As a supplement to Matt Taibbi’s article — described and linked to in the previous post — I thought this paragraph from George Packer in a February article in The New Yorker about Florida’s foreclosure disaster — “The Ponzi State” — was particularly apropos.
Dan knew that his plight was the result of rising unemployment in a bad economy that was shedding the few remaining manufacturing jobs. In Hillsborough County, forty-eight thousand people had no work. And yet, in pondering the cause of his trouble, Dan couldn’t avoid the feeling that the world had singled him out for some terrible payback, that it must have been his fault, that the failure was his alone and he had no right to anyone else’s help. It occurred to me that this was an attitude that no senior figure on Wall Street had adopted.