It is immodest to gloat about being right, but today is my day for immodesty.
Time magazine has published a list of the 25 people it believes are most responsible for the economic mess that has ruined lives and created a rampant feeling of -- dare I say it? -- depression across the land.
At the top of
Time's list is Angelo Mozilo, former CEO of Countrywide Financial. You know his firm, if
No character is more at the heart of the economic mess than Angelo Mozilo.
not him, as the group at the heart of the sub-prime mortgage mess that helped precipitate the entire economic crisis with its predatory lending practices (okay, the case was settled when Bank of America bought Countrywide, so no court has found Mozilo guilty, but really...). Mozilo, the son of a butcher, was so good at motivating his sales force to push those toxic loans that
Time placed him ahead of such hall of shame characters as #2, former Senator Phil Gramm, Mr. Deregulator; #3, the belatedly contrite former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan; #4, former SEC Chairman Chris Cox, whose team of investigators turned a blind eye to warnings about Bernie Madoff and other Wall Street miscreants; and #5, you and me ("The American Consumer") whose appetite for spending and irrational risk, and our blind faith in the efficient and legal operation of the markets, helped fuel the fires.
But no character is more at the heart of our problems than Mozilo. Here is what
I wrote in this space on November 17, 2007, long before the stock market collapse almost a year later.
"I can't feel sorry for lenders like that whining multi-millionaire hypocrite Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide Financial who gave shovels of money away to people clearly without the means to repay; some were even in bankruptcy, according to reports."
Back in late 2007, Mozilo was just a nasty character worthy of scorn. By
August 1, 2008, when I last wrote about him, he was much more. I suggested, only partially tongue in cheek, that he be dragged from his mansion "to Las Vegas or Miami or some other area savaged by foreclosures, and give him the public flogging he deserves."
"And when they are done," I suggested, "lock him up...in one of those foreclosed houses."
I know our President wants us all to look ahead rather than back, but it is hard to reconcile people being thrown out of their homes while Mozilo lives off the roughly $400 million he made in the six years before he left Countrywide and a legacy of yuck behind.
