Quotable: Jamie Lee Curtis on the credit crisis

Posted on February 24, 2009 by Sabina Becker

“Are we too so drugged as to think that the idea of Corporate greed and avarice and the lies and misdeeds are a new thing? Madoff’s Ponzi worked (longer than most) but it worked because people didn’t ask questions, they just really liked the returns. Is this new? Did the banks and the mortgage lenders and Feds really just figure out that there was a problem. We are all to blame. We are addicted to the dope of credit and each plastic card purchase sets off the phenomenon of craving for more. Then advertisers and marketers (lobbyists in better suits) and the media tell us we need it and the banks and the credit companies tell us we can have it and boom — we are all in over our heads.”

–Jamie Lee Curtis, “A Fish Called Denial”

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One Response to Quotable: Jamie Lee Curtis on the credit crisis

  1. otto says:
    February 25, 2009 at 9:32 PM

    JK Galbraith said it earlier and better. From his book “The Great Depression”
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    To the economist, embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny, it has a time parameter. Weeks, months, or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. This is a period incidentally when the embezzler has his gain, and the man who has been embezzled oddly feels no loss.
    There is a net increase in psychic welfare.
    At any given time, there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in, or more precisely not in, the country’s businesses and banks. This inventory—perhaps it should be called the bezzle—varies in size with the business cycle. In good times, people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. And even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances, the rate of embezzlement grows. The rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases sharply.
    In Depression all this is reversed. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks.”

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