Your Money is My Money

This brilliant piece is a translation of a Dagblad article that appeared 20 July 2012, written by Frits Bloemendaal [http://byhans.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/jouw-geld-is-mijn-geld/]:

How is it possible that one broker can bring down a bank? That one money trader can bring entire countries to the edge of disaster? And that one director with a penchant for gambling can reduce a corporation with many tens of thousands of homes to beggary?

It happens because it can.

At the tops of businesses, and at the moment in public and semi-public institutions, a culture change has arisen in which self-interest, narcissism and unscrupulousness have become the most normal things in the world. That began around 30 years ago in countries such as the US and England, and spread thereafter to our own regions.

One of the worst examples is the American energy company Enron, where managers set up an enormous fraudulent network and filled their own pockets, with the eventual result of the demise of the billion-dollar company. Many thousands of employees and investors were left destitute. In the Netherlands it began with Aegon, where executives like Kees Storm enriched themselves with options worth billions, while their clients were squeezed dry with extortionate policies.

Since then the examples have piled up. The real estate fraud of the Bouwfunds and the Philips pension funds, laid out in the book De Vastgoedfraude [The Real Estate Fraud] by journalists Vasco van der Boon and Gerben van der Marel, mercilessly exposed the mentality of anyone managing the savings of others. Your money is my money, it comes down to that.

It is so much that I can only skim the surface. But no one takes note.

Theft, or gambling with other people's money, has long since ceased to be taboo in financial institutions. Unscrupulousness and shamelessness are virtues rather than sins. In the play "De Prooi" ["The Prey"], about the collapse of ABN AMRO (also such an example), one of the lead characters says, "At Goldman Sachs they choose people who were teased as children." These people want revenge against the world and show no pity.

Journalist Joris Luyendijk, who writes a column about London's financial world for the British newspaper The Guardian, recently quoted a psychologist who coaches banking sector executives. The owners of the banks, he says, are looking for "a psycopath" to transform the organization into "a merciless, money-making and soul-stealing organization." That is the secret of their wealth.

That exploitation has become the norm has everything to do with the nearly boundless freedom of the financial sector.

For years, no one dared to place obstacles in the way of the money machine. Precisely in a sector where so much money literally is up for grabs, there is very strong control needed: checks and balances. Only in the last few years has that realization begun to dawn, but that took a banking crisis that cost the Dutch people alone some 200 billion euro in stalled economic growth.

Whether politicians have the ability to turn the management culture the right way is the question, because for the time being the countries are still dancing to the pipes of the financial sector, and not the other way around.