Exit triumphalism

Today the US Congress voted down the much touted 'rescue package', the measure that the American Administration hoped would stabilize the shaky financial sector. I have done quite a lot of reading up about the apparent causes of the 'crisis', especially the shady home lending, with its extraordinary acronyms (whatever would real ninjas have made of NINJA loans?) and dubious packaging of said loans via securitization. Not being an economist or even a financial planner, it is difficult to unravel the layers of esoteric detail of the situation, but I can think logically if I have to.

So it should come as no surprise that if you give large home loans to people who have no chance of paying them back, or who are likely to default in the near future; if you detach the normal screening process from the lender itself (via non-aligned mortgage brokers) and if you then on-sell these high-risk debts as if they were quite reasonable investments,( and multiply this many times over), then you have the makings of full-blown disaster.

You know, it wouldn't take more than a primary school education to figure this out, but the simple logic has alluded regulators and bankers and brokers and other financial wizards, the very cream, as it were, of US capitalism.

And this is the system that would triumph over all, taking no prisoners and ending history as we know it.

I hope that this is the end of this foolish triumphalism.