Watching the Defectives

Of course, you know that selling mortgages to people with no money and no assets isn’t going to make you rich. Your granny knows it. Fred down the street knows it. The toothless hobo shining shoes for beer knows it too. Just ask him, he’ll tell you. So how come all these bankers don’t know it? We keep being told how intelligent they are, but when even stupid people wouldn’t be that stupid, then just how talented are they?
The crash of 1929 came about mainly because the bankers were conning the public at large by selling them shares they secretly knew to be worthless. The Savings and Loan crash of 1989 was about them having tried to con each other, selling bonds to fellow bankers without telling them they were junk. But this latest one has gone beyond all bounds. The marks, the suckers, the victims of this latest con were the traders themselves.
”If I buy this worthless mortgage contract, I can pay myself a lot of money for it and with that money I can buy a lot more worthless contracts which I can sell to myself and then buy more... I’ll be rich in no time.” It’s like one of those perpetual motion machines that scamsters used to peddle to gullible nobles in the eighteenth century. The ball bearings roll over the top of the wheel, and then fall down the other side, dragging the wheel around faster each time, so it turns forever! Except that it doesn’t. There’s no new energy coming into the system to overcome resistance. Same here, except with money. But don’t worry, we can fall for as many dumb shell-games and shills as we like - it’ll all be okay in the end because the government will always bail us out!
If you want a mythological analogy for this, it’s easy to see. Sitting in the middle of his labyrinth, the half-Prince/half-bull Minotaur could be kept under control just as long as the King made it a regular blood sacrifice. Virgins, young men and women from the country were led into the maze, never to emerge. This was the contract the mortals had with their royal monster... In our new world order, the beast-like ‘Princes’ of the financial world can wreck havoc in our kingdoms, but every so often they demand we make a vast sacrifice to appease them. They want money, not blood, but the effect is the same. The City of London even looks like a labyrinth on the map, I notice.
If we are going to cut a deal with the dealers in the future, it ought to involve having some genuinely intelligent people accompany them at all times, charged with dragging them away from “Hunt the Pea” and “Find the Lady” stalls... at gun-point if need be. Where would you find these guardians? Oh, any unemployed seventeen year-old could do it. That toothless hobo I mentioned earlier would be more than capable of minding these brainless dimwits. He’s got far more common sense than any of them, but a thought occurs to me that we could kill two birds with one stone. Bankers love their drugs. Oooh, don’t they though! And drug dealers are not fools. They know how to make money. So, who better to award the contract of supervising the day-care of our banker class? It’s a win-win. It keeps them all off the streets. I think it’s a marriage made in heaven.