May 26, 2011
I’m writing because my family and I were affected by the deppression, never mind what Wall Street is calling the 2008 crash with its sugar coated lies. You need to know we don’t want it to happen again.
You also need to know we are fed to the teeth with being treated like nothing more than peasants with money to steal. Ours is supposed to be a democracy, not a country stolen by corporatism. A country which has become of special interests, by special interests, and for special interests.
What the idiots who run corporations and the really stupid, greedy Too Rich fail to understand is that throughout history, it has been shown over and over that they are not immune to what they cause to befall the rest of us. They go down with the ship along with us. Too late smart.
Wall Street greed and outrageous pay practices were a major cause of the collapse. One way to change the incentives so they don’t collapse our economy again would be for regulators to use a *safety index* for incentive compensation, instead of a profit index.
Currently, most bankers receive stock options. So if they can generate more profits, the stock price goes up, and their options become more valuable.
Instead, what if they used the bank’s bond price, which measures the overall ability of the bank to repay its own debt? Another measure of bank stability is the spread on credit default swaps (the insurance-like policies that are essentially bets, where one gambler bets with another that a particular firm will fail). The closer a bank comes to failing (such as in failing to pay of its bond debt), the bigger the spread on credit default swaps.
Thank you for considering my comment,
John Dinkmeyer
Grand Lake, CO