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.