Omega Point

It sucks when the little guy falls on hard times.

So yeah, it turns out that if you let peo­ple buy things with imag­i­nary money that they have no hope of pay­ing back and then those things turn out to only be worth their actual value, rather than their imag­i­nary, crazy-person value, your entire econ­omy turns to crap. Who knew?

One side effect of this is that banks are sud­denly forced to cut back on things like mort­gages to unem­ployed peo­ple and employ­ees — who are now unable to secure mort­gages from their for­mer employ­ers. Bummer.

Case in point: Scar­lett McCutcheon, for­mer Bear Stearns employee, fea­tured in this BBC News piece:

“I was very sur­prised when I was called into the head of the hedge fund group’s office and told that due to restruc­tur­ing rea­sons, I was being let go.”

“Wow,” reporter Karen Nye responds.

On voiceover, Nye con­tin­ues: “For one of the finan­cial industry’s worker bees, liv­ing in a big city with­out an income is NOT easy.”

McCutcheon agrees: “You know, I’m not one of these… uh… sto­ried Wall Street work­ers who makes mil­lions of dol­lars in bonuses. You know, I had to pinch my pen­nies and really tighten my belt.”

Wow, that’s tough. Liv­ing in Van­cou­ver with­out an income is tough enough, let alone a city like New York. Hey, I won­der what job she lost. The video didn’t men­tion that part. Let’s take a look at her LinkedIn pro­file:

Scar­lett McCutcheon
Greater New York City Area
Past: Vice Pres­i­dent at Bear Stearns

Aw, that’s a shame. It always sucks when upper man­age­ment in the very depart­ment that crip­ples a multi-billion-dollar bank­ing cor­po­ra­tion gets let go because they fucked up so badly that it trig­gers a global eco­nomic cri­sis. How unfair.

BBC News: Life for Wall Street unemployed