Recently, I've seen the documentary called "Inside Job". It's an interesting documentary that explains how the financial crisis that started in 2008 came about. Obviously, the documentary is a little colored / biased but I did feel that a lot of issues were addressed in a satisfactory manner in the sense that I felt I had some beginning of an understanding of what was going on.

The shocking thing, to me, about the documentary was the enormous number of people and institutions that were “guilty” of the crisis. Focusing mostly on the US but finding several parallels with Europe, several US Presidencies such as the ones of Reagan and Bush jr. were criticized for giving too much leeway to financial institutions.

The bonuses that were awarded to some of the top bankers (even to some who had to leave due to bad management and were given exit bonuses) I found – considering these are institutions that are saved by the government when they fail and hence are extremely safe – to be obscene.

Credit rating agencies were dependent for their payments on the banks that sold the financial products that they consistently rated as reliable investments, which is simply a too large conflict of interest to handle. A “scientist” (I am a scientist myself and this person deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison IMHO) “forgot” to mention that for a study into the reliability of the Icelandic financial sector it was the Icelandic government that payed him about 125.000$ to perform the study. (Earlier in the documentary the narrator explains that this very government actively participated in the promotion of its banks, that would later be among the first to collapse.)

And I’m not even mentioning the role of the so-called “checks and balances” (central banks, Securities and Exchange Committee or whatever you call it in the US or other countries).

If so many people are involved, I believe the problem lies deeper than simply “in the capitalist system we’ve created”, although – before guys like Putin33 hijack this thread – I immediately admit that we have serious and even fundamental problems.

We could point the finger of blame to all people mentioned above, but I assure you, we’d be running out of fingers to point with. I feel like I’m partly to blame, that is, coming from a country that has 16 million inhabitants, I’ll take a little under 1/16 millionth of the responsibility. They were playing with my money, but I was playing Diplomacy, watching Star Trek episodes or taking my traditional 8.5 hr night of sleep while they were sticking enough coke up their noses to screw me over non-stop from Monday morning till well into Saturday night.

As a citizen, I need to arm myself and I believe the best solution is... I don’t know. Check out all the Macroeconomics books from my university library to see how they did it? Play their game and invest my little savings in companies I somehow determine worth investing in? Putting my money in an old sock? More carefully reading the political programmes put forward before the elections and making a more informed decision? Discussing it on webdip?

Discuss.