But they are also old-fashioned loans, which remain on our books for the long term, and are directly used for a visible purpose (like wind farms).
Holding loans long term really changes things as far as the moral hazard ... originating loans, bundling them, then selling them on gives incentives to the loan originators similar to used car salesmen. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
Securitisation is a symptom of that. The other side of abstraction is social disconnection. As long as your trading profits look good you don't have to care about the people you've made unemployed or the businesses you've destroyed. You don't have to see them, or visit them, or know who they are. So they're lives become irrelevant to you.
The other side of abstraction is social disconnection.
The sociopathic nature of the Corporation - at least in its publicly traded form - is that it enables ownership without responsibility.
ie it's not just meta-money which has come about through the objectification of money, but also meta-capital through the objectification of property. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
A floating layer of upper class twits whose expertise is in sending memos.
