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Oct. 5th, 2008 03:40 amI'd forgive more how london homos mistake a club dancefloor for a busy sidewalk if it meant they were as prone to dancing in the streets.
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Oct. 5th, 2008
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Oct. 5th, 2008 02:49 pmDear WaMu
Do you have any idea of the damage you have done? You were a bank. A BANK. As in stability, rock-solid, a foundation. You were supposed to be one of those institutions that would carry on, that knew what it was doing. You were in the class of companies that was special, that was so conservative it has its own hours and gets forgiven for them, where people dressed up to work at, where Business Casual was frowned on, where, from the earliest depictions in children's books onwards through everyone's life, you were depicted as necessarily stuffy and solid because you guarded people's money, so you had to be beyond trustworthy, and exude it. Hell, WaMu, banks are so special they weren't even ranked in the popular mind as a mere company. You were a bank. A bank!
You were supposed to be filled with people who patted youngsters on the head and adults on the shoulder, reassuringly, and say "You are safe here". Like a church is supposed to give sanctuary from evil, you were supposed to give what little we could scrape by from our hard work to save sanctuary from all the scammers and idiocy and forces ready to leave us with nothing when we needed it. Dude, that was my contract with you when you took that word BANK. That was your promise. You'd tell us in small print my deposits would be insured, but then you were supposed to be able grin a little as you ever so slightly rolled your eyes and spread your arms a little and said "Like you'd ever need that FDIC guarantee, I mean, look, we're a bank." Then you'd clasp your hands and put them on the desk and lean over and say "We are safe. We take your deposits and lend them out and then from the returns we give you interest. But we always make sure your deposits are covered. It is not just the law, it is our promise. We deal in trust." A bank, man, you were a bank. Not a corner drugstore.
And now it turns out you were taking my money and investing it in crap that only worked if house prices kept rising forever. Which you, as a bank, remember, the smart people with computers and MBAs, should know is an idiotic idea. Yes, everyone mortgaged as if it was true but we all knew it wasn't and couldn't be, and now you turned out to have bought into that idea wholesale in the investments you made, buying up all those mortgages, which turned worthless when a lot of people stopped making their payments, house prices stopped rising so they could not sell or re-fi, and the agencies you turned out to be paying to tell you those investments were good had no choice but tell you overnight they were bad. And you had so much of that bad shit you suddenly were no longer covered. You didn't buy just a little of that mortgage securities stuff with my money, you hadn't conservatively spread risk, no, you had bought whole hog into something you didn't actually know if it was worth anything. You took my money and invested in tulip bulbs, in Webvan.com.
No, seriously, how could you? Not just be so stupid, but be so stupid that you ended up betraying your social contract with us so? How could you so behave like a drunk dot-com investor in 1999? I am so angry with your whole industry right now. Another set of lies I was fed. Turns out you were not trustworthy. Turns out you and all your little friends are no smarter than a chain of corner drugstores. I am not looking for mommy and daddy, I don't need a rose garden, but was it too much to ask for something, anything, to be more than a thin façade of trustworthyness? Like my bank?
Look, I'll get over this. I'll now have to just evaluate banks just I like evaluate everything else in corporate life: with mistrust, wariness, cynicism. A little extra padding on the skin, a little more irony. Turns out you guys with your smarts are just as shit moronic when it comes down to it as everything else in corporate life. Untrustworthy. Like there was no difference between you and giving my money to CVS to keep safe (except, well, CVS is still in business). Except this time with my money, you know, what I need for food and shelter. Turns out, all libertarian free-market-rules corporatist bullshit companies have been spouting for years now, in the end it actually is that government you business people so despise and feel holds you back that keeps me safe after all, that is the net that is there.
Because as sure as hell it wasn't you and your free-market honed, nimble smarts.
Deregulate more my ass, it turns out you actually couldn't handle being allowed to do what you wanted to do, you and everybody else invested in the stupidest thing possible, whole hog, until it killed you. I was always wary of people who scoffed at regulation and the government, saying they made things inefficient and got in the way, and had all this ideology and examples; I knew from my background It Wasn't That Simple. Now it turns out what should have been the most stable and conservative institutions, pillars of public trust, handled their unregulated freedom by chucking all common sense and being stupid. Without any real repercussions to the people being stupid. The shareholders lose money, dear money they need, and the rest of us lose trust, something all you money fucks should know is even more precious because it what your banks are built on -- 'scuze me, your companies, your rackets, are built on. "Bank failures like in the 30s can't happen again, oh no, we fixed that now, you can trust us. Your grandpa who is wary of us, well, that is old thinking, no, it isn't like that anymore."
WaMu, you suck. All the other banks suck too. I am glad I have so little money in your accounts. I burned much of it from that account trying to get away from the US clusterfuck when I knew that somehow the country would have to pay for giving the national checkbook to a cokehead alcoholic and his cronies for 8 years, so I am glad that I contributed some to you even being less covered for your idiocy, even if it was by an infinitesimal small amount. But I didn't get far enough. Because I did the right things. And now I am gonna hurt.
Because you see, WaMu and all you financial cronies, remember me? I am the guy who saved, like everyone says I should have, because I could. And when I had a chunk of savings I did what was recommended for good returns, which is invest it, carefully. So it would grow and not lose purchasing power when I needed it. And I bought my flat instead of "throwing money away on rent", because you have to invest and use tax advantages.
But here's something that you failed to mention, you financial whizzes of good advice, something I knew after I saw the.com failure, but you still didn't explicitly mention: unless you put your money in places where it will not or barely keep up with inflation, it will not be available for you when you need it. When do we non-retirement age professionals need our nest savings most to tie us over? Not when times are good, we can g from one job to another then. When do we need money to move, retrain, pause, regroup? When times are bad. Well guess what, that's when nobody wants your real estate, your mutual funds have dropped so much your returns are worse than if you had bought CDs, and most of the good saving certificates still have your money locked up because to get that return you had to commit to a specific locking in.
There is no safe place for saving. The safest place turns out to be run by lunkheads, the place that gives some return will not be available when you actually need it, which is when times are bad. And the people reading this who want to tell me I should have 'diversified' can saw your own heads off with a popsicle stick first before even taking a breath to talk to me, and then go run a bank since they are in obvious need of your super smarts, but most of all, you can can it. I was diversified, and it included real estate and very diverse funds and saving accounts, and they all turned out more or less useless in a crisis like this when everything has lost value across the board and nobody can buy whatever I have to sell except against vulture prices, and the places I trusted turned out to be run by total idiots. Makes me reeeeeeeeeaaaaal comfortable about that 401(k) scheme I am supposed to believe in these days. I am kind of glad I have no US job and no salary to contribute to that bullshit built on the vagueness of "average returns". And the bailout apologists telling me that we have to support the lunkheads or "we will all hurt" need to fucking first acknowledge that I am already hurting. Everybody but the lunkheads is hurting, just in grades of hurting or hurting more.
Sincerely,
FJ!!
Do you have any idea of the damage you have done? You were a bank. A BANK. As in stability, rock-solid, a foundation. You were supposed to be one of those institutions that would carry on, that knew what it was doing. You were in the class of companies that was special, that was so conservative it has its own hours and gets forgiven for them, where people dressed up to work at, where Business Casual was frowned on, where, from the earliest depictions in children's books onwards through everyone's life, you were depicted as necessarily stuffy and solid because you guarded people's money, so you had to be beyond trustworthy, and exude it. Hell, WaMu, banks are so special they weren't even ranked in the popular mind as a mere company. You were a bank. A bank!
You were supposed to be filled with people who patted youngsters on the head and adults on the shoulder, reassuringly, and say "You are safe here". Like a church is supposed to give sanctuary from evil, you were supposed to give what little we could scrape by from our hard work to save sanctuary from all the scammers and idiocy and forces ready to leave us with nothing when we needed it. Dude, that was my contract with you when you took that word BANK. That was your promise. You'd tell us in small print my deposits would be insured, but then you were supposed to be able grin a little as you ever so slightly rolled your eyes and spread your arms a little and said "Like you'd ever need that FDIC guarantee, I mean, look, we're a bank." Then you'd clasp your hands and put them on the desk and lean over and say "We are safe. We take your deposits and lend them out and then from the returns we give you interest. But we always make sure your deposits are covered. It is not just the law, it is our promise. We deal in trust." A bank, man, you were a bank. Not a corner drugstore.
And now it turns out you were taking my money and investing it in crap that only worked if house prices kept rising forever. Which you, as a bank, remember, the smart people with computers and MBAs, should know is an idiotic idea. Yes, everyone mortgaged as if it was true but we all knew it wasn't and couldn't be, and now you turned out to have bought into that idea wholesale in the investments you made, buying up all those mortgages, which turned worthless when a lot of people stopped making their payments, house prices stopped rising so they could not sell or re-fi, and the agencies you turned out to be paying to tell you those investments were good had no choice but tell you overnight they were bad. And you had so much of that bad shit you suddenly were no longer covered. You didn't buy just a little of that mortgage securities stuff with my money, you hadn't conservatively spread risk, no, you had bought whole hog into something you didn't actually know if it was worth anything. You took my money and invested in tulip bulbs, in Webvan.com.
No, seriously, how could you? Not just be so stupid, but be so stupid that you ended up betraying your social contract with us so? How could you so behave like a drunk dot-com investor in 1999? I am so angry with your whole industry right now. Another set of lies I was fed. Turns out you were not trustworthy. Turns out you and all your little friends are no smarter than a chain of corner drugstores. I am not looking for mommy and daddy, I don't need a rose garden, but was it too much to ask for something, anything, to be more than a thin façade of trustworthyness? Like my bank?
Look, I'll get over this. I'll now have to just evaluate banks just I like evaluate everything else in corporate life: with mistrust, wariness, cynicism. A little extra padding on the skin, a little more irony. Turns out you guys with your smarts are just as shit moronic when it comes down to it as everything else in corporate life. Untrustworthy. Like there was no difference between you and giving my money to CVS to keep safe (except, well, CVS is still in business). Except this time with my money, you know, what I need for food and shelter. Turns out, all libertarian free-market-rules corporatist bullshit companies have been spouting for years now, in the end it actually is that government you business people so despise and feel holds you back that keeps me safe after all, that is the net that is there.
Because as sure as hell it wasn't you and your free-market honed, nimble smarts.
Deregulate more my ass, it turns out you actually couldn't handle being allowed to do what you wanted to do, you and everybody else invested in the stupidest thing possible, whole hog, until it killed you. I was always wary of people who scoffed at regulation and the government, saying they made things inefficient and got in the way, and had all this ideology and examples; I knew from my background It Wasn't That Simple. Now it turns out what should have been the most stable and conservative institutions, pillars of public trust, handled their unregulated freedom by chucking all common sense and being stupid. Without any real repercussions to the people being stupid. The shareholders lose money, dear money they need, and the rest of us lose trust, something all you money fucks should know is even more precious because it what your banks are built on -- 'scuze me, your companies, your rackets, are built on. "Bank failures like in the 30s can't happen again, oh no, we fixed that now, you can trust us. Your grandpa who is wary of us, well, that is old thinking, no, it isn't like that anymore."
WaMu, you suck. All the other banks suck too. I am glad I have so little money in your accounts. I burned much of it from that account trying to get away from the US clusterfuck when I knew that somehow the country would have to pay for giving the national checkbook to a cokehead alcoholic and his cronies for 8 years, so I am glad that I contributed some to you even being less covered for your idiocy, even if it was by an infinitesimal small amount. But I didn't get far enough. Because I did the right things. And now I am gonna hurt.
Because you see, WaMu and all you financial cronies, remember me? I am the guy who saved, like everyone says I should have, because I could. And when I had a chunk of savings I did what was recommended for good returns, which is invest it, carefully. So it would grow and not lose purchasing power when I needed it. And I bought my flat instead of "throwing money away on rent", because you have to invest and use tax advantages.
But here's something that you failed to mention, you financial whizzes of good advice, something I knew after I saw the.com failure, but you still didn't explicitly mention: unless you put your money in places where it will not or barely keep up with inflation, it will not be available for you when you need it. When do we non-retirement age professionals need our nest savings most to tie us over? Not when times are good, we can g from one job to another then. When do we need money to move, retrain, pause, regroup? When times are bad. Well guess what, that's when nobody wants your real estate, your mutual funds have dropped so much your returns are worse than if you had bought CDs, and most of the good saving certificates still have your money locked up because to get that return you had to commit to a specific locking in.
There is no safe place for saving. The safest place turns out to be run by lunkheads, the place that gives some return will not be available when you actually need it, which is when times are bad. And the people reading this who want to tell me I should have 'diversified' can saw your own heads off with a popsicle stick first before even taking a breath to talk to me, and then go run a bank since they are in obvious need of your super smarts, but most of all, you can can it. I was diversified, and it included real estate and very diverse funds and saving accounts, and they all turned out more or less useless in a crisis like this when everything has lost value across the board and nobody can buy whatever I have to sell except against vulture prices, and the places I trusted turned out to be run by total idiots. Makes me reeeeeeeeeaaaaal comfortable about that 401(k) scheme I am supposed to believe in these days. I am kind of glad I have no US job and no salary to contribute to that bullshit built on the vagueness of "average returns". And the bailout apologists telling me that we have to support the lunkheads or "we will all hurt" need to fucking first acknowledge that I am already hurting. Everybody but the lunkheads is hurting, just in grades of hurting or hurting more.
Sincerely,
FJ!!