It’s small potatoes by American financial rip-off standards. But the run now going on at the Kabul Bank in Afghanistan might soon lead to yet another U.S. government bailout, a new bit of fiscal idiocy to add to our country’s other manic policies in the nasty pissant backwater in which we are currently drowning.
The facts here are simple enough. As part of our policy-makers’ ongoing exercise in nation building, we decided to remake the Afghan financial/banking system in our own image — a truly heroic notion given the fact that much of this country’s people live a 14th century lifestyle governed by 9th century religious beliefs. Oh, and also that Afghanistan is the most corrupt society on the planet and the principals of this Kabul Bank, which is the centerpiece of our heroic financial remaking, are so utterly and flagrantly corrupt themselves, that even Hamid Karzai seemed embarrassed by their shenanigans. And brother, it ain’t easy to embarrass Karzai when it comes to corruption.
Well, obviously someone has to bailout the Kabul Bank because…well, just because. If you don’t understand that you probably don’t understand almost any other aspect of our policy in that country. So then, who’s gonna bite the bailout bullet?
Clearly, we need a party to do the job who has a lot of experience bailing out failed financial institutions. A party who expects (and gets) nothing in return except greater disdain than it already gets from the those being bailed. A party with an apparently endless amount of money and a bottomless appetite to make whole (and then some) the manifestly undeserving, incompetent, greedy and arrogant.
And that silly, hapless and bumbling bailer is…..
More from this writer at wallstreetpoet.com