Knock-knock. Who's there? Bernard Madoff.
Bernard Madoff who?
Bernard made off with all your money, so you're screwed. Happy New Year!
The list of victims of Bernard Madoff's scheme is long and varied, ranging from actor Kevin Bacon to retirees in Florida to the Jewish Federation of Greater Toronto.
If you think about it, though, isn't the whole subprime crisis of 2007-2008 (and maybe-2009) its own kind of Ponzi scheme? Investors in mortgage backed securities came to rely on people coming in and buying those investments from them, even as those investments started to seem a little dodgy. As long as you could sell off your iffy debt to some naive newcomer, you were basically OK. But when new people stopped buying mortgage backed securities, poof.
Maybe I'm going out on a ledge here, but the brand of capitalism that dominates the American economy to some extent depends on the kind of attitude that leads to high tech bubbles, and housing bubbles, and commodity bubbles.
I wish I knew who to attribute it to, but somewhere, someone said that American capitalism goes directly against what's in the bible. As in, the bible says we're not to covet our neighbor's ass, but the consumer economy totally depends on people coveting their neighbors' asses. In fact, much of the current super-recession can be blamed on Americans finally having enough and not coveting their neighbors' asses anymore.
Bernard made off with all your money, so you're screwed. Happy New Year!
The list of victims of Bernard Madoff's scheme is long and varied, ranging from actor Kevin Bacon to retirees in Florida to the Jewish Federation of Greater Toronto.
If you think about it, though, isn't the whole subprime crisis of 2007-2008 (and maybe-2009) its own kind of Ponzi scheme? Investors in mortgage backed securities came to rely on people coming in and buying those investments from them, even as those investments started to seem a little dodgy. As long as you could sell off your iffy debt to some naive newcomer, you were basically OK. But when new people stopped buying mortgage backed securities, poof.
Maybe I'm going out on a ledge here, but the brand of capitalism that dominates the American economy to some extent depends on the kind of attitude that leads to high tech bubbles, and housing bubbles, and commodity bubbles.
I wish I knew who to attribute it to, but somewhere, someone said that American capitalism goes directly against what's in the bible. As in, the bible says we're not to covet our neighbor's ass, but the consumer economy totally depends on people coveting their neighbors' asses. In fact, much of the current super-recession can be blamed on Americans finally having enough and not coveting their neighbors' asses anymore.
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