Big Think

Corzine: Our economy is really nothing more than the aggregation of the decisions of every human being that’s a part of the country. So if you’re not actually impacting the lives of the people that are making that economy run, then you’re not really addressing the problems. That’s what has, in my view, been the problem with most of the so-called bailout efforts that we’ve had so far. It had been more of a trickle down approach going up to the outcomes. The lending practices of the banks and their accumulation of debt in packages was a reflection of something that happened in the base level economy, at the roots of the economy. And we attacked the upper level problem, hoping it was going to trickle down to the real economy when, in fact, I think you needed to work with those individual units. And the same thing goes with regard to mortgages or college loans or small business. We need to give those individual business units, economic units, human beings the ability to operate in the economy. If we don’t do that, then, I think, we’ll never fix what is happening in the financial wholesale marketplace.