A Day In The Life Of The Bouncy Banker-Even Bullrider has the odd bad dream

The Not So Bouncy Banker Watches Aghast as People Walk Away from their Debt Obligations

In today/tomorrow's Sunday New York Times magazine I was delighted to come across an article that pointed up the fact that bankers play around with morals the same way they muck around with financial instruments. They tell everyone how they must be financially responsible, pay their mortgages, pay their debts, debts, they argue that are ultimately debts to society. If you walk out on your obligations we all suffer. If you abandon your home we are all stuck with the soon deteriorating property. All well and good but these days many folks are walking away from their obligations with very little left to show for lifetimes of work at pay that rarely kept pace with the cost of living as the renumerations toward the financial sector skyrocketted, went stratospheric. As one watched banks walked away from payments on office buildings as their values plunged. Are they not required to honor their debts? So it does look as if a lot more people will be walking out on their obligations and not with their tails between their legs but with their heads held high in grim determination not to be left a sucker holding the bone the banks proffered in the first place. Don't think I delight in this. It is sad that we are in this place where it is impossible to respect or trust the very people who were supposed to help us all handle our finances responsibly because they were the experts. For an earlier article on the same issue by the same author, Roger Lowenstein, go to "Just Walk Away".

Letter to the bank #37

Dear BM,

Who holds the Moral High Ground? What is that and how valuable is it? Isn’t this something worth examining? When countries sacrifice their moral high ground for lucrative armaments deals have they spent down an asset the value of which they have vastly underestimated? I’m thinking some of the clever chaps over at your fine institution might consider packaging these lots of moral high ground that have been so carelessly tossed aside by governments the world over and then sell them back to those very same governments. They might make a killing! You would of course have to articulate the value of these assets in ways they can understand. Don’t say I have not given you some valuable advice. Of course my biggest problem is I am not capable of taking advantage of the situation because, absurdly, I cling to notions of doing the right thing and doing right by one’s fellow human beings and so cannot separate business from ethics as easily as you guys can*. Also I am numerically dyslexic but that is a whole other issue. You could say holding the moral high ground runs counter to the act of making money but I surely do not want to believe it is so. Then I'd have to think, god forbid, of Capitalism as fundamentally flawed. So if you can figure out how to proceed with the above transaction successfully all the more credit to you.

Yours sincerely,

Kristian W.

PS*—As an Atlantean I fall between two worlds that each can, or certainly do, claim to have held that very moral high ground of which we speak, even if they no longer do: England and the US of A. This would also explain my ambidextrous use of words like “chaps” and “guys”. Hope it isn’t all too confusing for you as you struggle to squish language into the necessary documents so that selling moral high ground can become a reality and not just a pipe dream.