I leave you with this quote to ponder over the weekend.

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.

– Thomas Jefferson, 1802

Thanks to Ian Copsey, a forex analyst in Asia, for sending this one on.

UPDATE: Re-posting on Facebook yielded some interesting commentary. According to his wikipedia page. TJ died deep in debt, much of it caused by out of control banking policies. This background puts the above quote in greater context.

Although he was born into one of the wealthiest families in North America, Thomas Jefferson was deeply in debt when he died. Jefferson’s trouble began when his father-in-law died, and he and his brothers-in-law quickly divided the estate before its debts were settled. It made each of them liable for the whole amount due – which turned out to be more than they expected.

Jefferson sold land before the American Revolution to pay off the debts, but by the time he received payment, the paper money was worthless amid the skyrocketing inflation of the war years. Cornwallis ravaged Jefferson’s plantation during the war, and British creditors resumed their collection efforts when the conflict ended. Jefferson suffered another financial setback when he cosigned notes for a relative who reneged on debts in the financial Panic of 1819. Only Jefferson’s public stature prevented creditors from seizing Monticello and selling it out from under him during his lifetime.

I could never figure out how banks and securities dealers talked themselves into loaning money to people that common sense would tell you never could repay their obligation. Listening to this episode of This American Life – Giant Pool of Money revealed that it was incremental greed that drove each link in the chain to justify the crazy loans that were extended – a kind of slow boiling of the frog – which gradually upped the ante until the market could no longer sustain it.

A vital oversight often overlooked was that with the Mortgage-Backed Securities that were famous for bundling up poorly graded loans with a few high-performing loans to basically pretty up a pig, the complex risk management tools that were used for analysis failed completely because of the lack of historical data.

Very simply, no one had ever extended credit under such situations before (i.e. NINA loans, No Income, No Asset) so they assumed an overly optimistic rate of default and dealers let the computer models talk them into taking on loans that just didn’t make sense.