I’ve had it.
This country has been on engorging on a cheap credit binge for the last decade, stuffing itself on the sugar highs and empty calories provided by ultra-low interest rates and fancy derivatives and zero-down mortgages. Now the chickens are coming home to roost, and everyone is looking for a way to get their butt saved.
It’s bad enough that Congress already spent $150 billion earlier this year on a fiscal stimulus plan that did nothing but allow us to buy IPhones and XBoxes for a few more months. The American people now want more, and it looks like Congress is going to give it to us with another huge stimulus package. It’s money we can’t afford right now and which won’t do anything but provide another very temporary boost to an economy and consumer that needs to retrench for an extended period of time before they can begin to reflate.
But spending money one doesn’t have is the American way. Just ask the country’s beleaguered homeowners now drowning under onerous interest payments, the folks who were too busy picking out Ikea furniture to read the fine print of those adjustable-rate, no-doc mortgages they were signing. They, too, are soon going to get plenty of help from our friends in Washington.
You see, everyone says we need housing to rebound in order for the economy to recover, so by god, we are going to make the housing market rebound, even if it means the government has to buy up all those nasty little mortgages and restructure them, as Senator John McCain has so magnanimously offered to do (and to hell with the free market and the natural laws of supply and demand).
But really, who could possibly blame the American people for wanting to be spared the pain of an economic downturn?? They’re just following the lead of our most esteemed industry and financial leaders and watching with green eyes as the government tosses around hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars like so much loose change.
How fitting that the first ones at the government trough were the Wall Street pigs who cooked up this unhealthy smorgasbord slop and fed it to the ravenous, greedy (but mostly unsuspecting) crowd of American consumers.
Oh, it may seem unseemly that the ones largely responsible for creating this mess would be the first to come begging for help, but The Powers That Be knew the financial system that Wall Street had so cleverly manufactured was so fragile that many of these banks couldn’t fail. They knew that the pyramid scheme would have to be unraveled slowly or the entire economy would shut down.
So in order to prevent exposing the rot in the system to the public, regulators forced Bear Stearns into the hands of the relatively well-capitalized JP Morgan Chase, guaranteed the losses with a $29 billion loan and then lowered interest rates in an emergency session.
But that was just the start. You know the rest of the story. The scope of the problems became obvious, and it was clear the cancer had metastasized to every corner of our financial system. Housing in particular was a disaster, so we nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which should never have been privatized in the first place, as one of the only things scarier than capitalism gone mad, is capitalism with implicit government backing gone mad ).
AIG, too, needed help since it had gotten caught insuring a lot of these failing institutions, so we rescued that firm with $85 billion (and then watched as some of that promised money was immediately spent on a lovely sales retreat, replete with a $23,000 spa bill).
And yet all that government assistance still wasn’t enough, so the Treasury and the Fed went to Congress and pleaded for another $700 billion, and only after getting that pork-laden package passed have they begun figuring out exactly how they are going to use that money to save our banking system and economy.
It is all just so very frightening, but the last straw for me was reading an article about some of those poor, poor folks in the hedge fund industry who are now hoping they’ll also see some of that bailout money. Treasury Secretary Paulson insists the money is just for banks and thrifts, but that ‘plans could change’.
You’ve got to be kidding me!!
I mean, for crying out loud, it was only a decade ago when the government and a bunch of banks bailed out a hedge fund company named (ironically enough) Long-Term Capital Management.
Long-Term Capital, with its use of insane leverage (at least 25x) in highly illiquid, poorly regulated financial instruments, including some of the very same derivatives and mortgage-backed securities that are now causing us grief, was in many ways Version 1. 0 of the current Wall Street mess. And yet we ultimately learned very few lessons from that clear early warning sign (This Working Group document has some great background on the LTCM debacle as well as a number of generally ignored conclusions and recommendations).
Frankly, we missed a golden opportunity to increase supervision and disclosure requirements to help rein in some of the industry’s excesses.
Even worse, the LTCM bailout (and the subsequent lowering of interest rates by then-Fed Chairman Easy Al Greenspan) helped fan the flames and foster the environment that we now find ourselves in by encouraging more ill-advised risk taking while institutionalizing the idea that the government will always be there to cover up for our mistakes.
But there is a price to be paid for that largess. Eventually, we’re going to have to pay for this misguided philosophy. I’m just worried that it’s too late, that we’ve dug ourselves into a hole so deep it will take a generation or more to climb out of.
So it’s time to stop the capital injections and bailout plans, the incessant pumping of liquidity into the markets and the careless printing of money, the debt issuance and the interest rate cuts. We’ve done enough to unfreeze the markets and prevent a systemic collapse. It’s time to let the brutally effective corrective mechanisms of capitalism take care of the rest.
As Obama said during the most stirring moment in his Denver keynote convention speech:
‘Enough!’
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