Hot Flash!
Bankers ain’t villains! That’s the word from Citi’s new chairman, Richard Parsons, and I couldn’t agree more.
Parsons knows the score: when you screw up, blame everyone.
He cleverly elides over the fact that banks, blinded by hubris and greed, provided the hot air that inflated the Great Twenty-First Century Housing Bubble that Popped and Splattered Everybody with Shit.
It is unfortunate that the unwashed public when confronted with stupidity mistakes it for evil.
“Besides the banks,” Parsons points out, “there was reduced regulatory oversight, loans to unqualified borrowers were encouraged and people took out mortgages or home-equity loans they couldn’t afford.”
The truth is the banks were victimized by a venal public who forced them to approve loans to unqualified borrowers and made them write mortgages and home-equity loans they couldn’t afford.
The banks pleaded with them not to take the money on which the banks would collect fat fees for passing these toxic loans on to the next sucker. But the ignorant fools wouldn’t listen and dragged the banks, kicking and screaming, into their vaults and stood over them while they counted out the money.
It was this same mob, brandishing pitchforks and torches, that forced the banks’ lobbyists to direct their congressional employees to deregulate the financial system.
Dick's right to plead the banks' innocence. The truth is the American public mugged them.
--Belacqua Jones
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