Sometimes I like his articles, sometimes I think they're crap, sometimes a bit of both. This one is pretty much right on in my view --
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/business/28every.htm IMAGINE, if you will, that a man who had much to do with creating the present credit crisis now says he is the man to fix this giant problem, and that his work is so important that he will need a trillion dollars or so of your money. Then add that this man thinks he is so indispensable that he wants Congress to forbid any judicial or administrative questioning of anything he does with your dollars.
You might think of a latter-day Lenin or Fidel Castro, but you would be far afield. Instead, you should be thinking of Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and the rapidly disintegrating United States of America, right here and now.
But I am getting ahead of myself. First, I am furious at what the traders, speculators, hedge funds and the government have done to everyone who is saving and investing for retirement and future security. Millions of us did nothing wrong, according to the accepted wisdom of the age. We saved. We put a large part of our money into the stock market, as we were urged to do. Because the market wasn’t at ridiculously high levels, it seemed prudent to invest in broad indexes, foreign indexes and small- and large-cap indexes.
Now we have had the rug pulled out from under us. Our retirements have been put into severe jeopardy. The “earnings” part of those price-to-earnings ratios turns out to have been fiction for some financial companies, which normally account for a big part of total corporate earnings. In fact, earnings of giant finance players were often wildly negative, creating a situation rarely seen since the Great Depression, when the aggregate earnings of the Dow 30 were negative.
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