Ah, some sense from someone....

[johnny9fingers]

Yesterday that class-traitor Mervyn King addressed the TUC:

www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/sep/15/spending-cuts-mervyn-king-tuc 

But as he admits, though the current mess is the fault of the Banks, the Legislators, and those whose duty was the oversight of policy, it is the state sector that will have to pay for all this by being cut to the bone.

So there are at least two of us that think it wasn't the public sector's fault: but why do I still feel that opinion is, for the educated upper-middle class, a minority one?

Sometimes I feel some folk today have a stupid sense of entitlement similar to the Aristos of yore, but without the sense of duty that meant those Aristos weren't totally without some redeeming qualities. The bourgeois middle classes never really got noblesse oblige.

Comments

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure why we didn't simply nationalize Moody's and Standard & Poor's. If the government can grade eggs and armies, it should bloody well be able to grade financial instruments.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

I know some PhD mathmos who thought they knew what they were doing.

Most of these derivatives were so complex that it was impossible to work out what was really going on: this is a problem of de-regulation. If financial instruments are allowed to be so complex as to be un-regulatable it shows the limitations of the free market.

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

I'm not talking about derivatives, though. I'm talking about the securitzation of crap paper. I think Moody's and S&P are the real villains in this tale. They knew the paper was crap -- and they gave it top rating anyway so they could keep their Wall St. clients. Of all the bad behaviors that went down, this IMIHO was the most straightforwardly criminal. The failure to prosecute these guys is remarkable.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

You have a point.

No political will to prosecute folk who were 'part of the club' I'd guess.