made. I'm not so cruel to say they should be thrown out of their homes. But how much help should they get? If the banks shouldn't get help, as some people suggest, then why should the homeowners who overextended themselves get help?
And what about our spending and saving habits? How much will these hard financial times change our culture of greed and consumption?
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Related Topics: Buying, Financial Crisis
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Dean Arrindell | No Comments »
Greed All Around
(via Facebook, MySpace, Digg, email and more)