“The audacity of that p—k in front of the American people announcing he was deciding whether or not a firm of this stature and this whatever was good enough to get a loan,” he said. “Like he was the determining factor, and it’s like a flea on his back, floating down underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, getting a h–d-on, saying, ‘Raise the bridge.’ This guy thinks he’s got a big d–k. He’s got nothing, except maybe a boyfriend. I’m not a good enemy. I’m a very bad enemy. But certain things really—that bothered me plenty. It’s just that for some clerk to make a decision based on what, your own personal feeling about whether or not they’re a good credit? Who the f–k asked you? You’re not an elected officer. You’re a clerk. Believe me, you’re a clerk. I want to open up on this f—-r, that’s all I can tell you.”
What a charmer! I love that sense of outraged entitlement. Let 'em eat cake indeed!
Perhaps the approach to the crisis in the financial industry should be less regulatory and more prosecutorial. It was greed and corruption that created this disaster; corruption that was so pervasive that now no one knows who's honest and who's a crook anymore, and so credit remains frozen.
So true!
ReplyDeleteToo true - much too true :-(
ReplyDeleteYou're not being fair to Rand.
ReplyDeleteShe would tell you that her idea of capitalism is not what's going on now. She even stated explicitly that her ideal of capitalism has never actually existed, in the past or present. She disapproved of government regulating companies, but she disapproved, for the same reasons, the whole nexus of corporate intermeshing with government that we now experience.
She would have probably agreed with the Bear Stearns executive, although doubtless she would expressed herself in better English and with no curse words; but she would not have agreed with his motives. In her eyes, the government had no right to bail out anyone; Geithner was picking winners and losers among the banks even though he had no right to do any such thing. She would have told you that the best thing to do would be to let them all fail if need be, and let new banks spring up to replace them, and out of them the banks that would be run by honest and competent people would survive and flourish. Of course she would also say that it was government interference and the intermeshing of government and business that allowed the whole problem to reach the dimensions it has reached. The crooks are equally in the government as they are in the business world. In her laissez fair utopia, the bubbles might arise but would never have done the damage they have done.