AIG and the bonus furore

The Americans exasperate me. All this furore against executive bonuses specifically AIG's executives and Congress' attempts at taxation of individuals in a witchhunt, private executives' homes being targetted and public protests over their bonuses is beginning to look ridiculous. The poor (well not so poor) executives of the financial industry are being made scapegoats by and american public that has no clue how to manage their budgets and a government that abdicated all responsibility in regulating markets and was merrily collecting taxes and taking credit for a boom that was fuelled by easy liquidity - not fiscal and monetary policy genius.

Lets look at the American public - a bunch of morons who need a Suzie Orman show to tell them how to manage their finances should not be out blaming others. A typical segment on this show goes like

Caller (Linda) : Hi Suzie, I want to buy this new designer Louis Vuitton Scooter to Zip around the city. It costs 15,000 dollars.
Suzie: (after that toothy smile) It's a great scooter Girlfriend. But show me the money.
Linda: I am 40, I make 2000 dollars a month, and i have a 100,000 mortgage (!) and 5000 dollars in credit card debt. But i really love this scooter...

And so on the show goes.

So bunch of morons who need advice of this kind to manage their household finances should not be going around protesting about others' bonuses. Afterall, after enjoying all the easy credit and living lives way beyond their means they are now pretending that the finance companies forcibly made them spend money.

Well now the government and the members of the congress. Abdication of responsibility, complete failure of monetary policy and am sure the members of the Congress did not hesitate to get their share of prosperity going around and made sure that their respective party treasuries or campaigns got good donations from all these prosperous companies and executives. Now they have turned against them. Ungrateful wretches.

I wish the financial industry would mount a PR campaign and expose some juicy details about the failures of the government. Atleast it would be fun to see fatcats of the Congress squirm and not just the fat cats of the wall street and main street !

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