Will capitalism survive?

Yeah- and your retirement pension is 300 times the income of millions of families in certain regions. What's your excuse for that disparity as good socialists. You have none. You're phonies. You just want more of the CEO's share to fund more of your extravagancies and pet indulgencies.

Capitalism will always survive as long as there are workers to pay their taxes to prop it up.

The Age - 25/09/2008

Like a Roman emperor, Paulson fiddles with the principle of performance pay while the US burns.

HENRY Paulson has got to be kidding. He wants American taxpayers to hand a cool $US700 billion ($A833billion) to his pals on Wall Street in return for a gigantic bundle of their delinquent assets . without his pals taking a pay cut.

Could there be a finer reward for failure? Could there be a worse deal for taxpayers?

No stake in the upside, no ceiling on extortionate Wall Street salaries, no guarantee the system will be stabilised. Just the mother of all rip-offs: a deal to privatise Wall Street's profits and socialise its losses.

And don't forget Decko that the tax authorities know who got what and how much because it was all declared and above board.

A bit like the Jacobins knew who all the aristocrats were.

We are not seeing the crumbling of capitalism.

We've seen scandalous behaviour by some bankers, who packaged good assets up with dubious ones and sold them on to investors who didn't understand those risks. We've seen incompetence by ratings agencies that misvalued those financial instruments. And we've seen an inherent problem of what economists call asymmetric information within financial markets. But the most fundamental weaknesses have been in policy - in economic management and in regulation. There is no painless route out of the mess we're in; but the mess is not intrinsic to the Western financial system and could have been avoided. Policymakers will learn from the experience.

That may sound a feeble conclusion, but the lesson will be important in future financial crises. Recall that the 1987 stock market crash did not lead to recession, let alone anything comparable to the Great Depression, because central bankers - unlike their counterparts after the 1929 crash - flooded the financial system with liquidity. Financial capitalism - more accurately, the system of voluntary exchange - is a resilient arrangement because its practitioners and regulators learn from past mistakes. The same will be true of this crisis, bad though it is, and bad as it will get.

spendi, Quit wasting our time.

Disgraced banker faces the music
Committee chairman Henry Waxman opened with a question Mr Fuld was never going to answer: Was it fair that he had earned about $US800 million during his 12 years as head of Lehman Brothers, when investors and employees, and now the public, were being asked to pick up the pieces?