Hasta La Gadget!

The big news item in Washington last week was Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to resign. Undoubtedly there are positives to Holder’s tenure as attorney general, but one really big minus is his decision not to prosecute any of the Wall Street crew whose actions helped to prop up the housing bubble. As a result of this failure, the main culprits walked away incredibly wealthy even as most of the country has yet to recover from the damage they caused.

Just to be clear, it is not against the law to be foolish and undoubtedly many of the Wall Streeters were foolish. They likely believed that house prices would just keep rising forever. But the fact that they were foolish doesn’t mean that they didn’t also break the law. It’s likely that most of the Enron felons believed in Enron’s business model. After all, they held millions of dollars of Enron stock. But they still did break the law to make the company appear profitable when it wasn’t.

In the case of the banks, there are specific actions that were committed that violated the law.

Mortgage issuers like Countrywide and Ameriquest knowingly issued mortgages based on false information. They then sold these mortgages to investment banks like Citigroup and Goldman Sachs who packaged them into mortgage backed securities. These banks knew that many of the mortgages being put into the pools for these securities did not meet their standards, but passed them along anyhow. And, the bond-rating agencies rated these securities as investment grade, giving many the highest possible ratings, even though they knew their quality did not warrant such ratings.

All three of these actions — knowingly issuing mortgages based on false information, deliberately packaging fraudulent mortgages into mortgage backed securities, and deliberately inflating the ratings for mortgage backed securities – are serious crimes that potentially involve lengthy prison sentences. Holder opted not to pursue criminal cases against the individuals involved.

In the last couple of years Holder did bring civil cases against these banks that led to multi-billion settlements. These settlements won big headlines that gave the appearance of being tough on the banks.

If we look at the issue more closely the rationale for these settlements gets pretty shaky. When Bank of America or J.P. Morgan has to pay out several billion dollars in penalties in 2013 or 2014, the people being hit most immediately are current shareholders and to a lesser extent top management. Since stock turns over frequently, the overlap between the group of people who hold these banks’ stock today and the people who benefited from the profits racked up in the bubble years will be limited. This means for the most part the fines are hitting people who did not profit from the wrong doing.

The same story holds for the top executives. Insofar as these are different people from those in charge in the bubble years (this is mostly the case), they can rightly tell their boards that they should not be held responsible for the wrongdoing of their predecessors. As a result, boards are likely to compensate top management if they fail to hit bonus targets due to the fines. This just means more of a hit to current shareholders. So the people who profited from criminal acts get to keep their money, while Holder can boast about nailing people who had nothing to do with the crime.

Had Holder treated this as a normal criminal matter he would have looked to build cases from the bottom up. This means finding specific examples of mortgage agents issuing obviously fraudulent mortgages, cases where these mortgages got bundled into securities at investment banks, and then marked as investment grade by the rating agencies.

The people involved would then be pressed to say whether they are either buffoons or crooks. Most probably would not pass as the former. The next question is why they decided to break the law. When you get people to admit that they were acting on instructions from their bosses, you then ask the bosses whether they want to spend many years in jail or would prefer to explain why they thought it was a good idea to commit fraud. (This is the pattern the Justice Department is pursuing in going after illegal campaign contributions to Washington Mayor Vincent Gray.)

We can never know this pattern of prosecution would have nailed big fish like Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein or Citigroup’s Robert Rubin. We do know that Holder never even tried. As a result the Wall Streeters who profited most from illegal acts in the bubble years got to keep their haul. This is the message that bankers will take away going forward. This virtually guarantees ongoing corruption in finance.

“I just don’t think I’m cut out for a desk job.”

These words, spoken to me a couple of weeks ago by a close friend, took me aback for a moment, their novelty catching me off-guard. At an elite institution where many people wear collared shirts to parties, the idea of being anything but pre-professional was a refreshing surprise. It is easy to feel like the road from brand-name college to brand-name corporate career is logical choice. And then it hit me: I’m not so sure I want a desk job, either.

This summer, the article “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League” by William Deresiewicz was published and widely circulated among my Facebook friends. The piece was essentially aimed directly at us, a photo of a burning Harvard flag preceding the criticisms of us obedient sheep, us supposed followers of a consulting/finance Moses. A slew of critiques proliferated in response, including Joshua Rothman’s lovely New Yorker piece that argued that the problem was not merely the higher education system, but rather the pace of modernité. In today’s persistently plugged-in world we simply don’t have the time to let meaning seep into our lives, he argues, regardless of if and where we go to school.

But amongst the criticism and defense of our academic institutions there was also a general recognition among my peers that, yes, few of us have any idea what we’re doing after college and some thus seek a sort of refuge in a career path that will provide a literal receptacle for our self-conscious résumés (I receive emails from the on-campus interview program that notifies me of every consulting information session coming up). A large percentage of my friends have spent the past few years immersed in the social sciences — including philosophy, art history, English, and anthropology — and while their minds have certainly been sharpened as a result, their next steps are not a whole lot clearer than when we began college three years ago.

Part of this ambiguity is Harvard’s motto of “learning for learning’s sake;” we are explicitly not pre-professional, with no academic tracks for pre-business, pre-law, journalism, or education. Part of this is the self-selecting pool of students that flock to elite institutions: driven, good at following rules, and generally with a lot of breadth of experience without necessarily a lot of depth. But a large part of this floundering is a by-product of wanting to make the most of opportunities.

Isn’t this the best part of a liberal arts degree: not having to decide? Contrary to Deresiewicz’s argument, our uncertainty regarding the future is not because college hasn’t taught to think, but rather the opposite. Our willingness to try out a nine-to-five job is not for lack of creativity but rather because college has afforded us time to explore. I have spent the last few summers on three different continents, learning four different languages (much to the confusion of my family). My friends have spent their annual time off leading canoe trips across Canada, learning Arabic in Egypt, travel writing across Italy, working at a publishing house, living with indigenous communities in Perú, leading fishing trips in the Pacific and simply going home to be with family not only because we want to be interesting people and successful job applicants (although we do) but also because we prioritize happiness and experience in our lives. Hence why a desk job may not be the best fit for us all.

Yes, many of my friends qualify as “Super People,” appearing to juggle extracurriculars and theses and career choices without so much as breaking a sweat. But they are also super wonderful people, made of a kind of resoluteness, brilliance, and heart that often gives way to great perceptivity. We are all hyper self-aware and sometimes self-promoting (it is no coincidence that Facebook was the brainchild of a Harvard student), but also sensitive to what is important. For some, being able to feed oneself while living in New York is important. For others, being able to breathe clean air and live far away from a dry cleaner is a priority. And for still others, their artistic or academic pursuit will dictate where they live after we leave these ivy-splotched walls.

It is easy to criticize places like Harvard for prescribing to values rooted in the beliefs of old, white men. Yet judging by the number of social movements started by Harvard students that have gone viral in the last year–including I, Too, Am Harvard; emBODY India; and Rugged Grace–I would argue that we are also of a generation that cares about the good we do and values thoughtful critiques of the status quo. Granted, I am certainly biased, but I feel the perpetual busyness that is a symptom of an Ivy League education is also a symptom of having zeal for life.

If we are to press forward on issues like climate change and socioeconomic inequality and institutional violence, we need people who know how to work hard. This is something higher education teaches us. But we also need people who are willing to explore and flounder in a liberal arts education for a little while, thinking critically before snatching up the first career that floats our way. In this muddled pool of post-recession uncertainty, the excuses of our youth and relative anonymity are the best reasons to let our minds wander. And as the saying goes, not all those who wander are lost.

A roller coaster at a popular U.K. theme park struck and decapitated a deer over the weekend, leaving some passengers with the animal’s blood on their clothing, according to reports.

The Ultimate, a steel coaster at the Lightwater Valley theme park in England, hit the deer on Saturday morning, shutting down the ride for about 30 minutes.

“We can confirm a young deer did unfortunately get hit by the Ultimate train yesterday and was killed instantly,” a park spokesperson told the York Press.

“A couple of visitors on the train did have spots of blood on their clothing, but no visitors commented about the incident on the day other than to show concern for the deer,” a park spokesperson told the Ripon Gazette, adding, “No passengers were injured in the incident.”

A long stretch of the 1.5-mile-long coaster runs on flat land through a field and forested area at speeds of up to 50 mph. The spokesperson told the York Press that while a perimeter fence surrounds the park, animals do sometimes get in.

The Ultimate was the longest coaster in the world when it opened in 1991, and remained the record-holder until 2001. Today, it’s the longest steel coaster in Europe and third-longest in the world, according to Ultimate Rollercoaster.

The Northern Echo reports that the coaster also struck a deer in 1994, ripping its legs off and leavings its antlers stuck in the safety bars as passengers were covered in blood. A 12-year-old boy was taken to a hospital in that incident.

(h/t Daily Express)

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