I saw this in the Saturday Wall Street Journal and is well worth linking here. Our readers may recall my affinity for Jim Grant’s newsletter which I highly recommend. Jim doesn’t offer solice to the sleepwalkers or comfort to the many human ostriches who buried their heads to this budding crisis. Instead he focuses on the human behavior that got us here:
In disclosing plans to buy a quarter-trillion dollars of bank stock in the name of the American taxpayer, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson harped on confidence. “Today, there is a lack of confidence in our financial system, a lack of confidence that must be conquered,” he said on Tuesday.
What Mr. Paulson did not get around to mentioning was the excess of confidence that preceded the shortfall. Under the spell of soaring house prices (and before that, of stock prices), Americans trusted the things they ought to have doubted. But markets are cyclical, and there is always a new day. In compensating fashion, people will eventually doubt the things they ought to have trusted. Investment opportunity follows disillusionment. It’s complacency that precedes bear markets.
If the confidence deficit seems so high, it’s because the preceding confidence surplus was full to overflowing. People suspended critical judgment. They accepted at face value the pretensions of central bankers and the competence of investment bankers. Not one professional investor in 50, probably, doubted that wads of subprime mortgages could be refashioned into bonds that were just as creditworthy as U.S. Treasurys.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, were fine ones for believing impossible things. They propounded them, too. Never mind asset bubbles, they said. Not only can’t you predict them, but you can’t even recognize them after they’ve swollen to grotesque maturity. Better just to tidy up after they burst. Now Mr. Bernanke is likening our present troubles to those of the 1930s. The comparison is more confidence-sapping than he seems to realize. From peak to trough, 1929 to 1933, the gross domestic product was almost sawed in half, before adjusting for changes in the purchasing power of the dollar. No such mitigating fact helps to explain today’s set-to. It’s a crisis of competence of our financiers, of bankers and central bankers alike.
The term *con man* is derived from the term confidence man. A confidence man is a person who intentionally misleads another person, usually for personal financial gain. An example in history of a famous con men was an Italian immigrant named Ponzi. Hence the term Ponzi scheme.
So they are aptly named as confidence men.