Peddling Poison for Fun and Profit

[marmar]

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:



Peddling Poison for Fun and Profit
February 5, 2011

Wall Streeters made fortunes, the new official report on America’s 2008 economic meltdown charges, defrauding the American public. They’re still making fortunes — and this official report is already sinking out of sight.

By Sam Pizzigati


A quarter-century ago, in 1986, the biggest Wall Street banker paycheck went to John Gutfreund, the Salomon Brothers CEO. Gutfreund pulled in $3.2 million. Two decades later, in 2006, Merrill Lynch CEO Stanley O’Neal pocketed $91 million.

To understand the 2008 Wall Street meltdown that cratered the U.S. economy, suggests the new final report from the panel Congress appointed to probe the causes of that crater, you need to understand this enormous pay explosion — and the fierce incentive this explosion created for reckless and fraudulent behavior.



How reckless and fraudulent? In the years that led up to the 2008 meltdown, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report released late last month details, Wall Street’s top bankers and financiers “made, bought, and sold mortgage securities they never examined, did not care to examine, or knew to be defective.”

These same bankers borrowed, based on these securities, tens of billions of dollars “that had to be renewed each and every night” and then traded these billions in totally unregulated, semi-secret, financial “derivative” gambles.

This frenetic financial folly would eventually leave four million homes lost to foreclosure and another four and a half million American families either ensnared in the foreclosure process or seriously behind on their mortgage payments. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://toomuchonline.org/peddling-poison-for-fun-and-profit/