It’s no big mystery what caused the financial crisis, but at the Museum of American Finance it’s complicated.
“From the perspective of a historian,” said Leena Akhtar, the museum’s exhibits and archives director, “you can’t really document history and establish what happened until well after the fact … 15 or 20 years.”
In the meantime, the museum hopes to collect the source material that future financial historians will need to write their boring books and mind-numbing doctoral theses about our many sufferings.
The museum at 48 Wall St. is an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution. On Wednesday, it launched , a wiki inviting everyone to help chronicle the financial crisis.
“People still argue over what caused the Great Depression,” said David Cowen, a hedge fund manager and financial historian who was recently named president of the museum. “But what if we had recorded the personal accounts of every person who had a role in the financial system?”
Unfortunately, the history of financial crises is the history of folly. And few readily cop to folly, except maybe anonymously, and what kind of source material is that?
Not surprisingly, Recessipedia’s first personal account comes from someone identified only as a finance executive named Ninja Dad:
“Two years out of college, my unemployed daughter was finally ready to leave the nest,” he wrote. “She soared right into a house, a very nice quarter of a million dollar one no less.”
“My daughter was a subprime borrower, one of the worst kinds – a Ninja, or a borrower with no income, no job or assets.”
“Her plan was to take in boarders and to cover the rest of the rent from her sundry part-time jobs. She hasn’t defaulted yet but periodically she calls crying her eyes out.”
Clearly, Ninja Dad did not do a good job educating Ninja daughter about his chosen field of finance.
Ninja daughter must have grown up thinking that if someone is willing to make you a Ninja loan, then you deserve to be in a $250,000 home.
Not a bad start for Recessipeda’s first day of capturing history.
In the next 15 or 20 years, I suspect it also may hear from Ninja mortgage broker, who made a commission sticking Ninja daughter with her no-interest, no down-payment Ninja loan.
And then there’s Ninja mortgage company, which drew huge fees before selling the Ninja loan to Ninja investment bank, which then packaged the Ninja loan into a Ninja-backed security.
And don’t forget the Ninja ratings agency, which handed out Triple-A ratings like sales brochures at a boat show.
And Ninja derivatives trader, who sold the Ninja-backed security. And Ninja hedge fund manager who bought it and then maybe flipped it to Ninja Fannie Mae or Ninja Freddie Mac.
Notice that few of these Ninjas produced anything of value? Notice how they got paid to ultimately stick taxpayers with the risk? Notice how they acted in what they believed was their own best interest with few checks or balances?
Ninja Federal Reserve Chairman, Ninja Treasury Secretary, Ninja President, and Ninja Congress were just happy to be out of the Ninja tech bust. And Ninja regulators? They were too busy hassling Ninja Enron executives while Ninja Bernie Madoff robbed every Ninja investor he could find.
Surely, I’ve skipped over millions of other Ninjas. I’ll leave it to Recessipedia to collect those over the next couple decades, since it’s all just history.
What Americans care most about now is finding a job, according to a survey released Wednesday by the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute on Wednesday.
Wall Street economists say the economy is growing, thanks to even more borrowed money, and that we shouldn’t worry too much about unemployment because it’s a lagging indicator. Yet jobs are disappearing that may never be replaced.
For 53 percent of those surveyed, unemployment ranked among the most important economic problems.
The deficit ranked only 27 percent. The cost of health care ranked 25 percent. Low wages ranked 20 percent. High taxes ranked 16 percent. Foreclosures and home values ranked 14 percent. And problems with the banking system ranked only 12 percent.
Maybe it’s just as well we wait another 15 to 20 years before we come to any firm conclusions about what caused this mess. Maybe it’s more productive to just keep looking for a work.
“Something this colossal does not have one cause,” Akhtar said. “We hope to create a body of material to draw upon for later interpretation.”
Eventually, there may be enough material to show that everyone caused the financial crisis. And if everyone caused it, then nobody is to blame.
It all just disappears into the fog of history, so that it can happen again.
Al Lewis: 212-416-2617 or al.lewis@dowjones.com. Read Lewis’ blog at .
