Is the CEO cartel the enemy of capitalism?

Uplift, Deep Cheating, and the CEO Cartel
David Brin
Salon.com
MARCH 14, 2009

..."So long as risk is effectively concealed from borrowers and lenders or actually shifted to others, risk-taking will be excessive. The initial phase of excessive risk-taking will manifest itself as an economic boom, but eventually, when actual losses begin to change the perceptions of borrowers and lenders and begin to impinge upon unsuspecting others, the boom will give way to a bust....[A] market system whose credit markets involve risks that are partially concealed from the lender and partially shifted to others will be biased in the direction of excessive risk-taking. And excessive risks are converted in time into excessive losses." --Roger Garrison

“Neither the U.S. government nor anybody else is capable of estimating the ultimate cost of bailing out such corporate giants as Citigroup, AIG, General Motors, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac (and the list goes on). There are two reasons for this. First, on a stand-alone basis, these companies are opaque and indecipherable entities. Financial innovation left transparency in the dust. Wall Street devoted much of its intellectual and political capital to concealing the risks it was creating. This concealment was deliberate; products needed to be priced inefficiently to produce profits.” - Michael Lewitt

Ironies abound. Though I consider myself something of an open market libertarian, I have long warned that we've been slipping into a putsch-coup by a conspiratorial oligarchy. There is, of course, no contradiction. The patron deity of capitalism, Adam Smith, declared that the very worst enemies of markets (far worse than socialism), are conniving aristocrats and top lords of finance.

Smith made clear (as I'll reiterate) that capitalism and top capitalists are often NOT the same thing. Indeed, the latter can often be lethal to the former...

Let Big Oil pay for auto bailout

Ruben P. Hernandez of San Diego sent this suggestion to the San Diego Union Tribune:

Let Big Oil pay for auto bailout
January 5, 2009

In 1908, Henry Ford introduced the Model T, which got 25 miles to the gallon. Today, Ford makes an SUV that manages about 16 miles to the gallon. As a result, oil companies have made an outrageous amount of profits for 100 years. Instead of having the same chumps (taxpayers) bail them out, let the oil companies bail out the auto industry.