Sunday, February 01, 2009

My Sentiments Exactly

Dreher quotes a NYT essayist, Joe Nocera.

...Wall Street should not be surprised that oversize bonuses and $50 million jets generate outrage -- and tough rejoinders from the president. "It suggests the selfishness of people on Wall Street," said Charles Elson, a corporate governance expert at the University of Delaware, who sounded pretty outraged himself. "Wall Street has yet to learn the lesson of what happened."

What happened, put simply, is that the people who thought of themselves as the smartest guys in the room -- and were paid accordingly -- weren't so smart after all. They brought down the financial system. They lost so much money that only the government can save them.

"The smartest people in the Universe" thought that the price of real estate would NEVER go down. And that was just the beginning...

Screw 'em all.

2 comments:

Beer, Bicycles and the VRWC said...

They should have been allowed to fail. Could it have possibly made things worse?

Shoebox said...

And yet we continue to hire "the smartest people" and folks that came from that same cesspool, to run Treasury and other Federal departments! Do they know what the definition of insanity is?