Greed Is Not Good

Over the summer, the financial services industry came to a shocking conclusion: lending a lot of money to people who could never pay it was a very, very bad idea. This conclusion was shocking purely because it took them years to realise this fact which, to the layman at least, would appear to be obvious.

However, the markets will recover and the men in the city will continue to make ridiculous amounts of money out of all proportion with what they actually do. The real crisis does not lie on Wall Street or in the Square Mile, it lies with the hundreds and thousands of ordinary people who have been dispossessed or bankrupted by the sheer unadulterated greed of the bankers who lent them the money and thought only of the money, rather than the lives that they were about to destroy.

The truth is that the men in the city live only to make money. They lack morality, compassion and decency and have taken to heart the now infamous words of Gordon Gekko: Greed is Good. They don’t care that their machinations can and very often will bring the ruination of the ordinary man, as long as they get their money, everything is fine.

It isn’t just the bankers though, the politicians are also to blame. Only now is President Bush finally attempting to do something to stem the tide of repossessions, but nothing he can do will erase the fact that, when the politicians needed to protect their people, they failed. The relatively laissez-faire attitude of the governments along with the easy credit given out by the banks has conspired, however unwittingly, to destroy the lives of thousands of people. They have been left without homes and without funds, all thanks to the greed of the city.

Business is fine, I have no problem with business, but when money is put above people’s quality of life, it is not business, it is banditry. In future, the stock brokers and the bankers must think less about their wallets and more about the people they are dealing with, for Gekko was wrong, greed is not good.