2008 Financial Crash (An opinion piece)

 

In our opinion, these films should be made compulsory viewing for :-

• Politicians;

• All those dealing in finance at any level;

• Academics, particularly those working in the fields of economics: finance: strategy: entrepreneurship etc.,:

• All those working in the fields of enforcement: ethics etc.,:

 

Films

No.1 Inside Job

No.2 The Big Short

No.3 Margin call

No.4 To big to fail

No.5 99 Homes

 

 

There have been a succession of global man made financial depressions :-

1720 (New world investments crash)

1873 (The first Great Depression)

1929 (The Great Depression)

2008 (The Great Recession)

 

"Greed is good" is a catchphrase based on Gordon Gekko's quote from the 1987 film Wall Street.

 

The greed of Bankers, stocks & bonds traders, Politicians and the top 10% of wealth owners worldwide can be identified over and over again as one of the root causes, if not the major cause, of these cyclical financial worldwide depressions. With the increased globalisation of financial markets, all of these historical events have had the potential to completely cripple economies globally. History, has shown us that in each of these events it is the lower 90% of workers who have borne the fallout and the resultant cost of these disasters. While the top 10% seem to be relatively impervious to the downturn effects of these disasters and quite to the contrary in very many cases, they actually benefit from their own incompetence having wholly or partly caused the event to happen in the first instance.

 

The key participants in these financial disasters still to this day find it difficult to admit to their culpability and have yet to publicly apologise for the role they played. They tend to use collective responsibility as a defence to obfuscate their own individual responsibility.

 

In the Irish context, we only have to mention USC (Universal Social Charge) or the names David Drumm, Sheanie Fitzpatrick, Patrick Neary to remind the Irish people of the contempt these individuals displayed in the early 2000s.

 

The famous quote about WW1 and WW2 :-

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime”

 

 

The modern day quote equivalent could easily be re-coined as:-

“Never think that financial corruption, no matter how acceptable or approved, is not a crime”