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Comments from around the world on the financial crisis:
KEY POINTS:
Need a Job? $17,000 an Hour. No Success Required.
Are you capable of taking a perfectly good 158-year-old company and turning it into dust? If so, then you may not be earning up to your full potential.
You should be raking it in like Richard Fuld, the longtime
chief of Lehman Brothers. He took home nearly half-a-billion dollars in total compensation between 1993 and 2007.
Last year, Mr. Fuld earned about $45 million, according to the calculations of Equilar, an executive pay research company. That amounts to roughly $17,000 an hour to obliterate a firm. If you're willing to drive a company into the ground for less, apply by calling Lehman Brothers at (212) 526-7000.
Oh, nevermind.
NYT: Op-Ed Columnist NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
"The C.E.O.'s of which Mr. Kristof writes ... are fiscal terrorists and it would be perfect justice to see them hustled off to Guantanamo and their personal assets confiscated."
Hal Cheney, Martinsville, IL
All this craziness requires a creative escape route
This week's unprecedented purge of the global financial system has flushed out garbage that had to be removed before the markets could recover.
Malcolm Maiden, Sydney Morning Herald
"People are scared to death.Who would have imagined that AIG would have gotten into this position? No one's going to be believing anybody now because AIG said they were OK along with everybody else"
Bill Stone, chief investment strategist for PNC Wealth Management.
"It's ugly. It's about the worst I've seen it in 25 years. You have to have free-flowing credit to lubricate the system. That's not happening right now."
Michael Mullaney, Boston-based money manager for Fiduciary Trust Co.
"This crisis serves as a stark reminder of the failures of crony capitalism and an economic philosophy that sees any regulation at all as unwise and unnecessary."
Sen. Barack Obama.
"I think it's a failure of government and I think it's a failure of regulatory agencies."
Sen. John McCain.
"That's the one day & 'Let them all go under, Let the chips fall where they may.' That lasted one day, free enterprise. And then we went back to a big bailout."
Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.
"After 911, Bush said 'Go shopping!' Somebody did, and now look what's happened."
Jeffrey C. Stewart, professor of black studies, University of California at Santa Barbara, on Politico.com.
"No."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asked if Democrats share responsibility for the market crisis.
"Wall Street as we know it is kaput. It is not just that Merrill Lynch agreed to be purchased by Bank of America or that the legendary investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy or that the insurance giant AIG is floundering. It is not even that these events followed the failure of the investment bank Bear Stearns or the government's takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the largest mortgage lenders. What's really happened is that Wall Street's business model has collapsed."
Robert J. Samuelson, columnist, in The Washington Post.
"The Bush administration, the Fed and Congress, meanwhile, continue to focus on the immediate crises, with little attention to the underlying reasons that the economy has gotten into this mess a stagnation of incomes, an explosion of debt and a decidedly outdated, and limp, approach to government oversight."
David Leonhardt, columist, in The New York Times.
"This will come to be seen as the greatest regulatory failure in modern history. The degree of leverage that these institutions took on is indefensible."
Roger Altman, deputy Treasury serectary under Bill Clinton, writing in the Financial Times.
"If I knew more I could find someone to blame.'
Linda Burke, service consultant at AT&T in Atlanta, to Bloomberg.com.
"WaMu drank too heavily from the trough during the mortgage boom, and there's a lot of sludge left at the bottom,'Len Blum, managing director, Westwood Capital LLC, to Bloomberg.com.
"This has been the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. There is no question about it. But at the same time we have the policy mechanisms in place fighting it, which is something we didn't have during the Great Depression." Mark Gertler, New York University economist, to the Wall Street Journal.
"No one knows what to do."
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.