My God man, you were doing so well at making a great point and then you have to ruin your direction buy blaming wrong people for what can ONLY be described as PURE greed by those running the institutions.

Why, Bing, I’m surprised you don’t know!

The place was being run by business and political executives using many of the “Executricks” you’ve been telling us all about.

Seems the old human nature of wanting to avoid real accountability works better than anyone could ever have expected.

I’m sorry, DonB. I persist in thinking that Wall Street is a subset of the much larger corporation of which we are all a part. I think Dwight D. Eisenhower sort of made the same point.

Hello Bing. I think all the financials are simply on an unnstoppable meltdown. I don’t think the Dow will recovery its glorified high of 14000+ until 2023. We’re just going to have to be screwed until then it seems.

It’s been put on a faulty auto-pilot.

negative media…ALLLLLL the time. anything positive anymore is just a drop in the bucket.

One of the most important things I learned while mostly sleeping though Economics was this …

“Leverage works both ways.”

Anyone who did not see this meltdown coming years ago is a fool.

I have sympathy for the rank and file at these firms who are now out of work in a tough market. I have no sympathy for the greed and dishonesty at the top of an industry that rewards taking imprudent risks with other people’s money.

Bing is correct. When you have all the players who engineered this mess, sitting in the same room with the Fed and Treasury heads (who apparently had their heads elsewhere while all of this was initially going on) discussing options, it looks bad.

How does the line go…? And the animals looked from the pigs to the men, and the men to the pigs, and could tell no difference?

Is it just me or does Richard Fuld look like the commander of an Imperial Star Destroyer?

Bing…

All i gotta say is Glass-Stegall… its why we never trusted banks in the security business in the first place…

Now that the banks who can hardly handle peoples deposits in the first place now have to deal with the broken marriages of broker houses and financial companies like Lehman. It was better when banks had to go thru the back door to make these sort of “SIV” arrangements (better in that failures in the back door were isolated from the main bank and could be written off easier)

Now it worse because the only way for banks to get their money back is to continue to do what they have that lost them the $$ in the first place or cut such a large amount of losses by being ultra conserative that the economy will take a time machine back to 2000 (in size not growth rate).It is already getting “retro” if you look at the #’s. What we are seeing is the consequential “kills” from this policy change from a long time ago