Of Banks and Bailouts

This is my understanding thus far.

Say that I make a business out of finding people who need money to buy their houses. "You make a business out of..." Okay, that's fine, I didn't mean out loud. In exchange, they give me a piece of paper saying they promise to give me twice as much money in ten years or five times as much money in thirty years. We call this tomfoolery a "mortgage", and it helps a lot of people get a house sooner than they normally would.

Over time, I figure out that this sometimes doesn't work out as planned. Maybe some people die, maybe some people get sick and lose jobs, or maybe some people were just plain playing me the entire time. To try to get around this, I take the mortgages and I put them in boxes together, 10 or so at a time. This way, when one of them wins, it makes up for four other failures. I then get the idea to start selling the boxes. I tell everyone that the pieces of paper inside are as good as the money I expect to get out of them, 99% of the time. However, maybe I was so enthusiastic about this that I didn't spend enough time researching the people to whom I gave my money, making the paper inside my boxes only as good as I say 50% of the time. The reality is actually worse yet, because I actually *did* do the research, and I put all of the 99% safe papers in one set of boxes that I only sold to my friends, and all of the 5% safe papers in another box, and then sold them as the same thing as the 99% boxes to everyone else.

Now, there's another thing we can do in this game. Say a guy named Dave figures out that a guy named Sam really needs these boxes for a couple of days, to do I-don't-know-what, maybe build partition walls in his basement for a LAN gaming event. But Sam can't find any boxes to buy, anywhere, because a guy named Carl bought all of them and has been hording them selfishly, thinking he can just wait a while and they'll be worth more. Additionally, while Sam only wants to buy boxes with no desire to borrow them, Dave has no qualms about borrowing them. Dave does this for Sam because he thinks Carl is wrong, he thinks the boxes will be worth less after we wait around a bit. When he buys them back from Sam to give back to Carl, Dave won't need to use all of the money he got out of Sam when the boxes were first sold. Unfortunately for Dave, he needs to be extra careful because Carl could demand to have his boxes back at any time, then Dave has to go to Sam to get them back, but Sam is going to want his money back plus some to make up for the inconvenience of ruining his LAN party. We call these shenanigans "short-selling" (because you don't want to do it over a long period of time, unlike investing), and we agree to it because we won't find out the real value of the such things as paper and boxes for many years to come.

Now, I'm having so much fun, I think everyone should get in on the fun. So, I setup a casino on the side where people can bet on whether or not any boxes are worth more or less than I say they are. Money is flying around, everyone's having a good time, but some (a very small number) of the gamblers are getting wise. They've done their own research on the people that have paper in the boxes. And these savvy gamblers know I am full of shit. So, they get in on the "borrow boxes, sell em' back" game, because they know they are going to come out on top. They've turned the tables on me.

Actually, they only think they've turned the tables on me. Here's the rub: I set this all up just so I could get those savvy gamblers to bet against me. I want them to borrow the boxes so that I can buy them back. I do this because I think the savvy gamblers are wrong, I think people's opinions of the boxes are only going to improve. Either way it doesn't really matter, because I'm charging a rake to process the boxes! I want them to do this so that I constantly have my own boxes coming back into my own door so I can turn around and sell them again! As long as boxes are coming and going as fast as possible, I'm making a killing on these service charges. It gets so bad that at any one point in time I've got the same box "sold" to 15 different people! The paper trail is snaked around an incomprehensible tangle of ping-pong swats back and forth between me and the "savvy" gamblers.

Now, we've been doing this for a while, but I want more. But my big brother says I can only push the boxes 15 times, and I've already pushed my boxes as far as they can go. Left to my own devices, I might have figured out that it's only prudent to push these boxes 7 times, but I like my bro and I trust him, so I go 15 times. I could get more mortgages to put in new boxes, but I can't because my big brother says that I have to have some money left over at the end of the month, just in case it rains and I need to patch the roof at the last minute. On top of that, my big brother is now telling me that I have to let the new guy in town play the game, even though it's bro's rules that say I don't have any seats left at the table. It's not because he's new that I don't let the new guy play. I do it for the same reason I don't let a lot of people play -- I checked him out and he's probably going to stiff me before his mortgage is due. But my brother says that he's special and can't help himself, and nobody ever gave him a chance before, and he fought-in-the-war-after-all, and if I don't then that makes me a meany doo-doo head.

Also, there are some people who I'd be willing to let play, but the fact that my big brother takes some money from these people whenever they sell their house once and for all means they don't want to bother with the whole malarkey. So, I make a deal with my bro. I'll let the new guy play as long as my bro lets me use more of my rainy day fund, lets me push my boxes THIRTY times, AND promises not to take a rake off the people who aren't playing yet if they promise to sell their houses really quickly. We also convince more people to play by lowering the rake that is charged when selling the house, and lowering the amount the amount they have to pay back when they pay off the mortgage, even though that was how I made up for the losers in the pack. I know that I'm going to lose more mortgages than before, but I figure it's okay, it's more paper to make the churn, so whatever. This works even better than I expected because some people get the idea that they can play the game a bunch of times at once and will make a killing as long as they quit before everyone else does.

But the day comes that the savvy gamblers turn out to be right. It turns out that new guy actually did stiff me, and these double-dealing sharks from the end of the previous paragraph are finding they misgauged when they were supposed to jump off the runaway train full of dynamite. It's getting harder and harder to sell my boxes, and I really need to sell boxes because I need to get to the pieces of paper inside them to try to get rid of these mortgages once and for all. But the only people who are buying are the guys who sold me boxes after borrowing them from someone else, and they'll only take a lower price. I thought I was playing everyone all along, but in the end I was being fed my own tail.

Now more people have figured out that my boxes are garbage, and they want to get rid of them. But they can't get them back from the guys who are borrowing them. Why? Because they sold them back to me! And why can't I get them back? Because, I sold the boxes to other people, who then proceeded to lend them out again. Nobody knows where the original pieces of paper are now, or even what box they're in; they're lost in the shuffle! Actually, I'm probably not even involved anymore, I probably taught some gullible, 22-year-old shmuck the whole scheme, convinced him it was not only legitimate but also patriotic, bought an island in the Caymans, stocked the ponds with fat trout and the beaches with beautiful women, and booked it like it was 10 minutes before high-noon in Dodge.

So, like a cable dragging a cage full of crabs in the Bering Sea that snaps under the load, the blistering end starts to crack through the air, cutting anyone in its path in half. When it rains, man, it pours. But it's okay, I've got my rainy day fu... oh fiddle-sticks. So I go crawling back to my Big Brothers Ben Bernanke and Big Bald Boy asking for the Bad-Bank Bailout Bonanza because they did it once before for my Cousin Chrysler. My big brother thinks he can keep people from getting killed by dumping Parker Brothers money on my head from a helicopter. What do I do? I just let go of the other end of the rope, scoop up the counterfeit dollars, buy another island, and high-tail it again -- to quote Bullwinkle -- "this time for sure".

Oh, I conveniently left out the fact that a bunch of my friends were doing this at the same time as well.

And there you have it. Each individual activity describe here-in is a handy tool to keep business flowing. Dynamite on its own is useful for clearing hills, and uranium is useful on its own for generating power, but put together in the right configuration makes a nuclear bomb. We allow the system of loans because most of the time people don't have the means to get started, but will have such means if they can just get off the ground. We allow people to horde resources because we sometimes get carried away with how much of that resource we use and need someone to check us, ensuring there will be enough for tomorrow. We allow people to short-sell because sometimes resources are really needed but are being horded by others. We allow people to package risky assets together, because on average the winners will help shore up the losers in the package and make the entire package less risky. The problems started when we tried to game the system. We tried to get more people to play the game than we had seats at the table, or could afford to play, or wanted to play at the real price of the game. So we made concessions to attempt to entice them into playing. We got way over extended, and now we're pulling the dead-beat game on the guys we borrowed from in Shanghai to keep this all going.