Depending on who you ask, we've either dodged a bullet on the economy, or this time next year we'll be living in Mad Max World. Either way, I think it's fair to say that I was totally right.
One of the central points of this blog is that stupidity is underrated. Consider the origin of the crash: banks believing that a group of supa-smart peeople had found a way to turn lousy loans into something less stupid.
Oh sure, I might be over-simplifying, but I bet that's still not the stupidest thing written about this crisis. To the point: not one person in a hundred could explain how all this worked, but they just knew some dead smart folks somewhere had it all sorted.
Actually, I thinking maybe there was just one guy. Maybe he got run over by a bus? That would explain a lot.
In this environment it was somehow inevitable that the guy who steered HBOS onto the rocks would turn out to be an Oxbridge grad whose last job was at a supermarket. It's the generic skills, init?
This is about more than just the propensity of bankers to throw huge sums of money down a hole in the ground on the off-chance. It applies to people in general. The history of British politics in the last fifty years is pretty much the public being bilked into spending huge sums of money on white elephants in the vague hope that some really smart folks in Whitehall will manage to cure all our social problems.
Hey, why mock bankers? Say what you like about them, but compared to the Olympics, giving loans to crack heads looks like sound business judgement.
One of the central points of this blog is that stupidity is underrated. Consider the origin of the crash: banks believing that a group of supa-smart peeople had found a way to turn lousy loans into something less stupid.
Oh sure, I might be over-simplifying, but I bet that's still not the stupidest thing written about this crisis. To the point: not one person in a hundred could explain how all this worked, but they just knew some dead smart folks somewhere had it all sorted.
Actually, I thinking maybe there was just one guy. Maybe he got run over by a bus? That would explain a lot.
In this environment it was somehow inevitable that the guy who steered HBOS onto the rocks would turn out to be an Oxbridge grad whose last job was at a supermarket. It's the generic skills, init?
This is about more than just the propensity of bankers to throw huge sums of money down a hole in the ground on the off-chance. It applies to people in general. The history of British politics in the last fifty years is pretty much the public being bilked into spending huge sums of money on white elephants in the vague hope that some really smart folks in Whitehall will manage to cure all our social problems.
Hey, why mock bankers? Say what you like about them, but compared to the Olympics, giving loans to crack heads looks like sound business judgement.
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