Aligned Marketing Blog

The practices on Wall Street are not easy to defend but neither are they surprising. The U.S. Government took the cost of capital, the raw material banks use to make loans, down to zero and, at the same time, poured an avalanche of money into their coffers. That may have been necessary but random acts have random consequences and, in a panic, the last two administrations acted randomly.

From what I can tell the bailouts were done with little oversight. The banks are the new bad guys because they didn’t do what the current administration thought they should do. Metaphorically, we gave a teenager the car keys and said do your thing. Please. What the heck did we expect?

The banks acted in their own self-interest. How shocking? And now they are being slapped with the greed label. An old enemy returns and by-golly we’re gonna get ‘im. We’ve got new weapons too, more regulation, punitive laws and more outside interference. Wait, aren’t those are the old weapons? How well will that work? Wall Street might know. The Dow plunged 213 points (2%!) yesterday.

"Never again will the American taxpayer be held hostage by a bank that is too big to fail," Mr. Obama proclaimed Thursday. I feel better already.

Republican Senator Jon Kyl said, "Let's not be finding (sic) a bogeyman so that we can turn public attention away from what they're doing wrong in the administration." Good for you, Senator, waggle that finger.

Peter Drucker said that laws brought forth from "scandal" (real or concocted) are usually bad laws. He reasoned scandal driven laws “punish 99 innocents to foil one miscreant. They penalize good practice, yet rarely prevent malpractice. They express emotion rather than reason."


Ginning up scandal and public outcry to produce regulation will create more confusion, add cost and is unproductive. The American people need private sector jobs that sustain the economy, not hobgoblins and speeches, from either side.

Mr. President, if you’re listening, which you said you were going to do, seriously this time, like now, after the Massachusetts’s election, trim government spending so that you can lower taxes on businesses and individuals. You see, some greed really is bad. Greedy politicians who keep raising taxes are the worst.

If I were a tough-guy I’d tell all the politicians to just shut up, give us back our money and don’t let me catch you nosing around here again, but I’m not.