A Crisis Without Criminals

hamptons_house.jpgMy husband has a friend who worked on Wall Street packaging crummy mortgages into bundled securities and selling them to unsuspecting buyers. We’ll call him Boris. Boris is a real person. He was probably making $500K a year, and really needed that income to pay for the house in the Hamptons, private school for the kids, and a 6,000-square-foot penthouse apartment in NY. Boris had, and still has, a lifestyle to maintain. So he did what everyone he knew in the business was doing: he sold worthless, bundled junk to any buyer because it was rated well, and he wasn’t the one who rated it. In the downturn, his company (which will remain unnamed) let many of their brokers go. Boris did not end up on the streets. He found an equally high-paying job helping a new institution to recognize risky investments. After all, he knew exactly what they looked like.

Did I mention that Boris thought the whole thing was pretty funny at the time? That he was getting away with such a blatant ripoff and making tons of money doing it? The many brokers and executives running Wall Street knew EXACTLY what they were doing. But they didn’t stop because it was all highly profitable. And NOT ILLEGAL.

Even those massive bonuses that the execs paid themselves, $5 MILLION for Martin Sullivan, the departing CEO of AIG, were not illegal.

So Congress is giving them a verbal lashing. “Ow! Stop it! That hurts!” Our country and the world’s financial systems are tanking horribly and they get a verbal lashing. Sullivan keeps the $5 million and my husband’s friend Boris keeps the house in the Hamptons.

And now we get Neel Kashkari, our 35 year old boy genius to manage the Office of Financial neel-kashkari.jpgStability worth $700 billion of taxpayer dollars. A little youth obsession anyone? Wasn’t there a more senior, seasoned, wise choice for this position? Not that I’m nervous or anything, but Kashkari is the same age as Boris. And it may be me, but he’s got the look of mad ambition. Gawd I’m tired of mad ambition. It’s so 2007. And so McCain.

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October 8, 2008 | Filed Under Great Recession 

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One Response to “A Crisis Without Criminals”

  1. duh pookie on January 20th, 2010 8:14 pm

    [...] on it. Let your Congresspeople know that you care, and that you vote. (You do vote, right?) In an earlier post I explained that we have a “friend” who was a NY investment broker. He laughed as he [...]

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