Lance Mannion: I feel no guilt

Posted Thursday night, January 28, 2021.

Workers outside the London offices of Lehman Brothers on the day the company filed for bankruptcy as the housing bubble collapsed. September 15, 2008. Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP. Via Deseret News.

Rahman wrote this in 2014. The scene is set in 2008 during the collapse of the housing bubble when his narrator worked as an investment broker on Wall Street. For some reason it feels immediately relevant this week.

I feel no guilt for what I did in finance. There’s little doubt that the financial crisis will translate into an economic one and that recession will likely follow. People will lose their homes, their jobs, but tell me how I can feel guilt for something that was not only legal but actively encouraged gyt governments everywhere. I never sold mortgages to home buyers; I bought large bundles of them from commercial banks and apportioned the packages into parcels that were sold on to investment firms, all of it done aboveboard and without so much as a quizzical look from regulators. If I am to feel guilt, then surely it is for something I should not have done, when I knew I shouldn’t do it, and when that something harmed others. But even then, how I can I be responsible for all the consequences?

---from “In The Light Of What We Know” by Zia Haider Rahman.

April 2021