Why the big banks are like pinscher puppies
Elizabeth Warren is right, the people on Wall Street did break this country, but that kind of misses the point. Big financial institutions, public or private, are glands. Like a gall bladder, which is solely designed to produce bile, so a bank’s sole mission in life is to make money for its shareholders. These are not moral entities, they never have been, and we may as well get used to the fact that they never will be.
Here’s another analogy. Our big banks are like dobermann pinscher puppies. The dobermann is a great dog, potentially a very effective protector, a great family dog, extremely loyal and obedient. But the dobermann has a reputation for a reason. They are extraordinarily strong dogs, they have wildly sharp teeth, and they can be very aggressive. They can wreak havoc.
If you train a pinscher properly it will grow up to be the former. If you fail to discipline the dog early on, it will go wild. As a pup it will chew up everything in the house and tear your sofa to shreds. As an adult it could turn out to be unpredictable, aggressive and dangerous in all the wrong ways.
Our big banks are exactly the same. They need boundaries, constant monitoring and correction. Actually, they’re not exactly the same. Puppies grow up, but America’s big banks have proven to be perpetual juveniles. They have shown, time and time again, that they cannot be left solely to their own devices. Every time we’ve let them run free, they’ve chewed up the fabric of our financial system. The last time they nearly ripped it to shreds.
I don’t think I’m saying anything that isn’t blindingly obvious. Which begs the question, why are we running around screeching at the dog, when we should be going after its owner? The dog can’t understand us - it sees we’re angry, but smart as it is, it speaks dog, not human, so we’re wasting energy. We could shoot the dog, but we know the owner will only get a new one, and because the owner won’t give the dog boundaries or discipline, we’ll be right back where we started.
It would be nice to think that we the people can discipline the banks, but we can’t really. We’ve outsourced that job to our representatives in Congress. There’s an entire alphabet soup of governmental organizations supposed to be keeping the big banks in line, but they can’t even make the banks sit, let alone bring them to heel. Why? Because our representatives have systematically emasculated our regulators over the years. Slowly but surely, Congress let the leash slip, until the dog was able to rush off on its own and do all the damage it liked.
So while Elizabeth Warren is right about Wall Street breaking this country, she’s only half right. Maybe only a quarter right. Wall Street deserves to be punished for its actions (or lack of them), but the responsibility for the big banks’ actions lies primarily with the government. Thanks to the financial crisis, the banks are hanging their heads a bit now, like a dog that realizes that its owner is enraged by the destruction of the sofa. Warren knows this is an opportunity for the government to get Wall Street under control again, and put the appropriate boundaries in place. Like us, she’s on the march, and rightly so. Unfortunately, also like us, she’s sending her message in the wrong direction. Washington should be the object of her anger, not Wall Street. Because shouting at the banks isn’t going to help: the dog ain’t gonna put the leash on itself.
