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New York, 12:55 PM
Thu Dec 3
48 posts in the last 24 hours
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[jakelodwick.tumblr.com]
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I had a philosophy professor who called himself a "libertarian" and just loved Ayn Rand to icy Baltic bitch bits. In his mind, for some reason, Ayn Rand was the premier libertarian, despite her very public disassociation from that philosophy.
Anyway.
He had us read Atlas Shrugged during the class, and I tried to be a good sport about it. I was already familiar with Rand's academic work so I knew I disagreed with her stances but what the hey, it might be a good yarn none the less. I couldn't make it through the first section. Regardless of what you may think of Rand's views, I don't think anyone can legitimately call her a good fiction writer. Her characterization is one-dimensional and it's obvious from both prose and dialog that Russian is her first language. It was painful.
And it was our final exam! Yes, the final was to be an oral exam (stop giggling!...perverts) in which we had to have a discussion with the professor one-on-one about the book. And I knew zilch. Cliff Notes weren't gonna save me here.
So the day comes, and I've put my name last on the exam list because...I dunno. Was hoping for the building to light on fire. No such luck, of course. I go into the classroom, sit down, fully prepared to belly flop, and my professor says...
"I know you've read the book [Aidan]. You and [two names withheld] are the only people who actually understand this class. So yeah, you get an A," and then we had a debate about some article in a philosophy journal.
So the moral of the story is: slacking off and pretending to know what you're doing will work every time!
03/04/09
This is the shit that really picks my nit. At one point I bothered to track down the people who were pumping Ayn Rand garbage out into the lesser colleges. They were clearly using teachers like these. But how? Grants? Weekend seminars with all you can eat burgers? Anyone with younger eyes care to look again at who is pushing and funding it?
03/04/09
Imagine my shock when I went to college and found 10% of my Freshman class (this is a small college, btw) were vocal Rand fans. And imagine my non-shock when almost all of that 10% either left or had long passed through their own Rand phase by Senior Year.
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Even if the regulators had been one hundred times more stringent, the collapse still would have happened. The risk of certain complicated financial instruments was miscalculated on a very fundamental level. It's not like the regulators could have picked this up.
Everyone in the entire banking industry was making this mistake. Nobody picked up on it until it was too late. There was no evil intent, no grand plan to destroy the economy. A ton of those 'evil bankers' are out of jobs now, and very few of them had anything to do with subprime loans (actually only a smally part of most banks). Nor was there rampant recklessness, because nearly THE ENTIRE INDUSTRY thought it was safe from pretty much all sides. Tens of thousands of very smart people saw what was happening and thought it was perfectly fine.
They were wrong, of course. But it's not like more regulation would have helped the situation. It had already been analyzed a hundred times. There were already thousands of people who knew what was going on and didn't see this tsunami coming.
So stop pretending everyone here is the master PhD economist who saw this coming a mile away and wants to clearly blame the evil bankers and evil de-regulation. More regulation would not have helped here and it won't help in the future.
Feel free to begin your oh-so-witty snark attacks.
03/03/09
Your momma dresses you funny.
03/04/09
Go back to your cave with the other blissfully ignorant "Nobody picked up on it until it was too late" Neanderthals.
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Good job making a Madroff-subprime comparison, although the two have nothing in common. I'm sure your flunkie cohorts will think you clever.
If you'd like to back up the smoke blowing out of your ass, please point me to all these early whistle-blowers who said this was a bad idea as it was happening. You won't find any credible ones. Are you saying that the entire financial industry willingly planned their own downfall? Most of them are out of jobs now or having their pay slashed. Nobody saw this coming and you're just as much a hack as Ayn Rand if you really think this was easily avoidable.
Just to make it clear: MrInBetween's hypothesis is that thousands of the very smartest and most educated financial professionals in the world willingly destroyed their reputations, their companies and their careers for shits and giggles and the thousands of other intelligent people watching and monitoring what was going on knew the dangers but let them do it anyway for no discernible reason.
Or it could have been something nobody saw coming. Which of those is more likely?
And no, I hate Ayn Rand. I hate that libertarian thought is symbolized by such a terrible hack writer.
03/04/09
Here's a bit more "smoke" for you to consider: What about the warnings raised by the risk managers in these investment banks, whose jobs it was to MANAGE ALL THIS RISK? Hmm? Didn't some of those RISK MANAGERS internally raise white flags about the gargantuan RISKS that these institutions were taking on since the late 1990s? Why, yes they did! And didn't some of these RISK MANAGERS even honestly acknowledge, internally, they had NO CLUE how to even begin trying to MEASURE THE RISK because they didn't really understand the complexities of all these rapidly escalating derivatives? And when the risk managers ASKED their BIG CASINO COLLEAGUES WHO INVENTED THE MONEY-MACHINE DERIVATIVES to EXPLAIN the RISK, the colleagues told them to RUN ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE BECAUSE EVERYONE WAS MAKING RECORD PROFITS. What about those "WHISTLE-BLOWERS?" You keep insisting that NO ONE IN AMERICA saw this crisis coming. Just because Alan Greenspan didn't see this crisis coming, that doesn't mean no one else did.
And how do you feel about "too-big-to-fail" corporate behemoths like Citigroup and Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase, who have slurped up hundreds of billions worth of taxpayer money while escalating the pace of their mortgage foreclosures? You got no problem with that, right? And AIG? Should we throw more taxpayer money at that $60 billion-a-quarter-losing debacle? Well, why not? They're all just innocents, right?
I also love how you wonder aloud why all these smart, educated financial professionals "willingly destroyed their reputations, their companies and their careers for shits and giggles." A lot of these very smart (and politically plugged in) folks still have their companies, their careers AND THEIR BONUSES, despite making historic blunders. Not a bad gig, if you can get it.
And if by "shits and giggles" you mean A WINDFALL OF MONEY -- trillions in profits and corporate market caps made on the backs of working people, the true legacy of 10 years of the Greenspan worldwide credit orgy -- then, yup, I agree with you, "Mr. Ocean." Keep telling yourself that "nobody" saw this coming. Probably easier to live with yourself.
I leave you now with one irrefutable fact that this crisis has proven yet again: CASH IS KING. And, speaking of cash, how much of it did you sock away?
03/03/09
It's great for dealing one-on-one with people, y'know, with respecting their whole rights and such, but it falls apart .
Also, I entered an essay for that Rand Scholarship. I brought up an example from Sinclair's The Jungle and how regulation is required...they did not find my paper "rational."
Btw, philosophy is called "Objectivism" but it's the "Ayn Rand Institute." Wtf
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