Brian Hibbs’ thought of the day:

I think one of the reasons the economy is in trouble is because banks have started calling themselves “stores”, while the financial instruments they facilitate are called “products”.

You mistake advertising for policy.

If they considered themselves stores and their services products, they’d see that the customer was the true source of their income.

This crisis was brought about by banking institutions thinking that their money was made in the trading around of the mortgages and all the money transfers beyond the bank/customer relationship.

To give it a comics metaphor. It’s as if your pull lists were contracts that you sold to others so that they would eventually collect the money once the comic was delivered.

That those pull list rights were traded around and around and the profits from those transfers became the focus of the business.

To sell more pull list contracts you do all you can to get people to commit to adding books to pull lists even though they may not really need, want, or afford the comics once they come out, but since you’re selling off the pull list contract, that’s not really your problem. But the guys buying the pull list contracts off you don’t think enough about (or are ignorant of) the risk of the pull lists’ termination.

Providing entertainment to the comic readers becomes an afterthought of the industry. Until a few readers stop their pull lists, and the reality of the situation sets in and the value of those contracts drop.

Those dealers who go bankrupt in the process damage the health of the comic distributors and publishers are in peril as those bankrupcies mean they aren’t being paid.

Honest comic shops are hurt too because in an attempt to have “honest accounting,” the government required all stores to value themselves based on the resale value of the pull lists, even though they don’t participate in pull list trading, and their healthier business practices aren’t rewarded on th balance sheet. So even though they may have a loyal customer base their paperwork shows them to be in financial trouble.

Of course such accounting is based on the premise that the secondary market for pull lists is what really drives the comics business when it really is supposed to be about providing a product to a customer.

If the financial industry saw themselves as stores serving customers (or at worst, as wholesalers suppling the stores in order to serve their customers), they would have done a much better job, and we wouldn’t be in this mess.

This prolonged metaphor tries to explain the current financial crisis as I best understand it.

Though upon further reflection, Okay, the more that I think of it, Hibbs’ original statement isn’t entirey wrong.

Its that they view their suppliers (those who buy the contracts) as if they were the customers. And their true customers (the people taking out the loans) as if they were the suppliers. Turning the business model of banking upside-down, literally (well, too close to literally for comfort, at any rate)