ATLAS SHRUGGED UPDATED FOR THE CURRENT FINANCIAL CRISIS.
“Damn it, Dagny! I need the government to get out of the way and let me do my job!”
She sat across the desk from him. She appeared casual but confident, a slim body with rounded shoulders like an exquisitely engineered truss. How he hated his debased need for her, he who loathed self-sacrifice but would give up everything he valued to get in her pants … Did she know?
The Moral Stage of Wall Street from The New Yorker. Thanks, Ben.
Swiss bankers are not known as paragons of transparency and moral accountability, so it’s a nice surprise to read that the top officials of UBS, the foundering financial institution recently bailed out by the Swiss government, will forgo twenty-seven million dollars in compensation and bonuses. It appears that these Swiss bankers have a faint pulse of shame.
It has not gone remarked upon enough that their American counterparts apparently have none.” The rest of the article…
As Matt points out, “Damn, that’s an impressive comment“:
A middle-aged man stopped me in the store yesterday, pointed to the fresh pineapples in my cart and asked me if I was going to prepare them myself. He had a small, “cored” pineapple in his cart and noticed that it cost more than the two large pineapples in mine.
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All this talk about greater transparency is just a load of bull.
“The financial crisis highlights the need for greater transparency and oversight, but there has to be a balance. Overregulation could hurt the securities industry, which is vitally important to the State and the City.”
- Thomas DiNapoli in today’s report on Wall Street
If some jerk sets fire to his own house because he’s a moron and it starts a bigger fire that threatens the whole neighborhood, no one says we need greater transparency. How come when Wall Street blows itself up and threatens our entire economic system, everyone starts mouthing this absurd word?
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Another installment of the U.S. Treasury’s bailout is underway for Citigroup Inc., a financial services giant that is considered too big to fail.
While Citigroup waits for another injection of $20 billion and help offloading a portion of its toxic financial assets, Detroit’s automakers are still fending off bankruptcy without any federal assistance in sight.
Perhaps the car makers should rebrand themselves as banks with sideline automotive production businesses and resubmit their requests for emergency relief funds. Read more »
