(Washington, DC 4/15) I’ll go for that. The financial meltdown can easily be seen as a bunch of strung out coke heads trying to fix what they knew they’d broken: grandiosity, pressured speech, bad judgment after bad judgment, avarice, greed, and abandonment of any pretense of morality. (Image: 401K 2013
Dr. David Nutt, MD, chair of the British government’s Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs (1998-2009) and professor of pharmacology and psychiatry, Imperial College London, said this in an article just published by The Independent today:
“Bankers use cocaine and got us into this terrible mess,” he told the paper adding that the drug made them “overconfident” and led to them taking more risks. The Independent April 15
So, which bankers is he talking about? Inquiring minds want to know!
It is no secret that cocaine is the rich man’s crystal meth. The drugs are remarkably similar in the negative effects on work performance and risk taking. Coke costs $100 a gram and meth is so cheap it’s practically free.
Were the big boys on Wall Street doing coke when they had the secret meeting where they carved up the investment banks, deciding who survived and who tanked?
Was bailout planning at those late night White House meetings in 2008 fueled by lines of coke snorted with freshly minted Franklins?
The whole thing sounds like a drug crazed event, doesn’t it. A bunch of self-proclaimed geniuses realizing that they’ve ruined their business come up with a crazy plan to save their firms (most of them) and their lifestyle. They get one their own, who just happens to be Secretary of the Treasury, to bankroll their mistakes (an worse) and they just keep going while the rest of the country struggles on for years to recover.
LOL! Really, his name is Nutt?
Really, his name is Nutt. He’s been a voice calling for sanity in drug laws for some years. Last year he published _Drugs Without the Hot Air: Minimising the Harms of Legal and Illegal Drugs_ which is very good and written for laymen.
His big thing has been that the drug laws and lawmakers have little to do with the science with classification of drugs being determined by publicity and news stories. He was fired from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, because he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. One of the instances of same was his assertion that the ratio of horseback rides to serious injuries requiring hospitalization from falls while riding was much worse than the ratio of doses of ecstasy taken to hospitalizations treat overdoses. I don’t remember the numbers and have loaned the book out, but I do remember that hardly anyone using ecstasy was harmed till after the drug was made illegal.
Anyway, his is a very credible voice on drug use and drug law in Britain.
Thank you for that first hand information.
The bio that I linked from Imperial shows a distinguished career. The Independent had one quote about cocaine, with the balance devoted to making Nutt look eccentric. Instead of my own flights of fantasy off of Nutt’s core statement, I wish that the reporter had asked him, “How do you know about the cocaine habits of bankers (presumably senior)?”
Since the City of London financial sector produced even more derivatives than Wall Street, he may be onto something. It seems to me that coke would certainly distort and expand flawed, amoral beliefs and actions but those need be present prior to the partying episodes. But there’s nothing wore than someone you know on coke. The tedium is endless.
I think it is an over-simplification (and frankly, a little simple-minded), to attribute the entire 2008 financial crisis to cocaine. I doubt that the investment bankers who created CDOs, synthetic CDOs, credit default swaps and traded them, not to mention the employees at the rating agencies that rated this junk AAA and the thousands of mortgage brokers who made mortgage loans to people who had no ability to pay them back, were ALL cocaine fiends. Simple answers to complex issues are often wrong.
By extension then, I guess the editorial policy of the site is now to embrace the War on Drugs. If one can’t have a War on Bankers directly, embrace the indirect option.
This site? Did you see the humor and satire tag?
Hey, I was being humorous too. If I’m going to go to war on the Bankers, I’d like a strategy that might work…
Okay, but remember humor is good
I’m not sure there is a good strategy against the bankers, outside of voting out all of congress. It is always hard when the deck is marked and stacked against you.