Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Pay Caps for Shooting Craps

There is so much attention being paid to how much big banks pay their key players. Bloomberg is reporting this AM that our man President Obama is ordering that those big banks and firms that take our children's money limit their executive pay to $500,000. Now I am not for greed in any form, though I believe it is a cancer that can only be cut out of the body politic rather than a demon to be exorcised from otherwise good people, but this whole issue seems like a complete red herring. The larger question is that those banks that take our children's money to maintain their walk of the undead for a few months more be forced to open their vaults and their books to the light of day. Taking the public's money must accompany rebuilding the public trust by a thorough truth telling of all of the nonsense that these institutions have been up to and a thorough revealing of all of the worthless paper they are holding off the books. These banks must then be forbidden from engaging in any more of these stupid schemes in the future. Executive pay is nothing but a PR concern to keep the public from focusing on the real issue: that these banks are insolvent, but are being allowed to hide the truth by our government and to stumble on for an indefinite period into the future. Truth will out, sooner or later, and the amount of pain that results is proportional to the length of the charade now underfoot.

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