Wolf: Blame market-backed securities
Think back to senior year of high school. You get home from school and flip the television to MTV. You rock through 45 seconds of TRL with Nickleback, and then a middle-aged bald guy breaks into the middle of “Hero”: Citing risky endowment investments gone wrong, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown, Dartmouth and Cornell shutter their doors for good.
You’re 17 years old, you’re captain of Model UN, you’ve got a 16.487 GPA and boyish good looks. But before you’ve even sent your college admissions essay to Old Blue, your chances of getting into an elite school have...
@1
in the long run we will all be dead, there is no denying that fact but our children and grandchildren will be paying the price for our overindulgence today.
Wall Street is no more responsible for "this mess" than the residents of Main Street. The American consumer in their drive to have the biggest and best of everything, are in debt up to their eyeballs but as long as they can roll over their debt onto newly pressed credit cards they will be able to survive for another month. Does everyone really need a McMansion in subdivision-suburbia with twin SUV's in the garage and a plasma flat screen in every room? The American dream may be homeownership, but that does not mean they have a right to it. The majority of homeowners who have gone into foreclosure over the past 2 years are people who should never have owned the homes they did. They “speculated” on the housing market, hoping that prices would rise so that they could refinance their mortgage before the rate adjusted after three years. Joe Everyman, (aka the tax payer) is just as culpable for the mess we are in as anyone from wall street.
And to Wolf/copy editors: 1) what exactly are Market Backed Securities? 2) Merrill Lynch did not “closed up shop,” they were acquired.
You can't claim that the investment banks are "responsible" for the current economic conditions. They're not the ones approving and writing overly risky loans and consolidating them into nifty little pools.
Also, most would consider it important to understand how this entire crisis began...just a thought.
Admissions error.
What self-indulgent clap-trap ... the economy is falling apart, there are actually thousands of people losing their homes, their jobs, and all we can worry about here is that the most lucrative option out there, the one responsible for this mess, is no longer available.
As a good economist once said, "in the long-run, we'll all be dead."