I feel a rant coming on.

 

It’s been building since I heard an NPR story about those poor financial services firms and how government oversight would handicap their ability to offer innovative “products” to the public. That public, the credit card company suggested, was eagerly awaiting access to those life-saving, game-changing “products.”

 

Excuse me. I always thought a product was something real, something you could see, touch and use. I thought it required an act of making—production--on the part of the producer. These financial “products”—whether we’re talking bundled debt or those nifty new credit card offers with cash back on your spending spree and a 30% interest rate if you’re two minutes late on your monthly minimum payment—are less made than made up.

 

Products, indeed.

 

The institutional usurers among us are making a perfectly clean, useful word into a dirty joke. That a congress and a public are willing consumers of this fiscal devaluation of language, just as they (okay, we) have agreed that swashbuckling banks and credit card pirates need both special handling and big hand outs from public coffers suggests that Orwell’s “newspeak” is alive and well among us. Not to mention “dumbthink.” Among the financial “products” coming our way are next-generation adjustable rate mortgages.

 

This suggests that there are a few pockets in America that remain unpicked.

But few among our elected officials that go unlined.

 

People, why are we not howling?

 

Knowing where your next mortgage payment is coming from, priceless indeed.

For everything else, there’s something called personal responsibility.

It’s about reading the fine print. Only buying what you can afford.

Being willing to say “no thanks” when your credit card vendor offers you the latest nifty “product.”

 

Pass the scissors. Please.