Hmmm?
Paul Krugman notes that Daddy doesn’t know best, and expresses his opinion that the Dodd proposal [PDF] is definitely on the right track.
After looking at the proposal my initial response was, Dodd didn’t whip this out over the weekend, someone had it sitting in a file and did a little editing for the discussion copy. You don’t come up with all of the references to the various laws, rules, regulations, and government entities that are contained in the proposal when you start with a blank screen. I feel somewhat better knowing that someone in the government realized there was going to be a train wreck and wrote a law to deal with it.
It doesn’t contain the option of stoning CEOs, or making them take a credit counseling course before applying for assistence on the food stamp forms at the local social services offices, but it’s not the worst approach.
10 comments
if you want stoning, add it in.
Hmmm. 44 pages. Not bad for a *sudden* crisis. 😉 LOL
I missed the part where it says that all the assets of all the executives and their family of a failed company should be seized and sold to cover their debts to the shareholders and the public. 🙂 But I only read the first half dozen pages and skimmed the rest…. I may have missed it. (Yeah… in my dreams of fairness and justice!) LOL
‘The American Way'(tm) -> Where No Accountability guarantees wealth for the non-accountable. 🙂
I shall see if I can shorten that and make bumper stickers and T-shirts. Then I too can make money being non-accountable too. LOL Hmmm. No, that only works in America, and I don’t want to emigrate. I guess I’ll just have to find an honest way to make money. 😉 :b
…the missing option is requiring that CEO’s be forced to work as migrant farm workers and living in laborer camps with a 1976 Ford Maverick as their only means of transportation for one year for each million dollars in their golden parachute severance deals…
Well, that isn’t going to help with the general view that liberals are angry and vindictive people, which after 8 years of this crap anyone with a pulse should be.
I just can’t believe that leading your company into bankruptcy doesn’t qualify as an offense worthy of immediate termination and forfeiture of all pay and benefits. It would seem to me to be a rather obvious clause in an employment agreement.
Bryan,
Have to disagree. The Dodd bill is good, all right, a couple of ungrammatical constructions to the contrary notwithstanding. But it is well within the ability of a competent Banking Committee staff lawyer or Dodd staffer to draft overnight. It didn’t come from a file. If it had, it would have been at least three times as long.
You are a nice guy, Jack, I would have specified a Pinto.
Offtopic….Daddy may not know best…but Funny Kitties do!
When you LOL at silly pictures of cats with even sillier captions, Ben Huh laughs all the way to the bank.
For the uninitiated, that’s Web shorthand for “laugh out loud,” an abbreviation that is common in e-mails, instant messages and online chat rooms. Huh, a Seattle entrepreneur, has built a mini-empire on the unique brand of humor illustrated by the “LOLcats” craze: photos with captions punctuated by deliberately misspelled words and mangled phrases.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-benhuh23-2008sep23,0,2492555.story
If you have money, you are never put at risk under the US system, Kryten. It’s only the “little people” who are expected to act responsibly.
John, from the way it reads, the bail out that Paulson wants was inserted into a bill to bail out homeowners. Having worked in government in both the military and civil service and pushed for legislation at the state and national level, the final bill will be much longer but this is the preliminary version for the initial hearings, so there are a lot of things left out.
Not to prolong the point, which is tangential anyway, but … While I remain convinced the Dodd bill was not prepared much in advance, I’m prepared to accept that Paulson’s three-page proposal was. Check this nugget out from Marci Wheeler via Digby:“Fratto insisted that the plan was not slapped together and had been drawn up as a contingency over previous months and weeks by administration officials. “
I have a hard time accepting that anyone in the Hedgemony has ever developed a plan for anything, but the Paulson Plan is the usual “ukase” coming from the White House, i.e. give us the authority to do whatever we want.