Trochu ina reakcia ako je v poslednych mesiacoch zvykom:

Sorry but I have to stand up and say that this misinformed populism has gone far enough. No one “should” or “shouldn’t” get paid X or Y. You wouldn’t want someone or some faceless majority dictating what you get paid, so why are you folks so capriciously making value judgments about the pay of others? It has to stop. The problem is excessive money growth and our policymakers’ tendency to rely on easy monetary policy. Wall Street and a handful of chosen institutions (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the FHLBs) emerged as the chosen intermediaries through which the Federal Reserve, Congress, and yes, connected bankers multiplied Fed credit. The decision to risk moral hazard with multiple bailouts of financial institutions that took too much risk and should have failed (Latin America, Continental Illinois, the Hunts in the 80s, LTCM in the 90s, and of course the multitude of bailouts in this mother-of-all-crises) was a political choice. There are myriad issues besides moral hazard to consider as well: asymmetrical interest rate policies and an abandonment of the Taylor rule, manipulated inflation and growth statistics, the repeal of Glass Steagall in 1999 with Gramm-Leach-Bliley, agent/principal conflicts, the refusal to regulate the OTC derivatives markets, the unsound goal of increasing the rate of home ownership, allowing off balance sheet leverage, disregard for deficits both fiscal and in the current account…the list can be as long as you want it to be. But those bailouts (not to mention knee jerk monetary easing during Y2K and 9/11) stick out to me as the most egregious examples of ineptitude or evil, depending on your politics. Our policymakers could have let those institutions fail, and you know what, had they done so, maybe Wall Street bankers wouldn’t have made all that crazy money because financial conditions would have tightened (heaven forbid!). Our policymakers did not, however, let them fail, and they did not once consider the sanctity of the U.S. dollar as they committed the mistakes (or crimes, again, depending on your politics) listed above (Taylor rule et al). Greenspan, Bernanke, Geithner, Rubin, Summers, Clinton, Frank, Bush — these are the names we should be muttering under our collective breath as we sharpen our pitchforks. Wall Street employees are the distributors of the funny money, and some of them take large, exorbitant fees for doing so. I see nothing wrong with debating whether or not there are structural changes that need to be made to address how credit is issued/distributed to the real economy, and who should benefit and to what degree. But what I cannot stand is when I see, over and over and over again, how easily we are duped into focusing on the wrong villains, on the henchmen and not the bosses. Then again, are we in a democracy or not? Do we not elect these people? Who is really to blame? That’s right, we are. We all need to take a look in the mirror and realize we’ve abandoned our civic responsibilities. Or, we can throw in the towel, confirm the widely held belief that democracies do not work in large countries, and submit to the socialist/statist hell that produces arguments such as, “what SHOULD people in this profession make?” To summarize, and just in case my main point was lost on anyone, the father of this crisis is UNSOUND MONETARY AND FISCAL POLICY. The folks in Washington have made a straw man — an appealing straw man, perhaps, but a straw man nonetheless — out of the greedy and opportunistic but otherwise innocent Wall Street banker.

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@ http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/02/if-bankers-were-firemen