The Financial Crisis

I think it was in 2004, when I had just finished college. I had (literally) zero dollars in my bank account just before I was starting my first job at Oracle. On top of that, I had a tidy sum in college loan debt staring me in the face. I knew nothing about houses, other than I wanted to buy one for myself some day. It was around then that a friend of mine mentioned that I should ‘buy a house now.’ I laughed and remarked that I had no money to put down, plus I hadn’t even started my job yet. The conversation went something like this:

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Friend: “Why don’t you buy a house now? You’d just be throwing your money away renting.”
Jack: “What, you mean besides the fact that I don’t have any money?”
Friend: “Nah, you can get a no-money down mortgage. The interest rate’s not bad and you can just re-finance in a few years.”
Jack: (to myself) “I don’t know a whole lot, but that seems completely fucking absurd to me. Why would they loan me boatloads of money when I don’t have any?”

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I never got a straight answer to that question then, but it’s clear now what kinds of shenanigans were going on.

As a single mid-20’s male, with no real life commitments, who has been worriedly following this whole crisis, the main emotion running through my head (besides ‘concern’) is, surprisingly, anger. It’s the kind of anger that comes from the feeling of being cheated and it’s directed out between the immoral executives and financial institutions who dealt with these irresponsible mortgages, the idiotic/naive/gullible Americans who decided on taking these outrageous loans that they couldn’t afford, and to a certain extent the government regulators who I feel like should have been doing something about this earlier.

Basically, it’s anger that the entire world economy and American taxpayers (including myself) will get to bear the pain that should, frankly, be felt by these people alone. I’ll admit it, I haven’t even considered stopping to feel sorry for anyone from Lehman or any of the other financial institutions that have collapsed (or laid people off). It’s awful for me to say it, but it’s true. It’s particularly true when they have, on average, been pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, much of it due to these types of instruments. I don’t feel sorry for them for a single moment. I hope some of them at least realize their responsibility in this whole thing.

And then today, as if sensing that it’s a great time to come along trolling for money, the big Detroit automakers went begging in Washington today. It just makes you cringe, doesn’t it? How about first you guys actually make some cars that customers want to purchase?

It’s all incredibly disturbing. Welcome to the new global economy.