The original “Great Vampire Squid” reference was by Matt Taibbi, in “The Great American Bubble Machine“, printed in Rolling Stone in July, 2009.
Here at DoNotFeedTheSquid, I take a broader view, but let’s start with the original:
“The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.”
The broader view taken here is that the Squid is a collective parasite, consisting of any person or organization (not just some parts of Goldman Sachs) which siphons human time and natural resources away from truly productive enterprises. (* This definition may evolve as we delve further, but it’s a good place to start…)
Unfortunately the examples are all too numerous. The Squid includes:
- Failed financial and industrial corporations which squander billions of taxpayer dollars while refusing to reform their worst practices and unwise incentive structures.
- Politicians, media, and their followers which glorify sensationalized trivia, while neglecting to study and understand the real news. (Meanwhile, bloggers eat their lunches, and historians prepare to excoriate them for nonfeasance or “failure to act properly when required to do so”.)
- “Consumers” of all kinds, who fail to think before buying, and consequently let the squid feed on them unimpeded.
- “Investors” of all kinds, who settle for too little and fail to demand quality products from the financial sector. (We can start with the fraud-ridden mortgage system and crappy 401(k) plans with high fees, but the list is much longer!)
- And so on…
Part of the problem is that “We have met the Squid, and they are Us!” The Squid is not so much an organization, or a person, as it is a mindset, paradigm, or worldview. It’s a worldview which tolerates fraud, tolerates incompetence, tolerates inefficiency and waste. It’s a worldview which many of us (this blogger included) fell into during the long credit boom, when prosperity seemed boundless because money and credit were abundant… but those days are now over.
Many of us, perhaps nearly all of us who grew up during the Long Boom, were raised to believe in a system that worked for all. But we now see that the system worked far better for some than for most, and that during the Lost Decade of 2000-2009, declining incomes relative to inflation actually robbed the many to pay the few.
The Squid brought us wealth inequality and far too many individuals who feel that anything goes as long as no one catches them. As a result of this and other shortcomings, that system is now broken… and yet those most responsible for its failure have not been held accountable.
Here at Do Not Feed The Squid, the goal is to break the faulty mindset, to crack the broken paradigm, and to restore a more productive worldview. We feed the squid whenever we fail to think realistically about the human systems we have created, and let them run amok at our shared expense. We must learn from the recent failures, and fix the systems involved, but it is difficult to do so while the flawed mindset remains dominant!
I myself have much to learn, and can only dimly see the direction to go, not the destination to be reached. But I hope others will join me on this journey, and we will be able to make faster progress together. Hence doing this as a blog!
Readers may also be interested in my other blog, Investing for Sustainable Gains, which will focus more specifically on individual investing ideas. Do Not Feed The Squid is a more philosophical look at the broader national crisis.