“be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” Matt 5:45
Seems like we spend a lot of time in this country and in this culture trying to figure out who to blame when things don’t go the way that we would like them to go.
I’ve read a lot about the causes of the current financial crisis and heard even more.
Those who haven’t bothered to do much research want to blame it on the greed and irresponsibility of the financial community. There is some truth to that, but only in the context of the philosophy that the free market should be able to govern itself.
Instead this claim sets up a sort of convenient us against them, except in this case it is the Republicans encouraging us to bite the hand that feeds them.
The problem with the simple explanation that this was just wall street running amok is that it fails to place the blame where is should be, on all of us.
First a little history of this bubble.
Many have said it began with a bill intended to stop a discriminatory lending practice called red-lining. The bill was called the Community Redevelopment Act. Banks were required to make a portion of their loans in the neighborhoods in which they took deposits. This whole process worked well from 70’s through the 90’s.
The Bush administration is actually where things began to jump the tracks. There was a law in 2000 that made sure that credit swaps were unregulated. The criminal penalties for falsifying a loan application were removed and the SEC in 2004 allowed the largest brokerage firms to borrow up to 30 times their assets.
All of these things ended up marginalizing the Community Redevelopment Act because unregulated mortgage brokers offered the poor much better deals than banks were able to offer under even the weakened CRA provisions during the Bush years.
There have been attempts by conservative papers like the Investor’s Business Daily to fix blame on the democrats, and there were certainly prominent democrats who supported the effort, but most all of the damage was done during the period of time when the republican party controlled both houses of Congress, all of the committees, and President Bush didn’t use his veto once.
Now a little talk about real blame.
Wall Street for doing what we ask them to do, make as much money for themselves and us as they can.
President Bush and the Republican congress for doing what we elected them to do, systematically get government out of the business sector, reduce regulations, reduce taxes, reduce interest rates, and expect that the free market will usher in a new age of prosperity and conservative dominance.
All of us for flipping houses, taking out equity loans to finance our lifestyle, living on credit cards, and letting our government run up debts that our children will have to pay off.
It is unclear when this financial crisis will sort itself out. Right now everyone is very afraid and as a result the ready cash which had been financing our growth is suddenly hard to come by.
The most disappointing aspect of this crisis, however, is that we are in the middle of a choosing the person who will lead us for at least the next four years, and we are spending our time talking about bogus character issues. We should be holding both candidates accountable for an honest evaluation of how they plan to lead us out of this problem. I haven’t heard it yet.
What I have heard, though, is Jesus’ advice. If you want to be the children of your Father, you have to start by loving the just and those that we think are unjust. I’m working on it.