You're painting with a broad brush. Not all these guys ran their companies into the ground. Many of the current execs have been brought on board only recently to fix their various crises.
The WaMu payout is not taxpayer money. And I understand why many companies want to pay top dollar for top talent.
“The WaMu payout is not taxpayer money.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Mutual
Basically correct. It appears most of WaMu was taken over by JP Morgan Chase, for $1.9 billion at no taxpayer cost, and some of WaMu was retained by the FDIC in receivership.
So it can’t be clearly concluded if any taxpayer money is involved with the FDIC portion.
To date no taxpayer money has been invested in saving Fannie, or Freddie, either.
All this talk about taxpayer costs is in the future, should the public pay out to buy a mortgage, and then fall short of breaking even on the deal.
For Joe sixpack to understand the technical aspects will require hours if not days and weeks, to learn facts, terminology, etc.
Bank accounting is backwards from other businesses.
Banks have been regulated, deregulated, manipulated, targeted, used for financial trickery for so long, half the congress citters probably barely get most of the terms and concepts.
Obviously Bush and Paulson rushed to be the first to blink.
I truly hope McCain is quietly getting his facts and plan together, to unleash against the opposition is the final weeks.
He didn’t use the facts last night, when he could have.
When there is performance, then I will believe it.
How long ago is recently?
By all accounts this has been brewing now for a couple of years, if not more.
Without a doubt these top talents knew exactly what they were getting into. And, if they were top talent they would have known that eventually the 'jig' would be up . They had to know that what they were doing or what was going on was nefarious.