[ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors?

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of Stefano Vaj


2011/12/6 spike <spike66 at att.net>:
>> Plenty of us realized the Occupy people were occupying the wrong place.
> Wall Street didn’t do it, Washington DC did.  The fed set the policy 
> on a course of disaster, Wall Street just did what businesses do.  
> John why weren’t the mobs descending on the people who actually did the
crime?

>I have some objections to the generalisation of the term "crime" (I prefer
to reserve it to the breach of the criminal law actually in force in the
territory and in the time when the alleged crime is perpetrated, so that
best-practice and "ethical" rules cannot really be considered)...Stefano Vaj



Hmmm, OK.  But what we had were Washington policies that compelled banks to
give out a bunch of risky loans, then spread the risk into pools with good
loans.  Eventually the amount of toxic waste stirred into the stew caused
the entire pot to be poisoned, so... the banks were bailed out by the
government, being too big to fail.  Other healthy institutions were
compelled to buy the bad loans, but healthy institutions wanted more
certainty than the risky institutes would allow, so plenty of people who had
never missed a payment were foreclosed and lost their homes and all their
equity.

So the government took peoples' taxes and bailed out banks which then did
not bail out those who took out the risky loans, even those who had never
missed a single goddam payment.  Does that sound right to you?  Doesn't to
me.  

The bank isn't at fault: they were compelled to give out the bad loans,
another healthy bank was compelled to buy the bad loans and they want to get
them safer to comply with the standards that kept them healthy in the first
place.  It was the fault of those who set up the rules to compel banks to
give out risky loans.

The Occupy people have a perfectly legitimate complaint, if they can shake
off the drug addled fog and realize what it is.  They are occupying the
wrong place.

spike