Jay, being a liberty-loving individualist, I'm not in favour of collective guilt and punishment. Foolish investors in Globalstar, Global Crossing, Enron, Worldcom, rafts of cyberspace companies and other things have been cleaned right out. They cannot be more punished.
<If only matters were so simple as ACF Mike and Maurice prefer to believe. You know, sin, and repent, commit crime, and apologize, followed by forgiveness and another chance, sidestepping punishment and without skipping a heartbeat.>
Hearts have skipped many beats. Some hearts have literally stopped permanently. Worse than the alleged crimes were the ignorance and wishful thinking, mismanagement and waste. The insider swindling was a relatively small proportion of the financial destruction.
I have [I am told] a Calvinist attitude, or maybe it's Puritan [I should ask Google what those mean]. Financial markets are merciless - once gone, the money doesn't come back unless governments rob taxpayers and pay subsidies or give other financial incentives to rescue shareholders. Few of such taxpayer funded rescues have been made.
The world doesn't come to a stop because a litany of companies have gone and are going bust. The shareholders and creditors suffer the consequences, the assets change hands [Ka Ching, Chen and Winn are waiting to do their duty in this regard] and life goes on.
Most people are unaware of the change of ownership of the assets and do not miss the companies which did not deserve to exist. Those in trouble think the whole world is affected, but they aren't, other than when the world slips inside the event horizon of a black hole and we have a WWI, WWII, Great Depression, etc. There is little evidence that we are inside the event horizon of financial stability. There is increasing evidence that the world is going to escape the biggest irrational exuberance in history without mayhem or even significant disruption or even recession.
That's thanks, to a large extent, to the confidence instilled by Uncle Al in the stability of the US$.
Mqurice |
