A Peculiar Blog

There was a time when I used to watch 60 minutes nearly every weekend but in recent years I've gotten out of the habit. I don't know if I'm going to do anything to change that however I am glad that I caught the most recent episode and the story about the financial crisis.

Between that story and some of the news the next morning ...

It's bad enough that Wall St. investment firms allowed themselves to get so deeply involved in this "shadow economy" that involved creating ultra complex financial instruments designed to do some really stupid stuff with money and debt. It's bad enough that this mess was made worse by some further shady deals that acted to insure those complicated deals... without actually calling it insurance so that they wouldn't have to show that they could cover the monies being "insured".

It's bad enough that people that are responsible for so much of the nation's economy were allowed to get away with doing this asinine stuff for as long as they did.

The last straw is when we find out that a lot of these executives were packing away hundreds of millions of dollars even while their companies floundered, begging Congress for help.

For example, several Lehman's execs leaving the company were given $20 million in "special payments". I'll call that special alright. In fact, It sounds downright criminal to me.

We've got the biggest financial mess that's ever happened going on and a lot of the people responsible for it are walking away with millions while so many Joe and Jane Average types hope and pray that they don't lose their house and have enough money to make it through the month.

There had better be some industrial strength investigations going on in the near future. The people responsible for this mess need to be held accountable for it.

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