Understanding the Current Financial Mess

I stumbled across an excellent radio program (no longer online) where we hear from borrowers who didn’t have to show any credit worthiness, a broker who aggressively sought out borrowers without caring whether they could pay back loans, and other players up the food chain packaging mortgages into investments for the $70 trillion world-wide fixed income market that hungered for higher returns than US treasuries.

Over the course of many steps, a half-million dollar loan to someone with low income was merged with other bad loans and transformed into an AAA-rated investment. This story is part stupidity and part greed. Unfortunately, both parts are extremely large.

With stories like this it's easy to get discouraged. Are we all just greedy idiots? On the other hand, we still have too much food to go around and far more clothing for sale than we could possibly wear out. Life is pretty good whether we’re greedy idiots or not. For most of us, unhappiness is driven by envy of our neighbours rather than actual need.

Comments

  1. AnonymousSeptember 19, 2008 at 8:10 AM

    Want and need are two separate things.

    What we should be doing in living with a want for just what we need, and not a need what we want..

    Greg

    ReplyDelete

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