Daniel Indiviglio of The Atlantic asks Did Porn Cause the Financial Crisis? and then asks us not to consider it a joke question. Sorry, it is a joke question. I don’t care how much porn people at the SEC were watching at work. What caused the financial crisis was the issuance of credit to bad credit risks, the gaming of dishonest rating agencies, and the development of financial products that created these perverse incentives and destroyed any semblance of accountability. A couple of SEC executives watching porn all day at work was insignificant compared to what the Federal Reserve and Wall Street executives allowed to happen.
As a general rule, an employee who spends all day watching porn proves that his job is superfluous, not that he is indispensable for the company’s success.
The one thing you have to remember when you list the causes is that “the development of financial products that created these perverse incentives and destroyed any semblance of accountability” is why we ended up with “the gaming of dishonest rating agencies” because they wanted to extend “the issuance of credit to bad credit risks” because the cart came before the horse.
If it had not been so profitable for them they would never had wanted to give out those risky loans in the first place.
Just my two cents. 🙂
I think that is what I was trying to say.