Everybody Was Out to Lunch

An excerpt from the latest screed by James Howard Kunstler, a great American, writing about the new mortgage foreclosure scandel:

Did nobody, for instance at Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, review any of the paperwork fluttering in from places like Countrywide or Ditech and scores of other boiler rooms where mortgages were hatched like Peking ducklings? There was an awful lot of it, I'm sure, but aren't there a lot of seat-warmers at Fannie and Freddie who collect their salaries for the express purpose of reading mortgage documents? Was nobody the least bit suspicious about the mysterious flurry of "restaurant employees" and "lawn-care technicians" buying million-dollar condominiums with no money down at terms that would make a three-card monte dealer weep with laughter? After all, they had to sort and bundle all these contracts for the likes of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan and Citibank - the list isn't that long, but you get the picture....

And speaking of these august institutions, didn't anybody in the divisions charged with assembling complex securities composed of mortgages, or composed of bets against bundles of mortgages, or composed of some notion of something dimly related to a rumor of mortgage lending - didn't any of these expensively-educated chaps or lasses pause a moment in their aardvark-like labors of bonus-seeking to withdraw their snouts from the moist ground where swindles pupate and at least goggle in self-admiration at the fantastic legal novelty of their endeavors.

And what of the numberless agencies, federal on down, starting with, say, the Office of Thrift Supervision, or the Comptroller of the Currency, or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, or the chairpersons of a dozen senate and house subcommittees on matters related to finance, or the various inspectors general from sea to shining sea or the attorneys general of all fifty states plus the US Department of Justice, or the countless fiduciary officers of the pension funds who tripped over each other buying all the tainted paper churned out like so much Purina Rat Chow - or, for Godsake, a lonely loan officer here or there with something resembling a conscience?

Nobody in the USA noticed anything the least bit fishy. And now all that epic rot has eaten through the last hanging tendrils of the banking system. And the whole shootin' match is fixing to seize up and blow like a Chevy Big Block Super Stroker 632 engine that some clown has poured karo syrup into.