I should add, how can he ask for that during a time of lay offs in the company, when one bonus could save so many jobs?

There was some massive greed-is-good groupthink going on throughout the entire country, ever since Reagan. Asset bubbles were created, and then popped, one after the other. The housing bubble succeeded the dot com bubble, for example. Much of this was orchestrated by Greenspan, and the boyz on Wall Street simply followed and added their own ingenious twists, taking the game to ever more rarefied heights. Although this kind of thing has been going on for centuries, wherever there are unregulated markets, I see this particular chapter as the economic side of American Exceptionalism – the intoxicating belief that we’re somehow immune from the laws of financial gravity.

Meredith Whitney, cited by Friedman, caught a lot of heat when she first wrote about Citi. At least something good finally came out of Friedman. And if I were an auto worker, I’d be mighty angry right about now that Citi caught a $300 bn bailout, but otherwise it’s “DC to Detroit: Drop Dead”.

If Paul Krugman is happy with Obama’s choices for his economic team, then I’m happy.

To some extent Bush does, but it’s Cheney who’s the archetype of CEO gravitas. Even when you know he’s nuttier than a peanut farm he still sounds convincing.

I think that it’s not that CEOs are smart but rathe rthat they all have the ability to be very convincing, Bush seemed to have the same thing. It also helps to have the classic look and sound of someone authoritative, strong speaking voice, above average height and proper look. Given the extreme deference to authority these days in the media and elsewhere that’s all they look at because ‘gosh all this stuff is just so complicated’