PJ Media

PJ Mediahttps://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2008/09/27/fortune-and-mens-eyes/feed/PJ Media is a leading news site covering culture, politics, faith, homeland security, and more. Our reporters and columnists provide original, in-depth analysis from a variety of perspectives.en-usFri, 12 Jun 2026 15:42:08 -0400Laughing on the outside<![CDATA[This video is not as famous as “Burning Down the House”, (see previous post) but is very funny an provides a concise history of the subprime mortgage crisis. This “serious” entry from Wikipedia tells a story that is not much different from the comedic skit. The subsection on the causes of the crisis illustrates how comprehensive the system failure was. Whole swaths of the political, financial and journalistic systems simply didn’t work as expected. My guess is that when a big enough carrot is dangled in front society the incentives to “get along” simply become too great to resist. Some of my friends in the management consultant business say the the “global warming” bandwagon is too tempting to avoid. “Green compliance” and there is a cynical attitude that one should make money off the fad while it lasts. Less than a decade ago it was fashionable to argue that the Y2K bug (remember that?) would cause a global catastrophe. Fortunes were made on it. I wonder how much of the subprime bubble was created by the need to simply get with the program.]]>Sat, 27 Sep 2008 21:07:21 -0400<![CDATA[Richard Fernandez]]>https://pjmedia.com/richard-fernandez/2008/09/27/fortune-and-mens-eyes-n186163