Monday, October 13, 2008

Prime and Sub-Prime

At the sub-prime of my life and with lack of a degree in economics it is a bit of a dare devilry to talk about the so called sub-prime crisis that is causing much heart-burn everywhere. Don't worry I am not going to go deep into the problem and suggest authentic remedies - there are hosts of people doing just that [they never read English and are not aware of the adage "too many cooks spoil the broth"]. I am here just to make my little bowl of soup and move on. The so called sub-prime crisis which is the grandmother of all crises now faced by financial institutions across the globe, has been played out in a way that seems to give the impression that poor americans took loans and were unable to play. And by implication, poor people across the world are bad news for lenders. This inference is dangerous: firstly because poor people need loans more than rich; and more importantly, empirical evidence from micro financing institutions show that poor people have the best record of repayment [he pays up for he needs another loan after repayment].
What has not been brought out clearly that the present crisis has been brought about by the greed of a few persons, who had huge powers of manipulating, cheating and otherwise doing anything possible to increase their variable salaries and performance based bonuses. They were usually very rich people and they wanted to become richer. The surprising thing is not that such people would be greedy. What is surprising thing is that they could hold everyone including mighty governments to ransom and get away scott free in the name of free markets. It is time that some of these people were brought to book and made to face the music. And the sub-prime crisis should be promptly renamed super prime crisis.