Have you all heard the pun being bandied around? “He’s made off with our money.”
It’s clever, and it could be funny were the situation not so dire.
How many more of these blows can our economy – and our society – survive? Sub-prime mortgages, banks potentially failing, billions upon billions in bailouts, rapidly rising unemployment, the Detroit Big Three…now, Bernard Madoff.
When do we get to ground zero?
It may sounds nuts, but at least when one’s at rock bottom, the only direction which remains is upwards. Currently, however, it seems that whenever we think we’re ready to undertake the hard work of rebuilding another massive financial crisis comes along.
Madoff’s Ponzi scheme seems a painfully obvious paradigm of the US economy – our global financial crisis in a nutshell. Trading non-existing funds, duping investors, luring customers, blind trust in financial institutions, innocents left with nothing.
Throughout the last year and especially since September, many have been blaming “the market” for the mire in which we are so deeply entrenched. However, as much as the market never performs perfectly, this financial crisis is not an example of the market failing us. This crisis is the result of manipulation and misuse of the market in ways it could not sustain. At some point it all catches up, precisely as it did for Madoff on Thursday, December 11.
On some level, it’s catching up with all of now, and each blow to the financial system only serves to weaken our resolve and further erode our trust. Our skepticism grows when we see both our government and corporations pursuing virtually one solution – bailouts – about which we have already become skeptical. (See RM Jew’s last entry “Money, money, money”.)
We need radical solutions – maybe razing the system to ground is one.
Search the IJN using the term Madoff, and find all of our stories related to this financial scandal.
