Michael Hiltzik
Watching people desperately trying to hang on to their little all following a disaster is an experience, as Aristotle would have appreciated, certain to excite pity and terror in the human breast.
If only we didn’t have to spend so much time these days watching bankers and corporate executives do it.
Every day seems to present yet another example of the disjunction between the financial community’s sense of entitlement and the real world occupied by everybody else.
The other day, the inspector general for the government’s financial bailout program, known as TARP, revealed that Chrysler’s lending arm requested $750 million in new money but was turned down because its top 25 executives wouldn’t all agree to the compensation limits TARP requires.
That’s after the government had already given Chrysler Financial $1.5 billion. (Chrysler says, for its part, that it decided it didn’t need the additional money after all. Nothing to do with the pay caps, it says. But of the original $1.5 billion, so far it has repaid only $3.5 million.)
Meanwhile, a passel of Wall Street professionals unburdened themselves to New York magazine about the punitive cuts in pay and bonuses they’re suffering — imposed, to their minds, by jealous people less talented and successful than they. More
This column was first published April 23, 2009 in the Los Angeles Times.
Posted April 23, 2009 at 10:38 am, in From the News
