I've been busy looking for villains, as many of us have been. Likewise, the majority also has mostly agreed that corporate America - not the old capitalism of small business, but the new. modern octopus of greed - is at the bottom of it all. However, lately, I've been wondering if I've been guilty of simplistic thinking - picking out an abstraction that's difficult to pin down and prove. Cyprus has convinced me to look at what I should have known from the start when I advised everyone I knew to Follow the Money in trying to find the villain of the piece.
Sure, greed is still the answer to the rapacious behavior of the ultra-rich (people like Buffett and Gates excepted) and multi-national corporations, but when it comes to greed for money, the logical place to look first is where the money is and most of the really big money is stashed in really big banks.
Cyprus, currently a basket case with mandatory taxes on people's savings in exchange for a multi-billion dollar bailout from the eurozone, didn't get this way by accident. It was not a case, like Italy, of massive grabs by public sector unions or, again lilke Italy, of incredible graft and corruption in high places of government. In Cyprus, it was a case of bank failure caused by rotten loans and subsequent defaults. Sound familiar? Think J.P. Morgan Chase and Jamie Dimon. Ireland? Business failure helped along by tight credit and very questionable behavior by the nation's banks. Great Britain? Manipulation of the Libor index and hence the interest rates paid by all of us, courtesy of the Bank of Scotland and others.
The United States is just crawling out of the wreckage caused by financial manipulation by hedge funds, reckless trading in deritatives and just plain theft. So far, not surprisingly, none of the ethical termites responsible for this are cracking rocks. As a mater of fact, one of the testimonies to our basic civilization is that none of the financial maggots whose pockets were lined at the expense of the taxpayers who will ultimately have to bail them out have been torn apart by crowds of enraged citizens.
It's pretty clear, then, that I was dead wrong on who the villains were. We did get some of them, like the CEOs of Alabama's Colonial Bank, Florida's Orion Bank, and Lancaster County (PA) Bank, but these were small potatoes that didn't have deep enough pockets to afford the really big lawyers. Today, those that do are "too big to fail" and their CEOs "too big to jail."
I maintain that big banks are more dangerous to the United States than the Taliban and Al Qaeda combined, because while one can plant bombs and kill a few thousand people, the other can bankrupt millions and cause despair to rip our country apart. Of course, they won't be here. They'll be investing their funds in whatever country whose ideology will allow them to exercise their avarice as freely as they do here.