STIMULUS PACKAGES GALORE WORLDWIDE, BUT WHAT ABOUT PUNISHING THOSE RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS ECONOMIC MESS?

Two words have become household words all around the globe – 'stimulus package' – as the world tries to grapple with the worst economic situation since the 1930’s. US President Obama made several pit stops to campaign for quick passage of the stimulus package his administration put together. Eventually, a package watered down to USD787 Billion was passed by the US Congress.

Similarly, European countries are also implementing their stimulus packages. Situation in eurozone is also spurring urgent action after some quite dismal economic news. European economies contracted in the fourth quarter of last year, with some countries registering the worst figures in decades. The eurozone economy shrank by 1.5% in Q4 2008 and 1.2% on the year. Germany's economy shrank by 2.1% compared with the previous quarter, its worst quarterly performance since 1990.

Canada announced its own economic stimulus package recently in their parliament. Australia too made known their economic measures. China has already put in to motion a huge two year stimulus package to arrest downward slide of their economy. India has also implemented its own package in two instalments, some more may follow.

The G-7 meeting of its Finance Ministers and heads of the central banks in Rome on 14 Feb agreed to avoid protectionism and work in concert to pull the world out the current economic morass. The next meeting will be of G-20 countries in April to review progress of the steps agreed to by the Group in Dec 2008 meeting in Washington.

The above is a quick recap of steps being taken by the countries, which control more than 80% of world economy, to come out of the economic woes the world has gotten into. All this news is encouraging for the millions who lost their jobs, lost their homes, went in to bankruptcies, and went from a life of hope to despair.

But amidst all the abovementioned frenetic activities and hullabaloo to get the world economy back on track, has the world forgotten about the people who brought about this situation in the first place? What about bringing those blighters to justice and punishing them? How can those ‘canine-offsprings’ just say sorry and wash their hands off the accountabilities they carried with their responsibilities?

Because of the unbridled greed of some money spinning wheeler dealers in US (and to some extent in UK, and Germany) a housing bubble got created and this bubble gobbled up trillions of dollars. Between 2004 and 2006 US interest rates rose from 1% to 5.35%, triggering a slowdown in the US housing market.

Homeowners, many of whom could only barely afford their mortgage payments when interest rates were low, began to default on their mortgages. Default rates on sub-prime loans - high risk loans to clients with poor or no credit histories - rose to record levels. The impact of these defaults were felt across the financial system world over as many of the mortgages had been bundled up and sold on to banks and investors.

The questions are: what the hell was the US Fed Chairman doing during the years (2004-2006) when the seeds of the global disaster were being sown? Why could he not get out of his self imposed dogmatic intellectual strait-jacket of free-market mechanism principles? Why the hell was there no oversight of what was going on in the American financial market?

The people who have lost their jobs, their homes, their hard earned savings and probably many years of their future would like to know who were those female parent-fornicators who authorised the sub-prime racket to start! Who were those wedlock-products who encouraged this greed infested activity to engulf the society? Who was authorising the sub-prime mortgage business in Freddie Mac or Fannie May?

Why in God’s name nobody – either from Fed Reserve or SEC or some other Federal agency – bothered to take notice of what was going on in the sub-prime market? The sub-prime racket was not just a 4-6 month event which could have gone unnoticed. It went on for months, and yet nobody took notice?

Why did somebody in the Fed not take notice of the warning bells rung by Prof Krugman (who won Nobel Prize for Economics in 2008)? Prof Krugman was repeatedly warning about the dangerous path US economy was treading on.

And then, who were those female parent-fornicators in the big banks of US and Europe who blindly authorised investing in securitised mortgages? Some of these wedlock-product bank executives took home millions of dollars as bonuses!! Why and how are these canine-offsprings allowed to go scot free and not punished?

So, the question is: why have those people responsible for bringing about this financial mess in US, which caused domino effect world over, not been brought to justice? Why should they not be punished? In fact, why are they not being punished? Why should they not be thrown in to some Gitmo kind of prison and made to ruminate over the cataclysmic financial disaster they caused to happen?

Are these people not some kind of criminals? They may not have committed homicide, or rape. But the truth is that they have ‘raped’ the financial system. Their rapacious greed has robbed millions of innocent investors of their hard earned savings. The sub-prime mortgage can be compared to an organised ‘racket’ to ‘swindle’ millions of ordinary people who were ‘enticed’ by the rosy situations.

These people are responsible for having caused untold miseries to millions around the world, why should they not be flogged - publicly? It would be primitive, is it? Let it be primitive, but at least it will send a strong message to the world. Go ask the laid off worker what is primitive or not primitive – he doesn’t bother for all this intellectual debates which are luxury of the well-heeled. He/she wants secure economic future!

So, what is the plan for bringing these perpetrators of the current financial wrong-doing to justice? Is there no law under which these cold-blooded white collared diabolical schmucks can be tried and punished? Can these female parent-fornicators just say ‘I’m deeply sorry’ and can go un-punished?

The millions of people affected by the current economic upheaval are cursing those rascals day in and day out. Whether or not the actual perpetrators of current economic crisis (and those who were supposed to keep an oversight on them, and didn’t do their job) get punished by the law of this planet only time will say, but one thing is clear that if there is something called ‘natural justice’ these gutter insects will burn in the hell fire during their lifetime.