(no subject)

Pitchforks and torches moment:

In 2007, Wall Street’s five biggest firms — Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley — paid a record $39 billion in bonuses to themselves.
That’s $10 billion more than the $29 billion loan taxpayers are making to J.P. Morgan to save Bear Stearns.
Those 2007 bonuses were paid even though the shareholders in those firms last year collectively lost about $74 billion in stock declines — their worst year since 2002.

In other news the original idiotic Bush plan of "you give us $700B to give to our friends" looks likely to fail. I'm not convinced the Dodd replacement is a good idea, but it's infinitely better.

It's been hilarious watching the last week or so of McCain's complete EPIC FAIL campaign. From the "huge executive payouts - what about Carly Fiorina's $41M for wrecking HP fail" to the "Fannie and Freddie are evil, that's why my campaign manager was paid $2M to lobby for them, and was still on the books as of last month as a lobbyist", it's been a complete joy for fans of the train wreck.

readings on the crisis

Best writeup I've seen so far (albeit with a definite partisan bias).

No, it wasn't the fault of the 1970's era Community Reinvestment Act

It also wasn't just Freddie and Fannie

As mentioned, Phil Gramm deserves a fair whack of the blame. But so do the ratings agencies and the SEC.

Finally, if you're feeling any confidence at all in the Bush administration's ability to deal with the current situation, I'd point again to D-Squared's classic post from 2003:

... it does inspire in me the desire for a competition; can anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly recent arrivals to the board, give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:

1. It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
   
2. It was significant enough in scale that I'd have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
   
3. It wasn't in some important way completely fucked up during the execution.
   

It's been 5 years since that post, and it's still true.