How many Bear Stearns executives are losing their homes?
An old joke: The stockbroker takes a prospective client down to the marina and points out a row of gleaming high-end boats. “Those are the brokers’ yachts,” he says. The prospective client asks, “And where are the customers’ yachts.”
Now Bear Stearns is being “rescued” by a taxpayer-backed forced merger with JPMorgan Chase. Bear Stearns stockholders are being hosed. Many Bear Stearns employees are being laid off. And since the main cause of Bear Stearns’ problems was crappy mortgage loans that aren’t being repaid, lots of investors in “securitized” home mortgages are taking big losses, and homeowners who can’t pay their subprime mortgages are being evicted like mad.
The people who seem to be hurt least by all this are the very same Bear Stearns top executives who are responsible for all the bad decisions that led to this corporate meltdown. So far I have not seen a single article, anywhere, about a Bear Stearns corporate officer or board member losing his or her home.
If these execs, who made huge amounts of money from securitized mortgages, aren’t now being driven into bankruptcy ahead of everyone else whose lives they have helped ruin, why are middle-income working people like you and me supposed to pay for their mistakes with our tax dollars?
To put it another way:
Where are the Bear Stearns executives’ bankruptcies?