Sunday 5 April 2009

Stunning views on financial culpability



The interviewee in this video makes no bones about who he thinks is to blame for the current financial crisis. If he's right then things can only get a lot worse.
PBS Moyers video

4 comments:

Mark Forskitt said...

So it wasn't me!
Intriguing stuff.

Linda Corby said...

So glad I am not alone in my thoughts on this subject.

Very interesting. Thank you.

stevendm said...

What's so sad is that the nearly the entire population of the world will pay in some manner for the crimes these guys, and the US government has committed. Without proper regulation, it seems systemic immorality is inevitable.

Nick Palmer said...

I think the chief crime these guys committed was not listening to those who warned them and their colossal arrogance that they were the "masters of the universe" and that therefore everybody else had a lesser knowledge of how the world worked.

Perhaps a large part of the problem started back in the days of Reagan and Thatcher who promoted the idea that "there is no such thing as society". This was a reductionist philosophy which had the idea that society was no more than the sum of the ideas and aspirations of each person or family within it, just looking out for themselves.

In other words, they thought that if each person/family unit strove and competed to do the "best" for themselves, then that would automatically be the best thing and lead to the best, most efficient, most prosperous outcome for everybody. They thought that the sum of individual selfish successes would add up to success for all.

I've always though that idea had a logical hole in it that you could drive a bus through, but a lot of "yuppie" types fervently believe this sort of thing.

Looking at the holistic, or bigger, picture is just what Wall Street didn't do... and their crime was to be so arrogant, or blinded by greed, that they didn't listen to those who did.