A Brain-Dead "Financial Reporter" at NPR Defines the Problem
Via Doctor Black, who printed the answer but not the question:
PIGNAL: This is actually the second bailout for Dexia. In 2008, it had to be bailed out after exceptionally imprudent investing, including in U.S. subprime mortgages. This time around, it was basically dealing with the legacy of the past, and it was trying to do what it could to get back into safer waters. But with the Eurozone debt crisis in the past year, it basically ran out of time.
SIEGEL: Yeah, that was the past. This is now. And if the 12th most secure bank in Europe just collapsed, does that mean that several more bank collapses are in store? [idiocy emphasized by me]
This is what happens when you try Extend and Pretend while leaving the Management (think Pandit, Moynihan) who screwed up in the first place in charge of the burning building.
Anyone stupid enough to hire Robert Siegel as a “financial reporter” should be defenstrated with all deliberate speed.
Sounds like they’ve been Solyndra’d.
Somehow I’m reminded of the scene from “Hana-bi” though, where Miyuki is adding water to a vase with dead flowers, and a gangster can’t understand why she would do it (an analogy of the entire film where Nishi is taking his dying wife on a last trip).
Of course, people and corporations are different, but I guess we psychologically treat them in a similar manner, and at some point, there are actual people who are impacted by a decision taken on a corporation’s life or death.
“This is what happens when you try Extend and Pretend while leaving the Management (think Pandit, Moynihan) who screwed up in the first place in charge of the burning building.”
How do you figure that Pandit and Moynihan were the ones who screwed up in the first place? Pandit didn’t even get to Citigroup until the fall of 2007, by which point all of the damage had already been done. And while Moynihan was at BofA after 2004, he wasn’t responsible for any of the disastrous decisions, either on the lending or acquisition side, that killed the company.