I will not put the financiers who created subprime mortgages, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and all the other forms of financial manipulation in the same category as Thomas Edison or Henry Ford or Steve Jobs.
These folks at Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch and Countrywide Financial didn’t invent Macintoshes or iPhones. They didn’t invent automobiles or power plants. They didn’t invent anything except clever ways to slosh money around. Too clever, because they created a genuine Ponzi scheme in which the total amount of credit default swaps they created came to over $40 trillion (that’s TRILLION), triple the annual GDP of the United States.
And they created actual fraud, in which rating agencies like Moody’s overrated these packaged securities as AAA so that they could be sold to unsuspecting investors.
THEY SCREWED UP. Big time. And unlike Steve Jobs who had already created the Macintosh by the time Sculley aced him out of Apple, these financiers created nothing but a financial collapse.
I can’t defend their actions, and I absolutely refuse to put them in the same category with the entrepreneurs and inventors that folks here keep defending.
One reason I’m a conservative but NOT a Republican is because the rhetoric doesn’t match the actions. The GOP likes to talk about “job creators” and cites the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs (most of whom voted for Obama). But in practice, in Congress, the Republicans are constantly defending hedge fund managers, bankers and financiers, none of whom invented a darned thing.
