Just another filler . . .
[This was written about 2013
or 2014 and not published at the time. I
post it now simply as a means of giving myself some respite, so as to allow for
the doing of other things.]
-----------------
On the news this morning
was the information that the strong majority of people who are in trouble with
their mortgages are between 41 and 65.
This would make you suspect that they were people who in the main took out
second mortgages etc. in order to invest speculatively in other
property. And fair play to them for
taking the chance.
Yet
the fact is that if you look at it in the most stripped down terms, it was
basically a selfish venture, as all such ventures usually are. They were doing it for ‘me’. It was a purely individualistic effort. They weren’t thinking in terms of the general
population. They were doing it
ultimately to make money for themselves.
Yet
now that the gamble has failed—for those for whom it has failed—the message has become somewhat different. ‘We have bailed out the banks, so why can we
not be bailed out too?’ We have left the
‘me’ behind and are now talking in terms of ‘we’—and if not the Royal ‘we’ then
certainly the Republican ‘we’; the ‘we’ of ‘We’re all in this together!’
Societies
are not homogeneous. They are split
along various lines, depending on how you look at it. And the one major split that developed during
the so-called Celtic Tiger was the split between those who went mad and those
who didn’t.
The
fact is that we are all in this
together—to the extent that the bill for the fuck-up is being presented to
everyone, wise-head or fool. But the
fact is that the banks have no money of their own, they are ultimately
dependent on the commonality of tax-payers and citizens. In such a situation, the demand for a
bail-out for the indebted, and especially the foolishly indebted, amounts to a
demand for a transfer of assets from the cautious to the foolhardy in order to
help compensate them for their gambling splurge.
Possibly
a lot of the victims of the property boom didn’t see it at the time as being a
gamble. They thought—and were led to think—that they were on to a
certainty. As an analogy, one might
speak of someone going off to Las Vegas confident that he had a sure system for
winning at roulette. But when he comes
back broke, you would expect that he would have enough sense not to go looking
for sympathy. And even if he was to do
it, he might expect short shrift.
Even
the guy who goes into the bookies expects, or at least hopes, to win. But he has also factored in the possibility
of losing, which is why he is not up kicking the counter and looking for his
money back when his horse finishes last.
Of
course, there are hard cases out there.
No doubt, hundreds of them. But I
am speaking here specifically about people who got themselves into debt in
order to take a punt on the broader property market. And even for the hard cases, it is hard to
envisage any amelioration scheme that could corral them off separately from the
reckless.
In
general, people in trouble are right to be angry about it. They were in many cases suckered in by bank
propaganda to ‘release the equity in your home’ and kept in there by promises
of ‘soft landings’ etc. But it was not just the banks, the whole debacle was
facilitated by total political bankruptcy and incompetence—and not just of the
governing parties at the time.
Years
ago, when the storm first broke, and people were protesting with placards
demanding haircuts for the banks, I set about mentally devising one of my own,
which would have read ‘Not haircuts—but guillotines!’ Five years on and nobody’s head has rolled
yet, other than electorally. And even
more than the debts, I think, that’s what makes people mad. Until we get guillotines, potentially less
real than metaphorical, and on a swingeing scale, too, and not just for a few
handpicked scapegoats, then there can be no possibility of a unified shoulder
to the wheel, which is after all what everybody seems to agree is necessary to
get us out of the mess we’re in.
