Sanford Weill, of all people, has made the news today by advocating breaking up large financial institutions.
Ex-Citi chief Weill urges bank break-up Financial Times http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/feaa9cf0-d65f-11e1-ba60-00144feabdc0.html#axzz21ejh0BPr This can could change the conversation regarding what happens in Washington DC. Mark Mark Goldes Co-founder, Chava Energy CEO, Aesop Institute 301A North Main Street Sebastopol, CA 95472 www.chavaenergy.com www.aesopinstitute.org 707 861-9070 707 497-3551 fax ________________________________________ From: Jed Rothwell [jedrothw...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2012 11:10 AM To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: Re: [Vo]:"Too Big to Fail" movie portrays institutional disaster Chemical Engineer <cheme...@gmail.com<mailto:cheme...@gmail.com>> wrote: "They seem like smart, good people who accidentally brought about a disaster" They did it to make more money for themselves and the bank. Well, not everyone in the story was a banker. Some were government officials. Paulson was an official who had been an investment banker. I get the impression he was an honest banker. He quit and sold his shares in Goldman before he became an official. I am not excusing these people. I want to know how this happened. Why it happened. Greed and stupidity are the cause, but people have always been greedy and stupid, yet Wall Street seldom collapses catastrophically because of it. These explanations are not sufficient; there has to be more. I say the institution itself was dysfunctional. Paulson and the others were in over their heads. They did not realize how little they knew. They did not realize things were out of control. They were obviously ignorant to risk they created for everyone and we are all still paying for it and will be for years to come. For that, they should have resigned, been fired or at a minimum demoted. Many have been fired. Many lost their own money. One of the main characters in the movie, Fuld of Lehman Brothers, had shares of Lehman worth about $1 billion. When Lehman declared bankruptcy his shares were worth $58,000. Others made out like bandits, unfortunately. I favor punishing the guilty, but we also need to find the root caused that allowed bad actors and fools to bring about the catastrophe in the first place. The same goes for every disaster, such as Fukushima and the wreck of the Titanic. On April 15, 1912 everyone in the world knew who was directly responsible for the Titanic disaster: Capt. Smith and his officers. But it went beyond that. The causes were deeper. People needed to reveal the causes and take steps to prevent this from happening again. That took a Congressional Investigation and many reforms and new regulations. Mainly, it took Sen. William Alden Smith, without whom the dead would have died in vain. There would have been many more preventable shipwrecks without him. We need someone like that to clean up Wall Street. Unfortunately, all efforts to do so have been blocked by the bankers and the Republican Party. They seem determined to cause another disaster. That is predictable. In 1912, the shipping interests made a tremendous effort to stop Smith from investigating and reforming their industry. They attacked him the newspapers. To this day, many accounts of the Titanic disaster portray him as a fool and useless person who accomplished nothing. No good deed goes unpunished! See: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusion.pdf - Jed
