With respect to the financial crisis, the word of blame seems to be “greed.”  The people on Wall Street were greedy and that’s how we got into this mess.

No doubt people were greedy. There were even people who were dishonest.  I am sure that plenty of mortgage brokers misrepresented terms of the loan to uneducated borrowers who did not read the loan documents.  The sheer number of lawsuits against Countrywide and the demise of Ameriquest indicate there was plenty of wrongdoing in with respect to subprime borrowers.

But does greed alone explain how we got into our financial mess or is another force at work?  There is another force at work other than greed and no one wants to say it.  It’s a word that is taboo in our culture.  It borders on being so offensive that it’s almost tantamount to a racial slur.  But what’s true must be said.  Much of this financial crisis was caused by people who are just plain STUPID.

In any transaction, there are two parties—the supposed greedy seller and the buyer.  If the greedy seller prevails, then what adjective do we use for the buyer?  In order to be taken advantage of, the buyer must be at least gullible, or let’s just say it, stupid.

If someone could not understand their loan documents and went ahead and signed them and did not have the money to hire an attorney to protect their interests, then maybe they had no business buying a home?  Maybe, they are just too stupid to be a homeowner and unprepared to fully participate in a capitalist economy.

What about the guy who decided to purchase a block of mortgages for his insurance company’s portfolio and didn’t ask about the underlying mortgages?  Or maybe he did ask and was told these mortgages were 100% loan-to-value and he bought them anyway.  Would it be out of line to call that guy STUPID?

What about the bankers who made those loans and kept these loans in their portfolio?  How STUPID could one be to lend money to someone who had placed no money in the deal.  Would you be that lender? I think not because you are not stupid.

What about the analyst at S&P, Moodys or Fitch that gave these pools of mortgages with little or no equity a AAA rating?  Did he miss that many finance classes in college or is he just plain stupid?  Or did he know better but stupidly succumbed to his boss’s pressure to overrate the securities?  Somebody, somewhere had to be spineless moron.

In America, we have too many people who are just plain stupid.  They can’t think.  A perfect example is Sarah Palin.  Regardless of your political leanings, she is a MORON and while you might like her, you don’t vote for stupid people to run the country.  It’s just not smart!

One of the first rules of a free economy is caveat emptor—let the buyer beware.  But buyers have become so complacent, thinking that the government will look out for them.  AIN’T no one looking out for you!

It’s time people got smart, made sure people they deal with others who are smart, elected people who are smart to govern them and we start penalizing people who are just plain stupid.

There are a lot of nice people that are stupid. and they deserve to be treated with respect and honor.  But they don’t deserve to have your hard-earned tax dollars given to them to bail them out of a mortgage note they should have never signed, to get unemployment checks with your tax dollars because they were too stupid to hold onto or get a job and they don’t deserve to have the same benefits that you do if you work hard to make smart choices.

Stupidity is very costly and other people’s stupidity might even kill you.  It could come from the guy at the FDA who stupidly approves a drug that kills you or some guy in charge of food safety who allows tainted meat to get into your refrigerator or some guy on the night shift at the nuclear power plant who forgets to close a valve and your entire neighborhood gets poisoned with radiation (oh yeh, that already happened in Chernobyl).

We have allow stupidity to go unchecked and run rampant so that we don’t have enough brains to go around.  We’ve got people in very responsible positions, people you depend on for your very life, who are simply not prepared.

This is a brazen indictment of many.  But those who are first to say that the emperor has no clothes are often castigated while others still want to believe that the emperor is immaculately dressed.

Note that this post is not the official corporate opinion of Javelin Marketing.  It is the writer’s personal opinion.

P.S. If you doubt that stupid people caused trillions of dollars in losses, just read this New Yor Times article “from Midwest to M.T.A. Pain form Global Gamble” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/business/02global.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=from%20midwest%20to%20m.t.a.&st=cse&oref=slogin
In the article, one member of the school board, a FINANCIAL ADVISER, says “I’ve never read the prospectus” yet he voted to gamble the entire school board’s existence.

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