Fat cats and rats
This testimony certainly underscores those accusations about Wall Street “fat cats” and greed.
Although in this case rats leaving a sinking ship might be a more appropriate image—if you can picture rats carting off chests filled with booty as they flee.
Neo
Commenters to your previous post suggested: tar/feather, hang, publicly guillotine (that one’s mine) I’m all for it but there’s more than just the politicians who should be in for it. Lehman’s entitlement and greed! I think there’s worse. Watching the names in the news one keeps on coming across the following far too often and ominously.
The firm of Goldman Sachs
Lloyd C. Blankfein – GSG CEO)
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (former GSG CEO)
Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (former GSG CEO)
Gary Gensler (former GSG partner & Clinton Assistant Secretary of the Treasury)
World Bank President Robert Zoellick (former GSG managing director)
National Review’s Thomas L. (Dusty) Rhodes (former GSG VP, vice chairman, and partner)
Obamanomics: How Bottom-Up Economic Prosperity Will Replace Trickle-Down Economics
Author: John R. Talbott former investment banker for Goldman Sachs
I’ve come to notice this only recently but I am not alone in my suspicions, see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/business/02every.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
I’m no socialist, but at times like this I think it would be better if ‘the market’ were controlled by something more robust than people’s fragile emotions. Behind all the grand theories, arcane terminology and complex mathematics is just a herd of timid little people who panic whenever anything happens. It’s not a case of rationally adjusting course to avoid unpleasant consequences. It’s blind panic – blind panic with completely foreseeable results.
Why do we allow our prosperity to be controlled by irrationality?
tst
lookup fulds history, salary, and such, i cant post more than this.
Bugs says:
Because we want it controlled by people. Sometimes crowds are wise, other times they are foolish. It really is the best thing that we have come up with.
We’ve done a lot of regulating with good effect, slowing down the instabilities so people can understand them and work them out rather than multiplying them. But we made some mistakes (SarbOx mark-to-market in an illiquid market) and some venal politicians over-extended the system to buy votes (Dodd, Frank, and Co., the CRA original flavor and the CRA New-And-Improved, with threats from Janet Reno if banks didn’t carry enough bad loans).
SarbOx is an example of why change should make haste slowly; Dodd, Frank, and Co. are crooks who are protected by their political machines and by the media oligopoly.
OT.
Congratulation to my felow Sox Nation citizens.
We are moving on to Florida.
“Although in this case rats leaving a sinking ship might be a more appropriate image…”
Indeed it would. 🙁
On a happier note:
Citing his inability to execute the company restructuring he had envisioned, word has it that the ex-CEO of AIG Robert Willlumstad has refused his $22 million severance package.
As I said at that site, I was hoping we could get Willumstad to run the asset buy.
njcommuter – OK, if you say so! And when you think about it, who else would run the economy? Dolphins?
I don’t mind us acting like trooping monkeys once in a while. I just wish we could do it on our days off instead of when we have important things to do – like responding to terrorist attacks and financial meltdowns. I mean, there’s an appropriate time for screeching, scampering up trees and throwing poop at each other, and there’s an appropriate time for meeting, deliberating and carefully executing some clever plan for getting us out whatever mess we’re in. Lately we seem unable to distinguish between these different sorts of occasions.
So I guess we don’t need dolphins – just better monkeys.