To interpret news today, I’ve taken to substituting the word “greedy” for “stupid.” When Wall Street bankers say they acted stupidly on subprime loans, they’re lying to us and themselves. They weren’t stupid then and they aren’t now. What they were and are is greedy.
When a congressman or former statesman says he was stupid to accept a bribe, or not pay his taxes, or hire illegal workers, he’s not stupid. He’s just being greedy.
And when Alex Rodriguez excuses himself for taking steroids because he was “young and stupid,” come on. Alex is no fool. He was angling for the biggest salary in baseball.
Most of all, when a headline or article refers to all these acts as stupidity, they are not practicing honest journalism. They should call it what it is: greed.
Stupidity is an Olympic hero smoking a bong while someone takes his picture. Stupidity is trying to drive in Seattle in the snow (not necessarily because you don’t know how to drive in the snow, but because hardly anyone else does). Stupidity is missing your bus or your recycling day, or driving too fast on Aurora at the speed trap north of the bridge.
But stupidity is not a synonym for greed. With greed, you know what you’re doing. You’re trying to get away with something for the sake of more money.
We all know this, so why make a big deal of it? Because by labeling greed “stupidity,” it excuses conscious deception, fraud and criminal behavior. If you say you were stupid, it’s kind of like, well, you know, it was out of my hands. I didn’t really mean to. It could’ve happened to anyone.
It also deflects the act away from its root cause, the worship of money. The problem with greed is that it destroys our humanity. It turns us into dogs eating dogs, every man for himself, the filthy rich versus the mass of people. Stupidity is not one of the seven deadly sins. Greed and its kissing cousin gluttony are two.
Greed is not good and never was. At least Gordon Gecko called it by its right name.
Most of all: If it’s stupidity, they’re implying they wouldn’t do it all over again. And here they’re lying again. They would do it all over again, in a flash, if they thought they could get away with it. Their motto derives from Dylan: “In Jersey anything’s legal as long as you don’t get caught.” After all, if they do get caught, they can just say they were stupid and the media will back them up.
Anyway, try it the next time you hear or read the word “stupid” from someone apologizing or writing in the news. It’s remarkable how it clarifies your perspective on what’s wrong in America.
I’m struck by the similarities between steroid abuse and the banking scandals. In both cases, it’s about people trying to push the limits to gain an unfair advantage. If you let them get away with it, those who would otherwise avoid such “stupid” conduct feel that they have no choice but to follow suit, just to remain competitive.
This is easy enough to see in professional football or baseball, where an average player is threatened with falling back into the minors if he doesn’t pump himself up with storieds while others are doing so.
In banking and investment, it also applies. Bankers and investment managers who take riskier and riskier loans in order to goose their quarterly returns are greedy, sure, but they also create an environment which puts pressure on all other bankers and investment managers to do the same. WaMu’s situation is a perfect example: even while average banks were struggling WaMU stock was the darling of the investment community, as shareholders and mutal fund managers demanded that other banks figure out what WaMu was “doing right”, and follow suit. Of course, WaMu wasn’t doing anything “right”. It was cutting corners and pushing way beyond any rational loan underwriting proceedures and standards, as we found out later. And we are still, all, paying for it in the current taxpayer-funded bailout packages.
That’s why you need regulators who understand that enforcing the rules and proposing new rules where it’s necessary are so essential. Like referees and umpires, they keep the playing field level and relatively safe – not only for the players, but for the good of the sport in general, and for the fans. The last decade of hands-off approach to business has been a disaster. Yet you STILL hear Republicans argue that too much regulation was the problem. They can’t seem to recognize that we tried their approach, and it didn’t work.
Paul, you’re living on land that was stolen from the Native Americans as a result of greed, or stupidity?
Other people’s greed turned out pretty good for you, didn’t it?
@3: that was a stupid comment and you are greedy for the attention.
Paul: Nice analysis of the excuses people make the effect of greed on what should be conservative and upright bankers. They were trying to beat the system.
The underlying question is why?
Why was it so much better to get just a bit more return with these unsafe investments?
What promotes the investor or the bank that has slightly better return? Is this simply inherent in the competeive market of capitalism?
Do we have these same type of inducements in place now? Can increased regulation prevent these same type of mistakes from being made or are there any market controls that could be put in placer? At this point, the idea of bankers versus regulators controlling that failed industry won’t really fly…
Interesting. “Stupid” is also used as a fig leaf for drunkenness, unplanned pregnancy, and any number of things people get personally embarrassed about.
“I share your frustration myself.”
They can get away with it. And for all intents and purposes almost always do.
What we need to understand is that there exists a Laffer curve for corporate executive greed and risk. What real fallout is there for someone like Edward M. Liddy, or Richard Fuld if the global economy collapses? The kind of staggering wealth accumulated by these folks before the fall renders them permanently immune to economic downturn. Perhaps their eponymous charitable trusts will suffer. But as the soup lines grow, and the factories shutter, these people go bargain hunting for a spare Gulfstream.
We need to seriously consider the real risk that the global economy is exposed to when, by virtue of the astronomical compensation packages that have become fashionable, the folks who hold the strings have no skin in the game. Responsible citizens have a real interest in seeking to limit executive compensation, not out some misguided sense of class warfare, but for the sake of economic stability. The mess we find ourselves in today can easily be said to have partly resulted from the fact that the chief executive of a Standard & Poor’s 500 company made, on average, $14.2 million in total compensation in 2007.
It’s not the greedy executives who have been caught being stupid. It’s the rest of us.
Greed Definition: “Intense desire for something, especially wealth, power, or food.”
President of the USA is the most powerful position on earth. So Paul must be saying Obama is greedy.
Individual greed vs a culture of greed?
Where is the line between the ordinary American with his two cars, a boat, 2500 sq ft house in Issaquah, 42 inch plasma, and $5 a cup lattes and this greed you describe at the top?
How many ordinary folks are upset that the UW almost spent $6mil/ year on a football coach or that we all spent $1,000,000,000 TEAR down a usable stadium and build a two palaces that cater to them what can afford luxury boxes?
Is it greed when the prexy of the Udub clears a mil? How about when an assembly line worker in Detroit needs $60k to lve a normal life?
I fear that the greed at the top is only a symptom of a society where vastly more students choose Law or Business than choose Engineering, Writing, or Agricultural Science?
All you non Udub types out there, are you happy about the erosion of the UW as an intellectual/cultural center? Is it a good idea to replace a place where WA kids can talk with historians and economists with watered down teaching enterprises like UW Tacoma or the proposed Bellevue State CC?
Does anyone actually think the driving force behind Reaganism was altruism?
Greed and unreasonable expectation of what we can all have is as American as … Corvettes.
Chalking this whole credit crisis up to mere greed oversimplifies the problem, because it fails to take into account the enormous increase in demand for mortgage backed securities during the earlier part of this decade–a demand that was spurred on by the Federal Reserve’s attempts to spur on the economy by loosening up the money supply.
When you take that increase in demand into account, you have to conclude that suppliers of CDO’s were behaving exactly the way that markets are supposed to behave. They came up with more mortgage backed securities in order to supply that demand. Unfortunately, that required more mortgages, and the way that our middle class has been squeezed by Reaganesque economic policies over the past quarter century meant that the vast majority of people didn’t have the incomes required to support the demand for mortgages. Hence, the bubble.
This is an important point to make for two reasons: first, we need to understand this when we try to work out economic policy going forward; and, second, it completely underscored the extent to which Republican philosophy is, literally, bankrupt.
This is why, for example, Mr. Cynical’s call for still more cuts in the capital gains tax rate is exactly the wrong medicine for what ails us, and what he calls “pork” spending is, indeed, one of the things we absolutely need in order to get us out of this mess.
We need to hammer the definition of Greed. Greed is Evil. Greed is getting ahead at any cost, regardless of what the consequences are. “An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth”
I had a long frustrating conversation with a mostly progressive person, who felt Greed was a good thing. But when I ask him to define it, he had trouble defining it easily. To be Greedy was attaining a middle class life.
Also he had fused Greed with Ambition for a better life. That if we penalized Greed, nobody would try to get ahead, nobody would create, nobody would try to better themselves.
The conservatives have done an excellent job of twisting our culture so that any attack on Greed is an attack on ordinary people trying to get ahead. And that is so wrong.
We need to decouple Greed with Ambition. Ambition tempered by compassion and ethnics are good things to encourage, Greed is evil and should be punished harshly.
The professionals outsmarted the regulators….
It happens in professional sports and business. The professionals, sports or business, have a much greater incentive, and are usually 1 step ahead of the regulators.
Tightening regulations on lending, passing new laws as the result of the current crisis is appropriate. The professionals however are already 1 step ahead, creating and exploiting the next opening…
The half-trillion dollar meltdown, via Rush yesterday & Beck this morning …
Oh boy Rush is ranting up a storm right now. He is promising to use the government as a weapon against all liberals if the GOP ever gets to power again. I think he’s baiting Pelosi to start hearing on “Fairness Doctrine”. Go ahead lefties, just dare to question Rush’s patriotism!
But don’t you dare question mine.
Limbaugh, Faux News and the GOP are right now creating the mother of all echo chambers.
Talking points are manufactured and cycled from one mouthpiece to the next spinning up a hurricane of propaganda and misinformation.
The role that sitting Republican reps and senators play in this monkey house is disgusting.
The bottom line is that they have NOTHING to offer but the failed policies of the past!
Yet I have no doubt that fearful people are sucked into this maelstrom and I can only hope that even more people know better and tune out the noise.
Obama’s program better work.
@ 10
The professionals outsmarted the regulators
Hardly. First of all, there weren’t all that many regulations for the regulators to enforce. Secondly, the regulators, for ideological reasons, weren’t all that eager to enforce what little regulations were in place.
No. But how do we change the culture to expose the lie? It seems the true culture war has started.
#10. Even if the regulators got outsmarted, is your logic that they shouldn’t try again and get it right?
Republican avarice in place since Reagan has achieved for them the goal of the New Aristocracy. The insipid Clinton terms and the apparently equally insipid Obama presidency is, with the feckless Democrats, entirely unequal to the task of rescuing this country from an irreversible descent. I’m moving within the year to a warm SE Asian country. It’s too late for the country of my birth; it is possible to destroy a national identity and change the fundamental structure of a society, and the thieves on the right have succeeded.
When the wall street bankers call themselves stupid it’s because they were stupid enough to fall for the democrats redevelopment act.
If liberals want israel to give up land they stole, should liberals that live on land stolen from native americans give up their land? Or is there a double standard.
@19
Excellent point!
As said by someone that rents their place of residence.
No surprise there.
If you had worked hard/smart enough you too could have been a greedy person and bought your own home.
It’s truly comical that a large segment of the right-wing psycho ward, who often claim to detest “liberal Hollywood”, long ago adopted and continue to chant “Greed is good” as one of their mantras. Their typically selective cognition blanks out the fact that this “proverb” was borrowed from a piece of fiction, in which it was spoken by a character played by an actor who happens to be way, way left of center. In the movie, not only does this character closely resemble the real-life executives of today’s financial institutions, but he ended up screwing up everything he touched (as they certainly have) and went to jail (as they certainly should).
Do you bother to read?
I said that Greed has been stretched and distorted to mean wanting a middle class life.
Wanting a house is not greed.
Wanting 7 homes and say….outsourcing your company to China to do so, is Greed.
Greed is not the same thing as Ambition tempered by compassion and ethics.
Are you unable to see the differance? If so, there is no reason to continue this discussion.
@10
So Don
The SEC rolls over all its personel with each new Administration? To use your words, Hardly.
The bureaucracies are full of personel of all political stripes. They are often bloated and slow moving. What was the climate circa 2007-2008? Who was in charge of oversight then?
@ 24
The SEC rolls over all its personel with each new Administration?
No. On the other hand, if your grossly oversimplified assessment of the situation is to stand, you have to argue that the turnover at the top is completely pointless.
The bureaucracies are full of personel of all political stripes. They are often bloated and slow moving.
Imagine you’re an investigator working for the SEC. You start an investigation into something that looks kind a fishy, but your boss says, “No.” What are you going to do?
The political stripes of the underlings is irrelevant. The political stripes of the folks who have the power to hire/fire means everything.
What was the climate circa 2007-2008? Who was in charge of oversight then?
You need me to answer those questions for you, or are they just rhetorical?
Who defines greed?
The person that isn’t capable of buying a house will feel that someone that owns multiple houses is greedy. In the mind of the renter he will feel that if “greedy” people didn’t own more than one house then they too could be a homeowner ignoring the fact the only thing stopping them from being a homeowner is themselves.
People that own homes and watch renters vote on propositions that increase property taxes for their free handouts will feel the renters are greedy since they won’t have the extra taxes to pay.
CEOs that are called greedy by liberals have to wonder why the hollywood limousine liberals never get called greedy for play acting for a month while “earning” millions of dollars.
I would define greed as wanting/acquiring in order to not let others. For example, if in many years from now you have saved enough money to buy a house and I put in a higher offer, not because I loved the house but only so you couldn’t afford it and you would have to continue to be a renter. That would be greed. If I loved the house and made a higher bid, that wouldn’t be greed.
Shorter:
Republicans are stupid.
Their Masters are greedy.
Speaking of stupid; assuming every actor is liberal, assuming every actor makes millions, assuming studio exectuives don’t “earn” billions off the work actors perform.
Dance for us Straw Man. Maybe The Wizard will grant you a brain.
Right-wing hate taken to the extreme – James Adkisson, who decided to kill liberals in their church after listening to a little too much hate being spewed in extreme right-wing books and on radio. His own words:
http://web.knoxnews.com/pdf/02.....ifesto.pdf
“The political stripes of the underlings is irrelevant. The political stripes of the folks who have the power to hire/fire means everything.”
And if you understand how the SEC is set up, then yo have to agree the lack oversight was the fault of both parties.
http://www.sec.gov/index.htm
“To ensure that the Commission remains non-partisan, no more than three Commissioners may belong to the same political party.”
@ 29
And if you understand how the SEC is set up, then yo have to agree the lack oversight was the fault of both parties.
When did I mention parties? Or do you think it impossible for George Bush to have found Democrats who shared the philosophical bent in favor of a hands-off approach to securities regulation?
You guys are completely amazing. Whenever the discussion gets remotely close to the inescapable conclusion that conservative philosophy is woefully feckless, you immediately jump to blaming the persons involved and their party affiliations.
So, which do you think is the more fruitful observation to make when it comes to figuring out future policy directions, the party affiliations of the people involved, or the ideological/philosophical underpinnings of their actions? Which meaning of the phrase “political stripes” do you think is more important?
Anyone who is ethical can easily define Greed. Greed is desire to attain a financial goal by any means, regardless of ethics or rules or consequences.
Enron manipulated markets and joked about screwing grandma, was Greedy.
Companies who ignore food regulations or lobby to have them reduced, regardless of the consequences to public food safety are Greedy.
Baseball players who take illegal steroids to give them an edge, are Greedy.
Mortgage brokers who push really crappy mortgages instruments are Greedy.
People who buy houses they know they cannot pay for, are Greedy.
CEOs who take millions, and ship all their jobs overseas, are Greedy.
Companies that make a safe product and don’t cut corners to make extra profits, are ethical.
Baseball players who play by their skills and talents alone are Ethical.
People who save and buy houses they can afford, are ethical.
CEOs who take good salary but try to take care of their workers are ethical. A good example is the owner of Costco. Wall street has criticized him for treating his workers too well and giving them too many benefits.
I find it ironic that conservatives who claim to be so christian, and should be the the least greedy if they actually followed the tenets of their religion, are often the most likely to fight any attempt to limit evil Greed.
Blew John
Enron manipulated markets and joked about screwing grandma, was Greedy. – Yeah, Price instability and spikes lasted from May 2000 to September 2001. Started on Bartholin Flavored Cigar’s Watch. Rolling blackouts began in June 2000 and recurred several times in the following 12 months.
Stupid or Greedy? Obama says lobbyists are not gonna be in his administration…
Oops… He misspoke. Isn’t the number close to or over 20 now? Been so many Puddy lost count. Senate confirms former lobbyist William Lynn as deputy defense secretary AKA pentagon #2.
#32. Am I reading you right? You are defending Enron?
Not stupid. Not greedy.
Criminal is more accurate.
And, criminal behavior is not always motivated by greed.
The free-enterprise system is based on greed. If greed is bad, laissez-faire capitalism is bad by definition. That’s what Gordon Gekko meant by “Greed is good.”
But laissez-faire capitalism without regulation is bad. We expect our economic system to reward success, but we also expect it to exist on a level playing field. When Wall Street makes its own rules, and invents unnecessary hybrid securities strictly to earn syndicate fees and trading profits, then we don’t have a “free” enterprise system, we have a “manipulated” enterprise system. When those artificial investment products are traded with dangerously high margin leverage, the potential for severe losses can jeopardize the entire system.
In order to be “free,” enterprise must operate according to rules. Since the 1980s, we’ve had laissez-faire economics, but we haven’t had free enterprise.
Not every. Just the overwhelming majority.
Of course not all actors, just the ones with the loudest political voices.
What’s the difference between a ceo and “studio executive” besides the political party they donate to? Liberals point out the wage gap between the executives and the workers… how much does an extra make on a movie compared to the star?
Of course you didn’t even try to explain why the hollywood elite is immune for the criticism of being greedy. Maybe next time you’ll give it the old college try.