Roger Waters as many of you know is rather politically motivated and likes to share his opinion on many matters important to him. As well as raising funds for building houses for the poor, he is also being political in his video response to the Occupy Wall Street movement below.

Roger’s dislike of the top 1% of people controlling the lives of the other 99% is stated clearly here if you were in doubt. He also shares his thoughts on the Credit Default Swaps which has caused the recession of 2008 and 2011 to run deeper than it would have otherwise. Feel free to leave a comment and share your thoughts on the Occupy Movement and Roger’s response to it, or perhaps Roger’s politics in general. Or be excited by Roger Waters 2012 USA Tour Dates instead!

The Great Recession of 2008 and Blame

Although Roger is quite right in my opinion that the selling of mortgage derivatives (known to be trash) to people en masse to make a short-term profit was quite wrong, I do find it interesting that the blame is not levelled equally between Banks, Government and Borrowers themselves both by Roger and the popular media.

The last Labour Government in the UK for example changed technical requirements of British Banks so that they could lend each £1 of customers deposits to more and more people. In the olden days, when a bank made a loan to someone, it was backed by gold or other assets. But then the rules changed long ago so that they were allowed to take on more risk by lending multiple times the value of the assets they had. So, they could end up lending a customers £1 deposit to perhaps 5 people. One very irresponsible thing that Gordon Brown did was to change this capital reserve requirement so that the banks could lend even more of people’s cash deposits out and thus not have enough cash to cover losses when people started defaulting in the 2008 recession. So, the Labour Government in particular was greatly to blame and Gordon Brown and Ed Balls in particular. These people ought to be arrested and put in prison.

The Banks are also to blame because, once again, in the olden days they would lend their money to people and be paid back by them over time. This means that the bank took on the risk of people defaulting and not being able to pay their loan back. This caused the banks to be very selective when lending to people so that they only lent money to people who could afford to pay it back. The banks came up with a plan though to break the link between risk and profit by administering the loans but then selling these loans to a “Special Investment Vehicle” and then selling shares and derivatives of these shares in the market place so that the risk was removed from the banks and given to investors instead… like pension funds and governments. This removal of risk from banks meant that they could now lend money to anybody who came through the door including unemployed people as the bank did not care if they paid their loan back or not because the banks were building the loans up into these investment companies and then selling the equity in them on to fools.

Then there are the Borrowers who decided to live beyond their means by taking on credit products that they had no hope of ever being able to pay back. You may argue that we live in a consumer society and that people are encouraged to be materialistic and live beyond their means and that these people have just been going along with that. However, this particular blogger believes that people should take personal responsibility for their actions and not rely on the Government of the day to make their financial decisions of the banks either. They should not expect the ‘nanny state’ to look after them.

Feel free to share your thoughts and get a debate going.