America desperately needs a Greed-O-Meter, because it is otherwise impossible to keep up with official government attitudes regarding Greed.

For about a decade, Greed was good.  That cycle started when the inalienable right to own a home was added to our Constitution by a Congress that had run out of other ways to keep the populace from getting Restless Populace Syndrome.

Mortgage lenders, who had up until then been driven by quaint notions that people who couldn’t afford houses couldn’t buy houses, at least with the mortgage lenders’ money, quickly got the message.  Mobs  threatening bankers with no constable in sight can do that.

After a while, the bankers joined the party.  Anyone, regardless of financial condition, could get a mortgage.  Demand outstripped supply, and real estate prices soared.  Anyone who owned a home could use the escalating value of that home to get a home equity loan, thus increasing their debt, but who cared when there were pools and outdoor kitchens to be built, other goods to be bought.

Builders built, as fast as they could borrow the money to finance the guaranteed riches of building over hill and dale and desert.  The bankers didn’t have enough real money to go around, so they sliced, diced and packaged loans to “investors.”  At every step of the loan process, somebody took a percentage, and what had started as paper money became just paper, leveraged far beyond any but a fool’s or crook’s sense of tangible worth.  Leveraged leverage was insured.

Then, all of a sudden, the people who had bought houses they could not afford stopped paying for them.  The bubble burst, covering the landscape from hill and dale to desert with dead houses and deader financial paper.  The supply of just about everything except real money exceeded demand.  All property values went down faster than they had gone up, and the rolling financial plague infected the entire economy.

Congress, aided and abetted by the  Bush and Obama administrations, then declared that Greed had gone bad, but taxpayers had  the obligation to take care of the panoply of debts now measured in trillions of dollars, including bailing out all of the Greedy, including those too small and those too large to fail.  That which wasn’t being bailed out was being stimulated, making debt to erase debt our only growth market.

Those plans weren’t working out so good, when it was learned by people who already knew that AIG, the giant insurance company that has already been bailed to the tune of $170 billion, was paying out millions in bonuses to employees.

Congress then declared Greed to be really, really bad and off with the heads of everyone except the Congress that started the Greedball rolling down the hill and, oh by the way, had approved the payment of the bonuses in the first place.

Greed was really, really bad for all of a week.  Then Tax Cheat Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, aided and abetted by the FDIC, announced that Greed would be really, really good for a while.  The way to solve the so-called “toxic asset” (bad debt) problem that has brought banking to the very brink of extinction is a “private-public” consortium that will make those “toxic assets” disappear from the banks’ books, so they can get back to...gasp, lending again.

Under the Geithner plan, the “toxic assets” will be auctioned to the highest bidders.  To be a bidder, one must be very, very, very rich.  And what a deal those very, very, very rich private investors will get.  Of every billion dollars put up to buy “toxic assets,” the private investors will only have to put up 7.5 percent.  The Treasury will put up 7.5 percent.  The remaining 85 percent will be paid by the FDIC as a so-called “non-recourse loan” to the private investor.  You probably don’t know what a non-recourse loan is, because you never got one in your life and you never will.  If the private investments in the “toxic assets” go south, then the private investors do not have to repay the FDIC loans.  The “toxic assets” then revert to the government, which, at that point, probably should but won’t send them to be buried under Yucca Mountain along with our other nuclear waste.

If the Geithner plan works, then Greed will officially be good, until the billions made by the private investors become known, at which point Congress will punish the good Greed with confiscatory taxation and Greed will be really, really bad...until Congress once again needs the campaign contributions of the Greedy.