Subprime financial crisis
I apologize for my lack of attention to this blog over the past week, but I’ve been extremely busy. MD and I left one conference weekend before last, came home for a day, and left for another conference, from which we just got home last night. During the one day we were home, we were running errands and had the clutch go out on our car in exactly the same place it went out two years ago. We were pulling off the exit from the freeway we always use when the clutch pedal went to the floor. We pulled to the side of the off ramp unable to move and sat waiting for help. We got the car safely to the shop and got home, but it took a few hours out of an already busy day. So, as Bob Cratchit said to Scrooge, I’ve been behind my time since it seems. If you’ve had a comment languishing in awaiting moderation purgatory, mea culpa. There are about 30, and I’ll try to get them all dealt with within the next 24 hours. By tomorrow I should be back on my regular schedule.
I planned to put up a regular medical/nutritional post today, but in view of the financial crisis, I figured I would instead put up this video that I saw earlier this year, months before the financial crisis exploded. These comedians were very prescient. I find it interesting that they discuss Bear Stearns by name long before Bear Stearns bought the farm. I’ve always found it amazing that comedy (including political cartoons) seems to be able to encapsulate a situation and present it more understandably than an in depth investigative report.
See what you think. I’ll be happy to post all comments.
” I think these people should be made to pay for their folly – I don’t think the rest of us should pay for their folly because odds are we’ll be paying for it again down the road if these folks never learn.”
You don’t think we’re ALL going to pay, one way or another? Everyone who uses credit, responsibly or not, will be hurt to some degree.
Good discussion.
If it’s been said and I missed it, I apologize, but Thomas Sowell made a good point about the “golden parachute” stuff:
” What really sets some people off is the fact that a CEO who has mismanaged some corporation into losing billions of dollars is rewarded with a severance package worth millions.
Think about it. If the CEO’s decisions are costing the company billions, it is a bargain to get him out the door immediately for millions, rather than having his departure delayed by either internal struggles or battles in the courts.”
Sowell is right, I suppose. I guess it’s one of those things where you’ve just got to hold your nose and do it.
Years ago in our clinic in Little Rock we found that one of our nurses had been stealing drugs from our locked drug cabinet. The day before we discovered the theft, she had announced that she was pregnant. Upon the discovery, we confronted her with the evidence, she admitted to it, and we fired her. A few days later we got a letter from a labor attorney telling us that our drug-stealing nurse was planning on suing us for terminating her because she was pregnant, and that she would not sue us if we would give her $10,000 severance pay. As you might imagine, I went ballistic. I told our own attorney that I would rather pay $20,000 fighting it than to give this woman a nickel. He pointed out to me that a) it would cost a whole lot more than $20,000 to fight it even if we won (which wasn’t a guarantee given the wrong jury, etc.) and b) that we could probably settle it for $5,000. He said that we should simply consider the $5,000 as a cost of doing business. So, we held our noses and paid.
When you have a contract with a big-time exec, it usually gives you an out if the exec commits fraud or does something unlawful but doesn’t usually give you an out for sheer incompetence. So if the contract is for 5 years and after 2 you realize the exec is costing the company a fortune, it’s best to pay him/her off and be done with it. God only knows what the cost would be to keep him/her around another 3 years. The thing that I can’t understand is why these people keep getting rehired after such horrible performance, but they do. And the cycle begins again.
It’s like NFL coaches. There are a bunch who are perennial losers. They coach a team, the team doesn’t do squat, the coach gets fired. Then he gets hired by another team and the cycle starts anew.
Dr. Eades:
“The thing that I can’t understand is why these people keep getting rehired after such horrible performance, but they do. And the cycle begins again.
It’s like NFL coaches. There are a bunch who are perennial losers. They coach a team, the team doesn’t do squat, the coach gets fired. Then he gets hired by another team and the cycle starts anew. ”
Same reason people still keep electing these bozos in Congress (both R and D) and still listen to Jimmy Carter. I don’t know what that reason is…unless it’s that they are familiar and it’s easy.
Can you believe how they’re patting themselves on the back today for “saving” us?
It truly beggars belief.