Sunday, January 25, 2009

The Worst Lies

Mitch Albom has a great column about lies over on The Detroit Free Press.

There is news every day of how banks that received money from the Troubled Assets Relief Program are failing to lend it, or never should have gotten it in the first place. We were told that without it, the banks would fail and credit would never loosen. But with it, credit has not loosened, and some banks have used the money to simply enrich themselves and purchase more assets.

A business lie.

...

Now, I'm not saying we never get upset at such things. But we get much angrier over a football coach not getting fired or a New York governor hiring a prostitute. We will argue that stuff on the airwaves, over watercoolers. We'll scream until we're blue.

But celebrity lies or sports lies don't affect our lives. Business lies do. They affect many aspects of it. And yet we seem to shrug and sigh, "Ah, what are you gonna do?"

2 comments:

Pat S said...

Yes.

And how is it that the bailout package that was supposed to focus on the root cause of our crisis - bad loans - now apparently fully morphed into a stimulus package???

Hank Greer said...

Probably because we were in a recession over a year ago but the Bush administration wouldn't admit it until last month.

Wikipedia has a good primer on TARP at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Assets_Relief_Program.

The explanations are so over my head that I'm looking at vapor trails.