Private greed and the economic crisis--part 1

Private greed has certainly played its part in the crisis.  I know more about private greed in the United States than in Spain, so I'll turn to that country for my examples.

And for a start, I'll write about the private greed of mega corporations and the over-rich.  Yes, in addition to private greed on the part of the big and powerful, there is private greed on the part of the little man.  But in my opinion, private greed by the big and powerful has the capacity and the reality of doing much more harm.  It's a question of scale.

An emblematic skyscraper of a multinational..

I do not believe that all large private enterprises are bad.  I do not believe all banks are bad.  I do not believe all rich people are bad.  But when one or all of these allows itself to be motivated by greed, then great harm comes to an awful lot of people.

Take the housing crisis.  In addition to individuals who asked for an obtained loans which they were really not in a position to repay, there are the banks, savings and loans, home mortgage insurers, and all the rest that crafted the loans, that actively promoted the loans, that gave bonuses to employees who signed more loan contracts.  And these loans were in large part the result of the deregulation of the Bush administration (although I understand that it started earlier, under Clinton).

These buildings project-intentionally, I believe-an image of power, might, and money.

But I digress.

THE NEXT BLOG WILL BE ABOUT private greed--specific examples of "unfair" loans