Financial Market Woes

I cannot describe how sick I am of reading the business section of the paper. It seems that every day, some "financial expert" gives his or her interpretation of the market, and various reasons for explaining how and why it is as bad as it currently is.

The latest chapter is a letter written from a bunch of Chief Risk Officers of some huge financial firms to the Feds. It basically blames this whole nasty situation on unreasonable optimism at the beginning, bad foresight and predicting on how fast things would deteriorate in the middle, and now investor panic at the end. The letter admits that perhaps firms like Bear Sterns, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, are a LITTLE to blame, but then quickly moves on to explain that it is the entire financial market that is to blame for getting us into this, and the investors and general public to blame for panicking when things got rough.

I personally believe that while there IS a little truth in the letter, it is mainly a bunch of finger pointing.

Let me tell you what I think happened (in short form):
A bunch of people got greedy, saw that they could make millions by scamming the everyday guy (and also by scamming other businesses), and so their lust for money and ambition for power blinded them to the fact that in the CLOSED financial system, someone ALWAYS gets hosed when someone else makes a killing. Simply put, each of these people wanted to see a redistribution of money in America - with themselves holding more.

The problem is not lack of foresight or prediction or panic, the problem is that the financial markets are full of greedy bastards who don't care who they step on in their climb to power and riches. There are too many people who are in that market because they heard that they could get rich quick. So without morals or ethics they set forth on their goal, not looking back at the trail of bodies left behind.

It doesn't take a genius to see why we are in this economic mess. Greedy people + no control = bad situation (economy). Did they think the government would just simple print more money and give it to them for free? If not, then when they were getting rich, did they ever think about who was getting poor? Did they not realize how fragile this whole economic system is? You cannot just "get rich" without any consequence! When they went after the average everyday American with a mortgage, they went too far. They didn't care how or where they got their money, even if it was the everyday consumer. And now we all pay. And guess what, the government DID print more money and give it to them for free. What a f-ed up system of bailing out of the financial markets.

When the government did that, they sent a message to everyone: take other peoples money and we'll just make more (thus diluting the value of the dollar and increasing inflation and making everything more expensive so that EVERYONE has to bear the burden of these greedy bastards).

You want to point the finger and blame someone Mr. Chief Risk Officer? Point the finger at yourself and most of your greedy cohorts.

You want to fix our economic problems? Make everyone who got rich off this give the money back! Take away their millions and use it to correct the financial markets. Make the people who got rich off this just as poor as the people who lost their homes due to their greed. I'm sure many of these greedy people have even found ways to avoid paying full taxes on their millions, further aggravating the whole economic situation! That's the solution - punish the greedy people! Make it not worth it to anyone who wants to get rich by crippling our economy.

Nothing in life is for free - especially not riches. It's a matter of who loses and how big do they lose. It is time to turn some of these "winners" into losers.