The Greed Bubble

"Greed is good - greed works" proclaims the character Gordon Gecko in Oliver Stone's 1987 movie Wall Street. The current crisis facing the U.S. financial market and citizen is what I like to call the collapse of the 'Greed Bubble'. People are scrambling madly around now trying to find out who is responsible for this mess when the whole time they should be looking at themselves. It was greed that led people to apply for loans they knew they could not afford by standard lending practices and to take out large home equity loans to pay for fancy cars and big screen TV sets. It was greed that drove mortgage brokers to qualify people for no money down, interest only loans, etc with the crazy belief that home prices would keep rising to the moon so they could make their fat commissions. It was the banks that packaged these stinky loans and sold them to investment houses because of greed. It was the investment houses that made these into securities and gave them an AA bond rating to sell to investors because of greed. And at last the investors who bought these securities in the hopes of making high interest returns. It was a great scheme that worked until the mortgage rates started adjusting on people and the rest was history. The whole moral is that if something is too good to be true, it probably isn't. The age of accountability is here now that the greed bubble has popped. A time of reflection for both the Government and the American public over how greed can get out of control and ways to recognize it in the future. Greed is good, but in the future it will have to play by the rules and live within its means.

Seven years later

Today is the seventh anniversary of 9/11. In many ways in my life it seems like it was just yesterday but at the same time long ago. I remember driving to work in Reston running late and getting a call from my Mom that there was an accident in NYC, that a plane had crashed into the WTC building. As soon as I reached work however, I found everyone huddled around a big TV upstairs and saw the 2nd plane hit myself. Everyone was strangely silent, only gasping when replays of the impact played over again. We witnessed the plane hitting the Pentagon on the news and at that point everyone was dismissed from work and heading home to loved ones. I went to my window office downstairs instead of leaving and sat at my desk with only the light from the outside coming in, thinking to myself in silence. A strange calmness soon took over me then. So many chaotic things were happening in my life on a personal level at the time that just seemed to parallel the destruction of the towers themselves. It was a big turning point for me, a return to recognize my needs that I had been ignoring for a long time and the same time I think for a country to recognize some things it had been ignoring. That time in my life and the people in the office I worked at will always be etched in my mind because of the date 9/11 alone. I wish all the best to those whose lives were affected directly that day seven years ago.