Expense Account, Mint
It is finally done. The US has now moved to the next stage of the financial crisis—this is where the brooms, antiseptic and hot water come out to clean out the goop left behind by the unadulterated greed of a handful of suits on Wall Street. Even as the news of the US Senate passing the Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010 comes in, I am at that part in the two-brick-sized tome, Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin, where the obnoxious Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. is screaming about shareholder value, even as he scrabbles to hoodwink other sharp Wall Street types with his good-bank-bad-bank plan. The plan was to take the toxic real estate assets of Lehman and shove them into another company while keeping the “good assets” in one company. Of course, it was totally irrelevant to the bonus-grabbing Lehman top team that there weren’t that many “good assets” left in the firm and that they were not in the money any more.