When There Is No One Left To Blame

Oil prices are too high? It must be the speculators/hedge funds that are hoarding barrels of oil in their supply closets and artificially driving up energy prices. Is your company’s stock tanking? It must be the short-sellers that are beating up on your poor company for pernicious reasons, not because you’re losing money and are basically insolvent. Can’t make the mortgage payment on the house you couldn’t afford in the first place? It’s not your fault; it’s negative consumer sentiment and the housing crisis that is preventing you from temporarily avoiding disaster by refinancing your way out of it.

Running a bank that’s losing money and needs a capital infusion? That’s not your fault either; it’s the big bad credit crunch that’s causing the problem, those bad investments you made that caused the credit crunch had nothing to do with it.

Lately it seems that no matter what sort of financial malaise and individual or a company is facing, there is a convenient scapegoat awaiting the call to absolve them of guilt. Better yet there is a convenient scapegoat available and government intervention at the ready, all to make sure that no one has to face the consequences of their own actions.

My question is: what happens when all of the scapegoats are dead, there is no one left to blame and all of the governments attempted magic cures are used up? Will people still cling to their old notions and invent new methods of escaping reality or will they confront reality, let things run their course and get to the business of truly fixing things?

While I don’t know the answer to this question, I do know that the answer determines our economic future, because the longer we delay confronting the reality the greater the cost of the eventual real clean-up.

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