Depuis que la Fed a (res)sorti le carnet de chèques pour sauver le géant de l'assurance AIG, le New York Times tire sur l'ambulance :

  • Need a Job? $17,000 an Hour. No Success Required (1)
  • The King Is Dead (2)
  • A New Role for the Fed: Investor of Last Resort (3)
  • For Wall Street, Greed Wasn’t Good Enough (4)
  • Abroad, Bailout Is Seen as a Free Market Detour (5)
  • As Fears Grow, Wall St. Titans See Shares Fall (6)
  • Stocks Slump as Investors Run to Safety (7)

Morceaux choisis :

Nicholas Kristof, en pleine forme, s'en prend au CEO de Lehman :

"Last year, Mr. Fuld earned about $45 million, according to the calculations of Equilar, an executive pay research company. That amounts to roughly $17,000 an hour to obliterate a firm. If you’re willing to drive a company into the ground for less, apply by calling Lehman Brothers at (212) 526-7000.

Oh, nevermind.

I’m delighted to announce that Mr. Fuld (who continues to lead Lehman since it entered bankruptcy proceedings this week) is the winner of my annual Michael Eisner Award for corporate rapacity and poor corporate governance. The award honors the pioneering achievements in this field of Mr. Eisner, the former Walt Disney chief."
(...)
"John McCain seems to think that the problem is that C.E.O.’s are greedy. Well, of course, they are. We’re all greedy. The real failure is one of corporate governance, which provides only the flimsiest oversight to curb the greed of executives like Mr. Fuld."
(1)

Roger Cohen :

"When I taught a journalism course at Princeton a couple of years ago, I was captivated by the bright, curious minds in my class. But when I asked students what they wanted to do, the overwhelming answer was: “Oh, I guess I’ll end up in i-banking.”

It was not that they loved investment banking, or thought their purring brains would be best deployed on Wall Street poring over a balance sheet, it was the money and the fact everyone else was doing it."
(2)

Paul Wilmott, après avoir comparé la situation actuelle à un cancer qui métastase, puis fait allusion à Hamlet, répond comme un écho à N. Kristof :

"Greed makes the world go around; it makes people take risks that ultimately lead to economic or scientific advances. But the greedy must also face the consequences of taking those risks."
(4)

Nelson Schwartz s'interroge sur la crédibilité du discours libéral après cet épisode :

"In parts of Asia, the bailouts stirred bitter memories of the different approach the United States and the International Monetary Fund adopted during the economic crises there a decade ago.

When the I.M.F. pledged $20 billion to help South Korea survive the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, one of the conditions it imposed was that the Korean government allow ailing banks and other companies to collapse rather than bail them out, recalled Yung Chul Park, a professor of economics at Korea University in Seoul, who was deeply involved in the negotiations with the I.M.F."
(5)