Wait, Who Scammed Whom?

It's always struck me as interesting that those who criticize Wall Street and those who sell Wall Streets products rely on essentially the same idea: that the game is rigged in Wall Street's favor. What else, after all, was the message of those old E.F. Hutton commercials that said, "When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen"? The implication was that E.F. Hutton had the inside track, that's why you were going to them in the first place.

In "Blame Main Street, Too ," today's story on Slate's spinoff site, The Big Money, I talk about how the current crisis didn't start on Wall Street. I've said that before: if you want to go to the root, you need to go to the suburbs of Los Angeles, the places where Countrywide and IndyMac and all the rest came from. It's not clear that Wall Street bankers saw just how spoiled were the goods the mortgage underwriters were selling them were (though Lehman and Bear should have--if they didn't know, it was only because they tried hard not know)--while folks like Countrywide's Angelo Mozilo. The difference between the mortgage underwriters and Wall Street is that Wall Street's stock in trade is pretending to know everything, while that of a Mozilo, with his absurd tan, is pretending to know nothing. That second, it turns out, can get you pretty far.

PS: Whatever happened to the great broker ads? Besides the E.F. Hutton ads (I don't think any legal department would let a bank get away with something so crass now) there was also the very different Smith Barney/John Houseman approach with  "We make money the old fashioned way. We earn it." After this Wall Street is going to need some major rebranding. John Houseman, unfortunately is deceased, but Fred Thompson's available, and good at that kind of growling.