Krugman is disturbed by this trend. Something about how Wall Street fat cats don't add value to society, and financial firms are public utilities now so this is inappropriate. Now, I'm not saying that he's wrong, but his focus on the economy right now is a bit peculiar — obviously he hasn't heard about the global pig flu pandemic.
Posted in Current Affairs
2 responses to “Bankers’ pay rebounds (Joe)”
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Some of the banks which got stimulus money, wanted to return (did return?) it because that would free them up to give bonuses to the top executives again. Which is fine with me. As long as they are not living high on the hog with public money. I guess it was putting a damper on their “usual lifestyle.”
Are you telling me that the swine flu (it also has a “bird” component to it) is just a distraction from the economic news? Should I then not worry, being in Houston and so close to the Mexican border? I wonder if any of the deadly Mexican drug lords have been infected. Are you also sure that we haven’t released a genetically altered virus south of the border? That this is not a novel strategy to fight the drug war through biological means instead of going in there with guns blazing? Never know. Let conspiracy theories abound :-)LikeLike
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I’m with you and not Krugman, I think: if it’s not coming from the stimulus money, banks can pay their people however they want. To the extent Krugman’s just really worried about bankers failing to run the banks in a public-regarding manner, I’m with him, and perhaps his concern with compensation could be charitably read as him taking it as symptomatic or an indicator of the “real” problem.
Most ironically, the swine flu hysteria is a distraction from health-care reform. It’s also a distraction from economic news and everything else, of course, just like the bird flu was a few years ago, and SARS a few years before that.
Maybe it will be a pandemic, and I guess it will be or is a big deal; I’m not an epidemiologist. The 80+ deaths in Mexico, contrasted to the 0 deaths in the U.S., is an interesting figure (what does it mean?). And granted, government needs to be prepared. But the world is not going to end. I don’t like the mass panic, which reminds of the W. years — it makes good governance difficult, useful stuff doesn’t get done, and non-useful stuff does get done.LikeLike
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