Monday, February 2, 2009

Krugman -- Bailout for Bunglers

Worth reading:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/opinion/02krugman.html

And I agree with the following comment on the above article:

517.
EDITORS' SELECTIONS (what's this?)
February 02, 2009 1:20 pm
Link
I think we need to be clear. What happened here was not "bungling". This were good business decisions that made some people a lot of money. And those people who made money knew full-well that someone else was going to pay dearly for those decisions.Real estate brokers knew some of these people wouldn't pay their loans - but they were not going to pay that bill. The bankers who packaged them into bonds knew that they weren't really high quality bonds. But they weren't going to have to pay the bill either. And the mutual funds and bankers who bought the bonds knew the short term returns weren't going to contintue and the bonds were going to fail, but they were investing other people's money. They weren't going to pay the bill.This was industrial level fraud, not bungling. The stockholders of the banks were only one of many victims of that fraud.
— Ross Williams, Minnesota

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