I was sorry no one picked up on the ceos’ mass gaffe earlier, when they were so eager to claim that their firms got no profit from their subprime mortgage operations that they apparently forgot the actual subject of this hearing, which was the justification for their compensation, given the lousy results that ever other stakeholder in sight has experienced from those operations and given that the continued existence of all three firms is more doubtful than anyone would have dreamed possible a few years ago.

we’re talking Jimmy Carter territory here folks

does the word KARMA sound appropriate ???

it goes around

it comes around

landed ALL OVER the repuglitards

didn’t it ???

Nell Minow, editor and co-founder of The Corporate Library, a corporate governance research group, argued that hefty pay packages are sensible only when they generate such returns for shareholders, but that Prince, Mozilo and O’Neal failed to fulfill that duty.

“We want CEOs to be paid hundreds of millions of dollar,” Minnow told lawmakers. “But there is no excuse for people getting so much for doing so little.”

(from CNN.com)

In my teens, I read this book about the commodities futures market, warning the average guy to stay away. The author, using the pseudonym Adam Smith, wrote about the cocoa market. As I recall it, he said, if Hershey’s doesn’t like the price of cocoa, it pounds the market to get the price it wants.

Later, I did securities regulation, and had a chance to see Roger Stone, Reagan’s appointee for the CFTC in action. It was amazing to watch an agency totally subverted. Stone was once quoted as saying that the commodities markets were the last wild west frontier. Meanwhile, the really good fraud investigators we were working with on a coal futures fraud case, were transferred to some idiot market regulation section, and quit.

For me, this strongly supports Hugh’s argument.

Optimistic Scenario: it’s 1991 all over again
Baseline Scenario: it’s 1979 all over again
Pessimistic Scenario: it’s 1929 all over again

The most consistently correct semi-mainstream voices over the past two years have been calculatedrisk and Roubini. Roubini is very dour. CR himself comes in somewhere between baseline and optimistic (his commenters, on the other hand, make Roubini look like Pollyanna).

I think it’s going to be hard to say where we end up, until we see the fallout from C going under.

Truscott was on the Presidential Protective Detail during Clinton (97-00). He was an ATSAIC or maybe head of a “shift.” I can’t remember which, but it was a leadership position within PPD.

And Mark Sullivan (who you also mention) was also on PPD at that time, and probably also an ATSAIC.

USSS goes to great lengths to protect their own. If there was any covering to be done, I bet Truscott could’ve counted on Sullivan as they cut their teeth together, so to speak.

I don’t recall if Truscott was called to testify during Lewinsky. Many agents on PPD as well as on the Uniformed Division were. But Truscott was a company man.

Now during the Clinton Admin there were the usual Agent-White House (young) Staff(ers) “indiscretions” going on (probably also going on during Bush) – maybe Truscott was taking notes about Clinton and was willing to talk. Nothing like ingratiating yourself to a future protectee by sharing war stories about the guy who was leaving… There was an article in Newsweek or US News in mid-2004 that hit on one of them back when the USSS was getting in trouble for sidelining African-American agents (the two issues were not connected).

[I’m not going to name names because I count some of those among my friends but they’re easy to find].