A Wall Street sequel?

—Rollie Atkinson
Last year at this time, the high-flying bankers of Wall Street
and their gambling partners around the globe fell into an abyss and
took $5 trillion of other people’s money to the bottom of it.
It has never been recovered, despite what many of today’s Wall
Street characters would have you believe. Anyway, they will tell
you, it wasn’t all real money.
Tell that to almost every Sonoma County homeowner who saw his
property value go down by 30 percent where it remains today.
Don’t try to change the mind of all the Baby Boomers who gasped
as their 401Ks and retirement pension fund lost overnight
double-digit value. Retirement plans were delayed or canceled.
The ripples of the Wall Street collapse, triggered by the
failure of Lehman Brothers, the country’s largest investment firm,
are still being felt today right here in Sonoma County.
Venerable Exchange Bank posted three quarters of losses and had
to suspend funding Doyle Foundation scholarships to local junior
college students. Housing industry leader Christopherson Homes
filed for bankruptcy protection and laid off more than a hundred
workers. Clem Carinelli, the county’s largest property owner, was
dragged into the Wall Street abyss and is taking dozens of private
investors with him. These include the Sonoma State University
Foundation and the founders of the Santa Rosa Symphony.
This week President Barack Obama went to Wall Street to chastise
the bankers, stock brokers and financial industry lobbyists for
being too coy and cozy.
“Instead of learning the lessons of Lehman and the crisis from
which we are still recovering (they) are choosing to ignore them,”
the president said. He accused many in his audience of returning to
the “days of reckless behavior and unchecked excesses.”
Many financial analysts now look back to a year ago and say
America and the rest of the world narrowly avoided a total economic
collapse that would have made today’s recession look like happy
days of prosperity.
It was a year ago when the Bush Administration and Secretary of
the Treasury Henry Paulson gave away $700 billion in TARP (Troubled
Asset Relief Program) to AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America, General
Motors and Chrysler among many other corporations deemed “too big
to fail.”
What have these corporations done with all that taxpayer money?
No one knows for sure because Paulson handed it out too fast and
didn’t attach any strings to any of it.
But we now know that lots of that money paid off millions in
individual bonuses to corporate presidents and chiefs. Some of the
funds were used to pay for private jets, spa retreats and other
corporate excesses that opened the September 2008 abyss in the
first place.
“Greed is good,” said Michael Douglas’ character Gordon Gekko,
in the 1987 movie “Wall Street” made by Oliver Stone. “Nothing is
worth doing unless it involves money,” his character also said.
Gekko made millions raiding successful businesses, taking them over
and striping away instant profits, leaving the smaller stock
holders and employees with ashes and broken promises.
Stone made his movie based on real events and the high risk
financial games that only escalated after the 1980s. His movie
ended with Wall Street continuing “business as usual” in the final
frames.
Now, Stone is set to release a sequel, “Wall Street 2: Money
Never Sleeps.” It is about the aftermath of last year’s collapse.
He has not revealed how his movie will end, just as we are still
living out the story of the Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and
Fannie Mae saga.
What President Obama and others would like to see is a story
that ends with a learned lesson and a moral. Nobody wants to live
through a real life sequel.