http://ftalphaville.ft.com//2010/04/30/217381/we-are-wall-street-we-are-smarter-and-more-vicious-than-dinosaurs/
Yes, this was circulating around back in 2010, and the crash
was six years ago now. But I still see this thing cropping up in places. And
frankly I remain somewhat surprised by the people I know who still float this thing
around. But I’ve never really seen a response to it. So here's mine.
To the smarter and more vicious wall street fellow (and whoever
else thinks like him):
Come on down. Make my day.
Let’s get something straight. The crash of 2008 didn’t
happen because the market crapped out, it happened because you’re an unethical
idiot. You think you’re smarter than the rest of us, but you’re not. In fact,
you’re so stupid, you damn near killed off our entire economy because you didn’t
have the slightest god dammed idea what the hell you were doing.
You had no clue whatsoever what sort of risk you were
exposing your clients (and everyone else) to when you started combining triple B
rated bonds composed almost entirely of sub-prime mortgages into new tranches,
then foisting those collateralized debt obligations off onto even more incompetent insurance companies like
AIG, who couldn’t even be bothered to wonder what the damned things were
composed of before backing credit default swaps on them.
But in addition to stupid, you suffer from a blatant lack of
integrity, as you gleefully suckered Standard and Poors into giving a giant
pile of high risk triple B bonds a triple A rating, then knowingly
duping others to buy or insure the things. You knew what you were doing when
you transferred the risk to others; you were taking advantage of their
ignorance of what you were doing. And you thought it would be fine because you
were too stupid to ever realize that the housing market could collapse and
uniformly have a price correction (despite the fact that it had happened
historically).
So come on over jackass, and try to eat my lunch. You don’t
have any idea what risk is because you’ve never truly been exposed to any. You’ve
never mortgaged your house to start or propel a business; you’ve never had to
actually produce something, or be entrepreneurial where the only safety net out
there is the asphalt that you land on if you fail. You’ve never had to hire or
fire people, or have anything like what the rest of us call moral
responsibility to our fellows for our own actions. Eat my lunch? You won’t get
anywhere near it. But unlike the value traders, such as Michael Burry, who ate
your lunch on Wall Street, you won’t even have a lunch to be eaten. No one I
know would hire anyone as stupid and unethical as you are.
Signed,
Joe Main Street
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