Wednesday 5 December 2007

Are these people stupid or something?

Right at the end of an article on page 1 of today's FT, headed "Mortgage lenders warned by watchdog":

"Gerald Corrigan, a Goldman Sachs partner and former head of the New York Federal Reserve told a parliamentary committe that 'mistakes were made' during the credit boom".

No, you stupid f***s, the credit boom was the mistake, all the other mistakes are secondary.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Spot on.

Snafu said...

No mistakes were made. The brokers continued to be paid massive bonuses whilst lending funds to third parties who had no income, no jobs, no assets and presumably no qualifications!

It's a classic moral hazard!

Mark Wadsworth said...

The mistake was the credit bubble, and you can't have a credit bubble without an asset-price bubble, in this case a house price bubble.

Which Land Value Tax would have dampened off, while allowing the government to cut really damaging taxes like VAT, National Insurance, Income Tax etc.