What do General Mills and the mortgage industry have in common?
The both like to take crap, re-package it and label it as something healthy.
Today on my way to work outside of Grand Central Station I was handed a sample General Mills “Fiber One” oats & chocolate bar with a wrapper indicating “35% Daily Value of Fiber.” When I opened up the package, though, it was your basic chewy granola bar full of chocolate chips, high maltose corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, etc. All in a nice shiny package. Kids junk food repackaged for adults.
It occurred to me that’s the same approach that the mortgage and banking industry took to finance. Take a bunch of subprime loans, package them together, get the ratings agencies to label them as something healthy-sounding like “AAA,” and then sell them off to the public.
It also occurred to me that, despite all the hand-wringing over that process with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, we still continue to allow the same pattern to continue in various aspects in our lives (and probably still in the finance industry for that matter).
Perhaps a more appropriate General Mills analogy would be how they treat oat bran in general. Some studies apparently show some sort of correlation between oat bran and lower cholesterol. I think the study may have even be discredited by now, or maybe just qualified in a variety of ways. Whatever it is, General Mills has aggressively applied the transitive property to sugar-filled cereals like Honey Nut Cheerios (and regular Cheerios, for that matter, which has a lot of sugar in it) to claim that eating them is a good way to help lower your cholesterol.
The reality of course is that eating those cereals is no more likely to lower your cholesterol than it is to make a pool of subprime mortgages a safe bet. And getting Moody’s to give a “AAA” rating to Froot Loops isn’t going to change the fact that they’re no more than rings of sugar (or high fructose corn syrup) held together by chemicals. It also doesn’t make them “whole grain” despite the fact that the FDA seems ok with that label.
Why are we so upset about abuse of a process that ruined our economy, but we’re willing to accept it in other settings? Are there just too many parties that benefit from the system to upset the Apple Jacks cart? Or is there something deeper within our human nature where we want the wool to remain snugly pulled over our eyes at the expense of our society?
Paraphrasing the great modern philosopher Homer Simpson, I would simply say, “Mmmmm…..high fructose corn syrup.”
Update 9.17.09
