There's this new organization (size unknown; for all I know it's one person) called the "92 Percent Group". Airing an eminently reasonable grievance, but promoting a completely wrong way of dealing with it: a mortgage strike.
To send a strong message to President Obama and Congress, we propose a nationwide mortgage strike in April 2009. By witholding their April mortgage payments, homeowners across the country will demonstrate the absurdity of rewarding those who do not meet their financial obligations.
A few days ago, I casually remarked:
...presumably, the impending doom of Citigroup is somehow also my fault, though I'm not sure how paying my mortgage on time creates a problem.
Well, if a bunch of us don't make our mortgage payments in April, we'll surely bring an already-wobbly Citigroup down, along with many other such institutions.
But how does this send a message to Washington? And what message?
It sends a message to financial-company shareholders, all right; when the banks fail, the shareholders are wiped out. And just the threat of a mortgage strike, if taken seriously, could trigger a further run on banks' market capitalization as investors bail out to salvage what little value is left.
The message to Washington is likely to be that it really is necessary to nationalize the banks.
This doesn't in any way punish the clowns in Washington. It punishes the poor sods who bought shares in financial institutions back when that seemed like a good idea... or whose pension funds bought shares, etc.
Then it transfers control of the banks from the Wall Street fat cats who've been mismanaging them to the Washington imbeciles who will promptly show us what real mismanagement looks like.
Do we really want hard-core anarchy?
(Via Tom Maguire.)
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