Privatized Reward and Socialized Risk
Hey everybody! Are you all feeling good about your investment portfolio today? I’ll bet you might be thinking about how you’ll be able to retire early. Like in your early eighties maybe…
But that’s only a problem for us working stiffs. If you are one of the big cats in the corporate financial arena, then you’ve gotta love this free-market financial system that the Republicans and a few craven Democrats have been pushing through congress since the Reagan years.
I mean really, what better way to make a killing than to run a financial institution in these times? If you do well, you get rewarded with a multi-million dollar salary and millions more in stock options.
If you make bad decisions while you are earning that salary and the firm goes bankrupt or gets bought out, no big deal! You still have your millions even if all the people that worked so hard for you to realize your dreams are now unemployed. But that’s not your problem. They knew the risk when they took the job at a globally respected 100+ year old firm, right? No reason to feel sorry for them!
And if the decisions you made turned out to be really stupid and the company starts to sink, well you might as well mess it up as much as you possibly can, because then the government will step in and rescue it so that the fallout from your failed company doesn’t totally destroy the economy.
You walk away a wealthy man, keep your mansions, fancy cars, and boats, and the taxpayers pick up the tab!
BRILLIANT!
