May 27, 2011
I’m writing because my family and I were affected by the economic collapse of 2008, and we don’t want it to happen again.We lost our small business (that we were in the process of selling) because money for loans for our students suddenly dried up, a direct result of the meltdown in 2008. Our retirement portfolio still hasn't recovered.
Wall Street executives do not earn nearly all the money they are paid. They are skimming profits that should go to lower paid workers (everyone below them, especially the rank and file workers) and back to the government (the people) in the form of taxes. They are simply taking the profits because they can. Who is going to stop them? They sit on each others Boards of Directors and grant each other obscenely huge amounts of money that they don't deserve. It should be against the law. They crashed the economy, ruined and degraded hundreds of millions of lives, and what happened? They still made massive amounts of money! I am surprised no one has gone after some of these executives for hammering their economic lives. They are greedy rip off artists.
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 to delay the bonuses for three, five or more years. That way, we’ll know if the loans they made in year one remain good. In the bad days, bankers paid themselves on the volume of loans (mortgages) they generated, not on their quality.
Thank you for considering my comment,
James Roberts
Palouse, WA