“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122476545437862295.html

The recent systemic crisis in financial services – verging on a global scale – is a hugely magnified version of the earlier Savings & Loan Association crisis in America in the 1980s and 1990s:

“The US Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s was the failure of several savings and loan associations in the United States. More than 1,000 savings and loan institutions (S&Ls) failed in ‘the largest and costliest venture in public misfeasance, malfeasance and larceny of all time.’ The ultimate cost of the crisis is estimated to have totaled around USD$160.1 billion, about $124.6 billion of which was directly paid for by the U.S. government, which contributed to the large budget deficits of the early 1990s.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_Loan_crisis

My insight into that crisis came from reading Donald Campbell: Incentives (Cambridge UP 1995, rev. 2006)

Sadly, the authorities seem not to have drawn the appropriate lessons from the earlier systemic failure.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/dominic_lawson/article6888959.ece

As an Autistic man myself, I think they all deserve the best that the LC can throw at them.

“I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.”

The Times find it inexcusable from the French, some here find it acceptable from the French but inexcusable from the Tories.

That, for those unfamiliar for the actual meaning of the word, is what ‘hypocrisy’ means (from the Greek for ‘play acting’)

(For the record, I don’t give a shit in either case, any more than if the French or Tories has used ‘mental’ or ‘retard’.)

I need to remove “left wing” from that post.

Grr…

Slow news day?