Bill
09-08-2007, 04:13 PM
"Teaser rates weren't a scandal. Teaser rates were a sign of misplaced trust: I trusted these people to get their teams of lawyers to vet anything before they signed it. Turns out, if you're poor, you don't need to pay lawyers. You don't like the deal you just wave your hands in the air and moan about how poor you are. Then you default. "
"But the poor could work off their debts. All over Greenwich I see lawns to be mowed, houses to be painted, sports cars to be tuned up. Some of these poor people must have skills. The ones that don't could be trained to do some of the less skilled labor -- say, working as clowns at rich kids' birthday parties. They could even have an act: put them in clown suits and see how many can be stuffed into a Maybach. It'd be like the circus, only better.
Transporting entire neighborhoods of poor people to upper Manhattan and lower Connecticut might seem impractical. It's not: Mexico does this sort of thing routinely. And in the long run it might be for the good of poor people. If the consequences were more serious, maybe they wouldn't stay poor."
"Lending money to poor countries was a bad idea: Does it make any more sense to lend money to poor people? They don't even have mineral rights!
There's a reason the rich aren't getting richer as fast as they should: they keep getting tangled up with the poor. It's unrealistic to say that Wall Street should cut itself off entirely from poor -- or, if you will, ``mainstream'' -- culture. As I say, I'll still do business with the masses. But I'll only engage in their finances if they can clump themselves together into a semblance of a rich person. I'll still accept pension fund money, for example. (Nothing under $50 million, please.)"
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=a5lhZkEauCu8&refer=home
"But the poor could work off their debts. All over Greenwich I see lawns to be mowed, houses to be painted, sports cars to be tuned up. Some of these poor people must have skills. The ones that don't could be trained to do some of the less skilled labor -- say, working as clowns at rich kids' birthday parties. They could even have an act: put them in clown suits and see how many can be stuffed into a Maybach. It'd be like the circus, only better.
Transporting entire neighborhoods of poor people to upper Manhattan and lower Connecticut might seem impractical. It's not: Mexico does this sort of thing routinely. And in the long run it might be for the good of poor people. If the consequences were more serious, maybe they wouldn't stay poor."
"Lending money to poor countries was a bad idea: Does it make any more sense to lend money to poor people? They don't even have mineral rights!
There's a reason the rich aren't getting richer as fast as they should: they keep getting tangled up with the poor. It's unrealistic to say that Wall Street should cut itself off entirely from poor -- or, if you will, ``mainstream'' -- culture. As I say, I'll still do business with the masses. But I'll only engage in their finances if they can clump themselves together into a semblance of a rich person. I'll still accept pension fund money, for example. (Nothing under $50 million, please.)"
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=a5lhZkEauCu8&refer=home