Blame China
Financial Crisis Cause No. 3: The Chinese.
The willingness of this remote and curious people to sell us goods at ridiculously low prices is disruptive. It encourages our poor to believe they can afford many items which they should not be able to, for instance. And the vast number of dollars these same Chinese people willingly lend to us at absurdly low rates of interest places an unfair burden on our financiers, who must find someplace to put them.
This is a far more difficult job than is commonly understood; it often leaves Wall Street people feeling overworked and underappreciated. If we want our financiers to perform even better than they do, we must cease to expect more from them than they can give.
Which brings me to...
Financial Crisis Cause No. 4: Upon our trusting, hard- working and underappreciated financiers we thrust the impossible task of overcoming impersonal historical forces.
The most distressing aspect of the commission's report is its attempt to blame actual human beings for the financial crisis: fraudulent CDO managers, greedy ratings companies, Wall Street bond traders and, especially, Wall Street CEOs. Think about this: If everyone on Wall Street is guilty, how can anyone be? If no one on Wall Street saw it coming, how can anyone be expected to have seen it?
Details for Dummies
Anyway, as several Wall Street CEOs tried patiently to explain to the commission, the details were never their responsibility. Martin Sullivan, the CEO of AIG in the three years leading up to its near collapse, even went so far as to prove that he had no idea how much he'd been paid ($107 million).
The commission proved incapable of grasping the point: the rare man capable of running a big Wall Street firm remains focused on the big picture. And in the big picture, from the point of view of their firms and their earnings potential, the so-called financial crisis was a blip. They've already forgotten about it.
And they assume that, eventually, you will, too.