Bankers vs. Economists

CEO GREED and CONGRESSIONAL/ WHITEHOUSE STUPIDITY CAUSED OUR PROBLEMS.

STEVE " THE RAT " RATTNER WILL END UP IN PRISON.

THE BAILOUTS WILL CONTINUE ; UNTIL, VIOLENT PROTESTS BECOME REALITY.

BARNEY " *** " FRANK WILL GET AIDS.

This is a profoundly STUPID topic for an article. It's a cheap shot way to get readership by playing on the needs of everyone and their mom to voice an opinion. It's no one's fault, it's everyone's fault. It doesn't matter. Economies have peak times and recessions and always will. Who's fault it is each time is irrelevant because it's not like such knowledge prevents a recession from occurring. I didn???t even read this moronic topic or any of the other comments. I???m just sick of this kind of media crap.

Speculation is fine with your own money. As oon as bankers start lending money to speculators, bubbles grow, and we all know what happenes when they burst. We need a constitutional amendment that prohibits lending money to any entity which intends to use the money to buy and hold a commodity, of any type, in hopes that its price will rise and that it can be resold at a profit. This practice of lending money to speculators never helps our conutry, caused the Great Depression, and probably caused this mess. Short-term profits from speculation with borrowed money lead to long-term disaster, every time.

It amazes me that lost in the muck and mire of the economic meltdown is the simple fact that corporate America has done a lousy job of managing its employees, by not having a basic understanding of what makes them tick. Human beings are born with basic biologic needs (food, shelter, reproduction, etc), which everyone seems to grasp, but what sails over most manager's heads is their employees also have five basic "social appetities", which author Paul Herr recently identified in his insightful book, "Primal Management": (1) Cooperation (2) Competency (3) Skill Deployment (4) Innovation (5) Self-Protection. Without elaborating on it too much for now, I simply suggest corporate America shift their typical hiearchial managment style to one that attempts to understand the things that really motivates employees. Treating them like a replaceable cog to their machine isn't the answer. According to the Gallup Organization, only 31 % of American workers really feel they're safisfied with their jobs, and making vaulable contributions to their company's success. That's horrible. In other words, 69% of employees aren't doing much of anything worthwhile, and that lack of productivity is what's killing the economy, to the tune of $2-3 TRILLION annually. I had my personal experience with the bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo working for Enterprise Rent-a-Car for 26 years (1974-2000), and at the tail end of my career watched a once fun-loving company with bright, ethusiastic employees turn into a dreadful corporate hierarchy, with declining profit margins, and poorly motivated employees. For a reality check, hop on "FailingEnterprise" to get a picture of how a good company went bad, or read the book that's the buzz at the Enterprise corporate office, "Life Under the Corporate Microscope".

In my field this bit of knowledge is quite well known, but not obvious to others so I shall share it. The most intelligent persons in the world are often not well rounded in their abilities. Many can have extreme adeptness at certain tasks but fail to see the big picture and put everything together equally intellgently. In other words they can lack common sense and prove extremely dysfunctional at seemingly ordinary tasks. Such geniuses are best suited for laboratory science and kept out of practical applications of their field where lives are at stake in the real world. The bottom lione is that all the intelligence in the world does not mean anything if it cannot be channeled into well rounded and equally intelligent output. This is especially true of people in leadership and advisory positions like in government. What you are seeing is such sophistry played out in the world of economics. It is laughable to assume that people will be have responsibly an rationally and not panic when things turn bad. Did they forget all of their history lessons in economic including the great depression and all of the panics before it? Of course people behave chaoticly and irrationally when the system is stressed out an urge of self preservation and worst case scenarios have to be taken into account when modeling any system. A basic understanding of psychology is necessary since the systems they are dealing with involve people. Shame on them for forgetting their 101 level lessons and then calling themselves experts.

The only real difference between an economist and a banker is that a banker gets to cheat with real money while an economist can only cheat with numbers.

There is more than enough blame to go around, and while bankers and economists may be the easiest targets, the politicians of both parties who voted to deregulate the industries, the media who abdicated their role as devils' advocate, and the general atmosphere of greed and consumerism of EveryDay Joe and Jane deserves some finger pointing as well.

Americans have turned the Blame Game into our national past-time when we should be putting all our energy into crafting solutions. Until we get to solutions, however, we will stay firmly stuck in the problem.

In regards to the topic of this article: if only it was that easy to pigeonhole who's to blame. "Economists", like many other people, were investors who turned a blind eye to what was an unsustainable economy because high returns made them blind. "Bankers" are knowledgeable of the economy, and they too felt that ignorance paid dividends. A few economists predicted the doomsday that befell the market, but there is never a shortage of bad economic predictions that rarely actually take place. Bankers, economists and the government (and the lack of proper oversight) are all to blame for ignoring this.

Whenever obama fails it is simple just blame BUSH...It will work all the time...

What economists? There are very few true economists in the world. The rest are hired guns who project whatever their employers want. REmember how persistently they tried to convince us in 2005 that US has shortage of houses?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's easy to blame the guys at the top. When speculation is high, and things are going great, who wants to rock the boat? Who wants to be a naysayer? Who listened to the guy who alerted the SEC about Madoff. Who listened to him? To Greenspan's credit, didn't he also ring the alarms as well his last year in officed? He issued some very strong warnings, did he not, but no one listened because we were going BOOM and didn't want it to stop. What bothers me more than anything is how the analysts simply refuse, under any circumstances, to acknowledge the climate of corporate greed, and how republicans love to create an environment for big business to offshore, out source, part time, contract out, basically screw the american worker for higher profit margins. Why? Because they think this creates more jobs. Guess what? IT DOESN'T. It simply puts more cash in the pockets of the execs and shareholders!Why are there so many foreclosures? Because people are LOSING THEIR JOBS and can no longer afford to make their payments! Why are they losing their jobs? Because the execs in corporate America are giving themselves big GUARANTEED bonuses at the expense of benefits for the American worker, and thinking of ways to get it done cheaper... never mind that it is like shooting ourselves in the foot. Except for the insanity of the UAW, which is also strangling the auto industry, corporate employers never tire of looking for ways to deprive their employees of basic benefits. Corporate greed and their pandering attorneys are responsible for all the mergers and acquisitions that have created unstable job markets throughout the United States. Is bigger always better when it comes at the expense of the American worker? And YES Patriot Dolly, you hit the nail on the head. What drove us over the edge were these rapaciously greedy and irresponsible oil companies with already obscene profit margins ripping off Americans on a scale unimaginable, putting a gun to our heads and making it so expensive to do business that it ruined small business and drove the average Joe further and further into credit card debt. What the problem with this irresponsible climate of SREW YOU I'M TAKING THE MONEY mentality is that no one can do the right thing anymore. Isn't the idea of democracy that if it's good for one, it's good for all? It's not EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF.. not if you want to survive as a group. What they should have done is divide the number of taxpayers into the bailout of $787 billion, and we would have all gotten over $400K, paid off our mortages and cars, been debt free, the banks would not have any toxic mortgage backed securities, they'd still be loaning money, and we'd all be sitting pretty. It's time for a revolution!

Everyone has forgotten that the beginning of the economic downturn started with the rising cost of fuel. Everyone cut back because the cost of transportation and manufacturing was escalated beyone their means. This led to the real estate stagnation which led to the mortgage defaults which led to the bank disaster. Nobody could have predicted the problem which started with the oil barons greed. Obama never mentioned this in his speech today. Was it intentional?

Congress, Gramm, Greenspan, Reich, Summers, Paulson, Bernacke, etc etc etc. It's a cabal, Mr. Gross, and a revolving door of corruption. While you're at it, what about the mainstream media who kissed Wall Street's behind? Don't you think you guys deserve some of the blame, too? We citizens and taxpayers certainly think so.