Financial Reform

From economist Joseph Stiglitz, via Andy Tobias:

There used to be a social contract about the reasonable division of the gains that arise from acting together within the economy. Within corporations, the pay of the leader might be 10 or 20 times that of the average worker. But something happened 30 years ago, as the era of Thatcher/Reagan was ushered in. There ceased to be any sense of fairness; it was simply how much the executive could appropriate for himself. It became perfectly respectable to call it incentive pay, even when there was little relationship between pay and performance. In the finance sector, when performance is high, pay is high; but when performance is low, pay is still high. The bankers knew – or should have known – that while high leverage might generate high returns in good years, it also exposed the banks to large downside risks. But they also knew that under their contracts, this would not affect their bonuses.

I was going to suggest we need a term to refer to these scoundrels, just as "robber barons" was applied to 19th century "captains of industry." From this Wikipedia article, I learned that "robber barons wasn't used until decades after the real robber barons had left the scene, and that somebody has already proposed "Robber Boomer Barons." I think we can do better than that. I was going to suggest "Republican," but nobody deserves to be called that.