ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

For like the first time ever, I am moved to discuss a financial topic.  Here’s the thing.  Ideally, the world of finance is an incredibly boring place to most people, which is why I never talk about it.  It doesn’t really take on real interest to most people unless it’s broken in some way.

So here’s the thing that I am currently pissed about. I’m driving to work today and listening to Morning Edition on NPR, which is what I always do unless I am listening to the same three fucking David Bowie, Stevie Wonder and Who CDs over and over again.  And so early this morning is when I hear for the first time that WaMu went down last night and had to be cannibalized by JP Morgan.  And this information causes me to reach a point of almost physical disgust with this wretched and stupid situation, although perhaps not for the reasons that one might suspect.

From the broadcast, and this was supplemented and confirmed when I heard additional coverage later on Marketplace, it was fairly apparent that while the company suffered from some pretty serious mismanagement, the immediate cash flow problems were caused by a bank run which took place over the past week or so.  This just pissed me off to no end.  And while I’m not pretending this is the only cause of the collapse, it really wouldn’t have hurt anything if all the fucking depositors hadn’t simultaneously freaked and yanked their cash. Who knows if they might have squeaked through if they hadn’t suddenly been exsanguinated to the tune of $17 billion?  I sat here listening to the broadcast and thinking about how basically the stupidity of the American public has needlessly overdosed the ailing Washington Mutual with morphine.

I mean, did we learn nothing from the depression?  Have these people never seen the goddamn FDIC stickers that cover every window at every fucking financial institution in the country?

And something tells me it’s all due to the collective force of the people who had like a measely $5,000 sitting there, who suddenly freaked and decided they had to take it out or lose it forever.  People who for some reason have never heard of FDIC and had no clue what kind of impact their stupid action would have in concert with everybody else’s same stupid action.  Obviously the bank holds, well, held, the primary responsiblity for its own mismanagement, but what irritates me so much is that all the dire media coverage freaks people out so badly that they all go nuts and do shit like allow their panicky thoughtlessness to tank the country’s biggest financial institutions. I mean, think about it.  What bank can you think of, even in a healthy economy, that wouldn’t be groaning at least a little if that many of its depositors came in at once to withdraw all their funds?

They have regulatory shit in place to keep the stock market from completely dying when there’s some kind of mass panic.  And while I don’t have a problem with strengthening bank regulatory law to keep these greedy-ass investment bankers from going nuts with stuff, it would be freaking awesome if something were in place to prevent the stupid depositors from freaking and making the whole self-fulfilling prophecy come true in a situation like this.

The public doesn’t like to stay calm in a crisis.  They’d rather react to alarming news by throwing themselves face down on the street and screaming about how a bus is going to hit them, rather than assessing their situation and proceeding in a reasonable fashion.

Anyway, I’m no financial wizard.  I have too much credit card debt and I make my living balancing business checkbooks and tracking fixed assets, not working with paper or treasury or any of that crap.  So I basically have little room to talk knowledgeably about it.  This stuff still pisses me off, though.  The bank did wrong.  But so did all those fools who participated in the run.  Screw you people.  You contributed directly to this recession if it happens.

On that note: we have a serving spoon at our house that we call Alan Greenspoon.  I got Alan Greenspoon for free at a yard sale 8 years ago and it is still going strong.  We use it almost every day.  But Alan Greenspoon is out of date.  Now I need to get like a kerchief or something and name it my Bernanke Hanky.  I can use it to dry my tears of rage when the public finally gets around to destroying what’s left of our economy.