When I turned 18 I got a credit card so that I could start building a credit rating for myself. My mother was concerned about this as she knew me to be a somewhat impulsive and overall idiotic shopper. She lectured me to no end about the dangers of credit and how I should make sure that when I buy something I have the money to pay it off, right away. I was surprised at how right my mother was when I soon maxed out my card on frivolous purchases that I neither needed or really wanted. It was more about the power of the credit card. I could buy something with no money! It was the best thing ever! That is of course until the bill came in the mail. Good thing it was a student Visa with a $500 limit. But the lesson was learned nonetheless. Due to unrelated factors, I have not had a credit card since.

Cut to September of 2008 and the announcement that the Lehman Brothers, among others, were declaring bankruptcy, thus thrusting Wall street into its most unstable period since the Great Depression. Very Lehm indeed. As I sat back and watched the world’s markets scramble to jam their collective chewing gum into the crack that had emerged in the dam that is world economics, I couldn’t help but be reminded of my old credit card. I wondered how the largest, most established financial institutions in the world could be less responsible than an 18 year old with no concept of the consequences of fiscal irresponsibility.

How could they not know that sub prime mortgages were a bad idea? How could they have possibly thought “Sure, have a 50 year mortgage on a house that is grossly over-priced, we’re here to HELP you get in over your head” and then been bewildered when the bottom fell out of the housing market and people simply walked away from their homes? I didn’t get it. That is until I remembered the one key life lesson I’ve learned in my time on this planet:

People are idiots.

Sure, in actuality there’s a large number of complex factors (including the ones above which I’ve grossly over-simplified) that have contributed to this crisis, not to mention the current President’s economic policies and war. But I stand by my statement. It happens time and time again. People see the opportunity to make a buck if only they could just side step a couple of rules, or circumvent common sense just that little bit, or justify some cockamamie plan.

We will do anything in order to not have to ride out the storm. Just look at the ‘solution’: to bail Wall street out with a 700 billion dollar influx of cash. I mean, I’m no economist, but this plan has a number of catastrophic implications to me. Not the least of which is massive inflation. But the implications I’m more worried about are the implied ones. The implications that this kind of thing is okay; that we can fix it.  Don’t worry everyone, we’ll just have an international bottle drive and raise the funds to save our economy.

Whenever something like this happens people stop and shake their heads, they ask how such a thing could have happened and wonder what do to next. They forget that all this has happened many times before and will happen again… or is that the Matrix? Either way, the key to these kinds of situations lies in the past where we have fallen on our faces many times already. I tend to look at the world with a historian’s eye, wearing a corduroy jacket and smoking a pipe. So it is with this perspective that I will now answer the question of how this has happened:

Do you remember the day you reached the realization that adults knew nothing more about the world than you did? That they really just had a little bit more experience in not knowing things, thus making them better at bullshitting their way through life? That, in fact, each and everyone of us can be dead wrong at any given point on any given subject, regardless of education or experience? In my personal opinion  the current situation on Wall street is the culmination of an infinite number of people being wrong. Sometimes we’re just wrong more than we’re right and this is one of those times. We erred, we made a huge mistake, we done gone and fucked up.

Sometimes we need to have shit blow up in our face so that we don’t get too carried away ever again. Aren’t these catastrophic events often referred to as the market ‘righting’ itself? Like that oh so glorious poop after days of being constipated, this is yet another event in the history of humankind where all we can do is look back and say “yeah, I can see how this happened – let’s never do this again.” There will be laws put in place, organizations created, standards defined – all in an effort to avoid this in the future. We will, of course, repeat this mistake, or one just like it in another hundred years or so because that’s just how we be ballin’.

The answer to the question of “how do we fix this?” is a much more complicated one that I will not be answering today. For now I will say this to the world: Good luck with all… that.