Misplaced Trust

the current financial crisis is known, in Chinese as 信贷危机, which literally translates as: crisis of trustworthy debt. which i think sums up the cause of the mess we are in rather neatly.

we trusted the bank executives, the fat cats of Wall Street, to know what they were doing. they trusted the people they lent money to, trusting that doing so will make money for their organisations. and on that trust, we bought shares. on that trust, they paid themselves handsome salaries. alas... it has now turned out that all that trust were ill-placed.

on hindsight, it seems obvious that the banks shouldn't have made lent so much to people who clearly did not have the ability to service their loans. but at that moment, when the prospect of making money existed, which fat cat executive would turn away?

the one thing which i think we all feel strongly against is the fact that these executives who are responsible for the crisis have made insane amounts of money and yet most probably are not going to suffer any form of reprisals. instead, it is the middle income group, the ordinary citizens, the 小市民, who have to bear the burden of this error in judgement.

where in is the justice?

this is one of the problems of our economic system. money can be made, wealth can be built, not by hardwork, not by really being productive, but by being cunning, being devious, being able to fiddle with numbers. while there has and will always exist a class of looters, our modern economic system allows these looters to operate completely within the boundaries of the law and hence making them legally irreproachable. yet these are the people are said to be working smart and thus are held up as models who many a young college student aspire to be. in light of this... is our world enroute to becoming the dystopia that Rand described in Atlas Shrugged?