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Santa shouldn’t come to subprime lenders this year!
By Lauren | December 24, 2008
As Christmas approaches, a lot of exhausted parents are telling their hyperactive, gift-greedy children that “Santa won’t come this year unless you’re good!” Until kids get old enough to realize that Santa Claus nearly always comes through no matter how badly they act up, the threat of getting no presents from the Man in Red is usually good for at least half an hour of model behavior.
It’s a shame that threat doesn’t work with adults.
There are lots of reasons why the economy is in recession, but it was the collapse of the subprime mortgage market that got the avalanche rolling. Sadly, it’s not at all clear that the greedy financiers who created this mess are going to get the lumps of coal in their stockings that they deserve. Since Congress passed the $700 billion bailout package we’ve heard that many of the recipients have continued to spend lavishly on spa trips and year-end bonuses while precious little has been said about prosecuting lenders who repackaged and sold mortgage loans knowing they were probably uncollectible. Meanwhile, there are probably a lot of children from middle- and working-class families who won’t get some or all of what they asked for this Christmas, because even Santa cuts back when recession looms.
We tell our kids that they have to play fair, tell the truth, moderate their greed and refrain from taking things that don’t belong to them. It seems wrong to hold children to a higher standard than we do the leaders of the financial services industry. Once Christmas has come and gone, a lot of us will start thinking about New Year’s resolutions. Maybe this year we should resolve to treat America’s financiers the same way we treat our kids.
Topics: Business Ethics, Social Ethics, corporate responsibility, ethics |
December 31st, 2008 at 11:18 pm
[...] presents Santa shouldn’t come to subprime lenders this year! posted at The Business Ethics Blog, saying, “Predatory lenders deserve a lump of coal for [...]