Now, I am not an expert on all the banking stuff but when the guru of guru's testified to Congress a while back that he could not believe that the people running Wall Street did not act in the best interest of their firms I wondered whether they might not care, at all, about those firms or its shareholders. Seems to me they made a pile of money, personally, while driving their institutions off of the cliff.
A good source on this, it turns out, is available on line.
Where was the down side for them? And when I hear someone say that X% of their savings disappeared in the crisis I have to wonder if a good part of that didn't disappear, at all, it just went from the person's savings into the bonuses of the people who were at the wheel. It's still there--it's just not in the "there" place it was before.
This all came to mind again this morning, listening the preview of the Goldman Golden Guy heading to Congress to talk about how they were not betting against the economy and making money off of the impending crash--they were valiantly fighting to protect their shareholders.
Why, the rhetorical question is expected to come from him to keep the Senators at bay, would we act in a way that would not benefit the bank or its share holders?
There's a Lily in this for the GGG. Cynicism on a stick--both deep fried and candy coated.
If any of the institutions that these guys work for go under won't they just surface again in another institution where, once more, their own bonuses and golden parachutes and such will insulate them from any accountability for failure?
This is especially true since there is a corporate propaganda machine standing by to blame all the failure on the government--Fannie Mae and all that jazz. Even if I am CEO and I drive the ship onto the rocks, on my way to my own personal Bermuda, I can just shrug and tell Fox and Friends all about how it was "Guv'ment regulation and bureaucracy that stifled the free market to such an extent that my valiant efforts on the bridge could not avoid the rocks they kept putting in the middle of shipping lanes."
My Republican father used to say of scoundrels, at least the ones wearing suits, "You have hand it to them."
But times change. Now you don't have to hand it to them. They just take it and claim it was never yours, anyway..
