Baby Boomer comeuppance; Richard Berry; American Thinker; Crash of 2008

American Thinker has posted an essay detailing how the baby boomer values led to the crash we have experienced over the past few years (most sharply in the past few weeks):

We are seeing in the Wall Street implosion the inevitable result of the Boomer Elite outlook and the behavior it spawned. Storied investment banks were being run on 40 to 1 leverage. Fancy new securities were designed and widely disseminated whose terms are opaque even to highly knowledgeable and experienced hands. Mortgage securitization techniques were developed which, our bettors assured us, would magically spread risk and thus stabilize the financial system. However, simultaneously with these brilliant innovations, lenders were being forced -- by Boomer Elite congressmen with an aching love of the poor and oppressed unique to themselves -- to loan to uncreditworthy borrowers at subprime rates and without adequate documentation. These loans, packaged into securities together with standard, performing loans, rendered unknowable the value of the securities, leading to mandatory write downs and drastic capital impairment or outright insolvency for many very large firms. Given the high degree of integration of the international financial system, critical destabilization was the real result of this confluence of Master of the Universe genius and Boomer Elite turpitude.

The next time you hear or see:

• a TV program extol the virtues of the 60's generation and how they stopped the war in Vietnam;
• a speaker refer to Vietnam as the "crucible of a generation";
• 60's music referred to as idealistic and the catalyst for peace and love, etc.;
• John Lennon referred to as the voice (or the conscience or whatever) of a generation;
• commercials or news accounts celebrating the empowerment of the baby boomers as they grow older;
• any other whitewash of the generation that has done so much damage;

click on this American Thinker article and remember the price we pay for our indulgence in this 40 year fantasy.