It’s All About Greed.

The current climate of rising corporate corruption is all about greed. From the Ponzi schemes being reported almost daily to the blow-out trades gone bad (or hedging as JP Morgan prefers to call them) the single unifying thread is that compensation is not at all, or at-least not sufficiently tied to the compensation, better yet the entire livelihood of the perpetrators of these financial disasters. The common thread among these financial fiascoes is that the people perpetrating these “crimes” is that they do it not with their own money; they do it with their shareholder’s money, their investor’s money, and the government’s money which of course means the taxpayers money. Unless and until the executives, up and down the line of the financial institutions at the center of each of these debacles, are called to task with a clawback of previously paid compensation and flat out firings, little will happen to stem the tide these financial calamitys.

To Barclay’s credit, they moved swiftly and decisively to oust its top executives that either instigated and/or allowed the LIBOR mess. JPMorgan’s failed trade/hedge fiasco is indefensible, and heads should roll there too. Simply saying “we were stupid” is how a grade schooler would describe it. After all, a fish rots from the head down.