Hate the financial game, not the player
By Tom Teicholz at 27 March, 2009, 3:35 pm
Jake DeSantis published his AIG resignation in the New York Times the other day. It was well-written and hearfelt. DeSantis described the way he and his fellow workers were betrayed by AIG, how promises were made repeatedly and broken, how difficult work conditions have become, and how it;s no longer worth it for him, how he is taking his bonus and donating it to charity — he wants to control what happens to that money and give up the victims’ of the economic downturn.
I am not unsympathetic to Desantis’ plight — he may be a good man, an ethical man, an innocent man, even — but he is caught in the crossfire of the economic chicanery perpetrated by AIG and the financial community and the backlash over it.
In the end, it is not Desantis and his desire to do the right thing with his bonus that is where our concern should lie. It remains with the businesses and the businessmen who did the fraudulent deals and awarded the disproportionate bonuses.
As Paul Krugman pointed out in his column in today’s New York Times, speaking of the wixards of Wall Street:
…the wizards were frauds, whether they knew it or not, and their magic turned out to be no more than a collection of cheap stage tricks. Above all, the key promise of securitization — that it would make the financial system more robust by spreading risk more widely — turned out to be a lie. Banks used securitization to increase their risk, not reduce it, and in the process they made the economy more, not less, vulnerable to financial disruption. (italics added).
If Desantis is leaving his job, perhaps this will encourage all the other overpaid employees to step aside and make way for people willing to serve in the trust of their clients, mindful managing their moneys and earning a reasonable living, allowing their clients, their companies and our economy to prosper.
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