According to news reports the U.S. Treasury has approved the "repayment" of $68 billion from banks who received government money from the bailout, including the TARP money, so that they don't have to accept excessive government regulation on things like executive compensation.
This way, we can continue to reward the incompetence of the men who ran the banks into the ground to begin with by indulging them with major bonuses for shitty performance and keeping their multi-million dollar salaries in tact without troublesome government regulation. In other words, welcome to status quo ante recession: the same shit for a new day!
Nevermind that they borrowed way more than $68 billion - after all, they passed the extremely difficult "stress test" and they didn't even have to pay Timmy Geithner for the answers! I suppose this is all we can expect from the land of the free bailout money. No doubt it will be vigourously defended by those sages of free market capitalism as getting business back on track. Of course, no one wants to own the fact that this philosophy of unregulated, unbridled capitalism brought us to the recession to begin with.
So much for change we can believe in...
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...was thinking the exact same thing when I read about it. Makes you wonder whether those bankers are really that blatantly and unapologetically greedy, or if this is just another populist move by the media to score some points with a recession-weary readership. Probably a little bit of both.
ReplyDeleteVIGOUROUS
ReplyDeleteI guess they heard you Alice:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/09/obama-admin-to-issue-new-_n_213457.html
Okay, I guess that link didn't come out so well, but apparently the Obama administration is going to start putting all new guidelines on the amount of executive compensation allowed for execs at institutions that received bailout money AND institutions that are overseen by the Fed. Also, as you may have noted, 10 banks are paying back TARP money and there are articles out there about how the government has so far made something over a billion dollars (IMHO) on dividends and interest from the loan.
ReplyDeleteI promise not to step on Frosted Tips' toes too hard with the recent addition of a more politically-minded Doctor/newest contributor to MW.
ReplyDeletei can assure you this is another Jeremy getting testy, not the unemployed one. I wuz unwittingly cyber-framed!
ReplyDeleteHA of course! The Jeremys in my life are the best writers about US politics I know. Sigh!
ReplyDeleteAlso both are unemployed.
ReplyDeleteWrong again, Alice =)
ReplyDeleteI am gainfully employed with a university job for the summer and a recently-concluded but renewable private-sector job. I've left the ranks of bum-dom behind and I'll even be getting another check this Saturday!