Henninger seems not to understand that it is the amoral, corrupt behavior at the top (CEOs, politicians, media) that sets the example for those down to food chain to ignore some basic decisions of right and wrong, license and accountability, sharing versus greed.
Fix your own house and that of the ones in the corporate/Senate dining rooms before you lecture us.
i think he’s spot on - we used to be a great nation because we were a good nation. we now wink at so much that would never have passed muster in the past... maybe we need a little of that old-time-religion.
The broad condemnation of all of Wall Street and all CEOs is a dumb oversimplification. The CEOs are so far above the traders that the have literally no idea what they are doing, other than the periodic P&L reports. The managers have only a small clue what the traders are up to, because the traders are all specialists in complex esoteric products. The traders themselves have very little understanding about the nature or the overall credit quality of the underlying loans of MBS, because they have pooled into bundles of several hundred loans by FNMA or Freddie. The traders at FNMA and FHLMC are given the loans as they request them, and they, too, don't send a lot of time examining the individual loans. The guys who issue the loans may be at fault, but they don't make a hell of a lot of money to begin with. I am thinking about writing a detailed essay about this, but I can tell you this: Most of these guys DESERVED the high payout when they were making money when it worked. A lot of people with math degrees from MIT went down to work there. The problem is that when it spun out of control, it was too big and too complex for any one person to get his mind around.