In article ,
"Ed Pawlowski" wrote:

"Caesar Romano" wrote in message

2) bungled the economy worse than anything since the 1929 depression.

That's pretty impressive miss-management even by American standards.

There he had the help of the Democratic Congress. Remember how our system
works? He is President, not dictator.

And a lot of this built up over time. We have had an abysmal savings
rate for most of the last half of the 20th Century, much of this and the
last three financial fiascos can be placed at the foot on Congress
playing with tax laws (The actual salary of most honchoes, if you look
at the SEC filings runs around $1million or so because that is what the
Congress said can be deducted. The rest of it (sometimes as much as 100
times the base salary) comes from bonuses and stock options which were
encouraged by Congress and tax laws. This was done so that the honchoes'
needs would be more in tune with the needs of the stockholders. Of
course, this resulted in a bunch of things occurring. Not the least of
which is honchoe's total compensation running a few orders of magnitude
above what even the most captive board would have had hte balls to give
them under the old system. Also it effectively DIVORCED the priorities
of the honchoes from the shareholders by tying such a high portion of
their income to the stock price. In addition, for those so inclined,
gave the exec's cover to try all of the Rocket Science bookkeeping,
credit swaps, etc., because it could be rationalized as raising profits
and thus stock prices and thus in the best interests of the stockholders.
Wasn't surprising all the crap that went down, it was almost
mandated by human nature and the tax laws. What was surprising is that
it wasn't more widespread than it was.
Then you've got the individual overleveraged not just in the
mortgages but credit cards, home equity, car loans, etc. There was more
than enough greed to go around.