Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Equal Protection

I'm with Barry Ritholtz. The auto industry is being forced to do a number of things which are highly unpleasant for their upper management and shareholders—reduce executive compensation, retool significant chunks of their production capacity, sell corporate jets, suspend dividend payments until the loan is repaid—that banks did not have to sign up for. Yes, there was a feeble attempt to limit executive compensation, but John Thain is doing his best to show that that won't work either. I suppose that if we put real re-regulation of the financial sector into place, the banks will have taken a real bullet, but for the moment, they seem to be getting off scott free.

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