The Curmudgeonly Professor has prepared a pop quiz for all members of the financial community who contributed to the current financial meltdown. Please answer the folloowing questions truthfully.
- Do you know how to add, subtract, multiply, and do long division?
- Do you know the difference between right and wrong?
- Did you ever appraise a property more than you knew it was worth so you could give an inflated loan to a borrower?
- Did you ever approve a loan without doing a thorough credit, income, and background check on a borrower?
- How much money have you made by earning commissions and fees on risky and subprime loans?
- Can you sleep at nights?
- As a supervisor, did you supervise the work and risk levels of the loans the people you supervised were making?
- Do you think Martha Stewart was more guilty for fibbing about insider trading than you are for lying about the appraised value of homes and the loan-worthiness of new borrowers?
- Do you think Bernie Madoff, who dwells in a penthouse, is worthy of living in luxury while Martha Stewart was sent to jail?
- Do you understand the term business ethics?
- Do you know how to assess appropriate and prudent levels of risk?
- Since you got us all into this mess through your ineptness and lack of attention and care for what you were doing, how can we rely on you to get us out of the sinkhole you have put us in?
- How many of the stupid loans that you made have resulted in home foreclosures and people losing their homes with nowhere to go?
- As a borrower who received a subprime mortgage, did it ever occur to you that you had no economic basis for living in a megamansion in la la land?
- If you were a government regulator, did it ever occur to you, once you knew the banking and financial and mortgage industries were skating on thin ice, that you ought to do something about it before it was too late?
- Are you an honest person?
- Please list all of the things you know you did wrong. Please explain why you did these things.
