The reader can rest assured that I have no training or professional expertise in finance or business. I say this not as a disclaimer but -- chest forward and chin high -- as a claim on the reader's trust.
A year into the disaster, much of the country still regards Wall Street with a confusion bordering on fury. What happened, why it happened, why nobody foresaw or prevented it, who is to blame, what's the right and wrong of it, what should be done, what the future holds, what it means about our free-market system -- all remains crepuscular, speculative.
One thing seems sure, there's a tinny, fraudulent sound to the Babylonian blather of the experts: The layman won't believe any of it anymore. All that opaque, priestly algebra -- risk management, credit ratings, contract triggers, "sophisticated" markets -- had no power to protect the harvest from failing.
The reader will perhaps remember the giddy days when chaos theory was said to illuminate an entire swath of the market's mystical secrets. So much for that. And those brilliant physics and math Ph.D's who turned to finance. Where are they now? Quite chapfallen?
And so, on the rare occasions that I comment on the economy, I offer my layman's status as a chief qualification, along with many years of marinating in sour journalistic common sense.
Questions build up, compounded by a frustration that they remain unanswered, and a queasy sense that these are impertinent or ignorant questions. They may be. But so were the questions that troubled us -- which we the uninformed failed to ask out of diffidence -- before everything imploded.
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1. Why shouldn't Wall Street's stars get even bigger bonuses -- for the infusions they garnered from the government, indeed from us?
In Wall Street, you get bonuses for the money you lure into a deal. Why not bailout bonuses? After all, the bailouts provided the liquidity from which successful bankers made the new deals that earned them the new round of 2009 bonuses.
Could they have made those deals without the bailouts? Ah, but that's the public's money, you say. In that case, they owe the bonuses to us.
Video: Preventing the next crisis
2. If Wall Streeters don't get bonuses, they will resign and work for the competition. That's precisely what they should do. We failed to stop entire industries from decamping to other countries. Why are investment bankers more important to the U.S. economy than, say, textile workers?
In a global system, we are China and China is us, as are Germany and Britain. So we are told. Even at the height of unionized labor, textile workers and their ilk cost us less than the banks.
3. Do bonus-earning bankers return their dollars back into the U.S. economy? Do they buy or invest American? Or do they put their money into ventures abroad manned by cheaper labor working longer hours?
That's the free market. Fair enough. But the front end, the money from U.S. citizens, is not the free market. Perhaps the taxpayer should get a percentage of the profit the bankers make from investing their bonuses.
4. We keep being told that Bernie Madoff was investigated three times by the SEC to no effect. Why do we not know the exact details of these investigations, who performed them and why they failed to unearth anything? What is the SEC hiding?
Continued: Deeds, not promises
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