It’s part of a system of free enterprise, Hackett says.

Question: Who is to blame for the mortgage crisis?

Jim Hackett: Well, I think we like to do that, I think that the nature of the free enterprise system is one of the excess in drought and usually gets over done or under done and both of those are not natural or good conditions to fall into, but they happen and I think that because of the way we try to get hold of the banks after the great depression, we have done a much better job of controlling that particular phenomena, although those sitting here in New York might not feel that has been accomplished, necessarily, but I assure everybody else in America really has. Is that I think that there are number of factors that lead to it and clearly they were all related to money being too cheap, is that there was too much money from globalization going around and people were not putting the right kinds of safeguards in place, from the mortgage origination piece of it, where people were able to originate mortgage get fees and never have any stake in whether the mortgage ever get paid off, from people who actually took out mortgage who able to knew they could not afford to do it. I think we all tend to feel sorry for everybody that took out mortgages they could not afford them, let us get real here, I grew up in the Midwest, if you cannot afford you buy it, so it is not to say the just the mortgage originated were evil or the banks were evil, everybody was bad in this whole process. The people who thought they were affording it frankly got surprised that it was not truly being offered, frankly some of our county through market to market with the SEC roles has caused some of this issue to occur. So, if there is any variety of factors that have lead to actually have this happen, now the good news is that the fed reserves come out in some different standards, states who are the implementing body, legally enforcing body for those regs. I think ought to be a much more sense of do enforcing them, particularly in mortgage originators and I think we would attempt to avoid some of these problems in the future, but the problems continue to evolve. That is the wonderful thing about a great system of free enterprise, this people will continue to get creative. So it is a derivative products, they will may be control more directly in the future, somebody will created a mouse trap, they will continuing to have to try to chase that, but they create huge amounts of jobs in the mean time and there is a lot of pain when it goes to far and you wish it could all be self regulating, it just doesn’t happen to be partly, because they cannot event tell were the world might go, they think that what is now will always be.

Recorded On: 3/24/08