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October 10, 2008
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Jack Gilden
Special to the Jewish Times
Of course the money disappeared.
Anybody watching the run in real estate over the last six years who saw how so much of it was fueled by the foolishness of subprime lending knew it was going to end poorly.
Now virtually all of Wall Street’s venerable names are in tatters. The American economy is collapsing. World markets are tumbling.
And why? Because the most brilliant minds in the investment world believed that lending a lot of money to people who couldn’t afford to buy a house was a good bet.
This decade was pretty much kicked off by a Saudi financier named bin-Laden, whose goal was to topple American financial might. He wasted a lot of lives, but his impact on the U.S. economy was relatively minimal.
If the good sheik had control of an entire air force with Manhattan in the crosshairs, he could only dream of doing the same kind of damage to the country that America’s own wealthy and powerful Wall Street titans accomplished.
But all of this isn’t even the funny part.
Now the U.S. government, with the full backing of both presidential candidates, is stepping into this shekel vs. shackle drama — to bail out the bad guys!
Uncle Sam is forking over more than $700 billion in what is referred to as a bailout. If you ask me, these guys really need a good bail bondsman.
If you’ve ever wondered whether there is a double standard in America for the rich, ask yourself: “Have I ever owed the IRS $5?”
Who from the benevolent government stepped in to bail you out?
You were probably called everything from a deadbeat to a leech, and threatened with jail. Instead of the president stepping in, you probably had your home attached and were hit
with late fees, penalties and some very interesting interest.
The government didn’t save you, did it? Instead you found yourself in the hands of one of the meanest, most relentless and sadistic usurers in the world. That’s the U.S. government you’re used to — the one that behaves like a gangster with a shy operation on the side.
So who are these generous guys on Capitol Hill and where did they come from? You don’t know them, but they are the bosom buddies of the rich guys who made this mess.
In a couple of months you can run to the soma of your local polling station to throw out whichever bums you hold responsible. But keep this in mind: 50 percent of them believe in no regulation. Fifty percent believe in over- regulation. And 100 percent have their heads firmly in their heinies.
Maybe the real roots of all this go farther back then any of us want to admit. Perhaps the merger mania that has struck banking and devastated Baltimore over the last 30 or so years is the real culprit.
All over America the control of local money left local institutions headed by local business people and went God knows where in the control of God knows who. Everything became decentralized and mysterious. There was nothing personal anymore; it was just business.
Maybe we need to return to those days of local institutions that publish annual reports on real paper. Remember those? They had photos of the board of directors, usually a group of prominent business people that lived in the same neighborhoods as the depositors and investors.
This system probably faded away as people came to regard the guy next door who takes his trash out in his underwear as too “rinky” to handle their assets.
There may be something to that line of thinking, but I say bring back that system. It really worked.
Because back in the day, when the money disappeared, you always knew exactly who to kill.
Jack Gilden, president of the Baltimore-based Gilden-integrated, writes monthly for the Baltimore Jewish Times.