I'll consider the source of the above statement.
Keep blaming the government and CEO's all you want. Just keep in mind Mr. Wizard, that when you invest large sums of money (or any money for that matter), you had best understand who is running the company and what direction they are going to take it. Instead of just blaming the CEO's and lack of Government Regulation, you need to assign blame to the people who decided it would be wise to invest with those companies that gave such rediculous compensation and severance packages to their CEO's. Investment Houses post all that stuff. If you want to invest with them, then it is up to you to do your own homework.
Bodhi, the problem is that "blame the investors" is correct, but a lot more complex than you think and brainless fools like skycrock don't help with their habit of crapping on anyone who actually tries to explain anything. He's partly correct but he doesn't know why so he relies on insults and mindless blathering about stuff he doesn't understand and can't explain.
If as a private investor I dumped (for example) $10,000 into bundled sub-prime mortgages and lose everything, then I'm a retard. The problem however is that it's not just minor players that did this. Major banks dumped hundreds of MILLIONS of dollars into these bundled sub-prime mortgages, and used them essentially as guarantees against other loans as well. When the loans turned out to be worthless, not only did the private investors lose money, but the BIG investors running these banks and investment houses quite literally lost billions. And since those billions were guarantees against even more loans, you can see how the problem resulted in an $85 billion bailout.
So yea, blame the investors is correct, but the investors who need to be lined up and shot are the ones who were juggling all these worthless bundled mortgages and treating them like real assets, when in fact every time they were traded they lost value because lenders had all the incentive in the world to keep making more and more worthless loans. They were almost literally playing with monopoly money, paying loan agents to keep printing more of the stuff by handing out more stupidly worthless loans.
Yea, blame the investors, but blame the right ones. Private investors didn't lose billions overnight, the big players did and there are probably 2 dozen people MAX who did this. As the article pointed out, many of those who gambled with these worthless investments got massive bonuses and walked away from the ruin they caused with $100 million paychecks.
