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Thain resigned on Thursday. Only then did we learn that he doled out billions in secret, last-minute bonuses to his staff last month, just before Bank of America took over and just before the government ponied up a second bailout to cover Merrill’s unexpected $15 billion fourth-quarter loss. So far American taxpayers have spent $45 billion on this mess, and that’s only our down payment.
Op-Ed Columnist - No Time for Poetry - NYTimes.com
I guess the free market didn’t self-correct itself after all as my granddad always told me it would as the stockholders or the market at large never exposed swindles like Thain. It should come as no surprise to use that people will take advantage of a system which let’s a few have excess. Consider e.g. if we had free health-care, would people take advantage of it? Not if we didn’t let single inviduals rip off the system for the rest of us. The same is true of our capital markets. We have to have controls that create incredibly stiff penalities for this type of behavior.
