Greed is good, if only for the greedy

The New York Times has the story of Lehman Brothers and their overweening greed:

Even as the investment bank Lehman Brothers pleaded for a federal bailout to save it from bankruptcy protection, it approved millions of dollars in bonuses for departing executives, a Congressional committee was told Monday.
The first Congressional hearing into the causes of the financial crisis began with a portrayal of Lehman Brothers as a firm run by irresponsible leaders who continued to reward executives and spend billions on stock buybacks and other capital-depleting programs even as internal documents warned about the impending crisis.
“It was a company in which there was no accountability for failure,” the chairman of the House Oversight and Governmental Reform Committee, Henry A. Waxman, said in his opening statement.One Lehman document among thousands reviewed by the House committee showed that four days before the bank filed for bankruptcy protection, Lehman’s compensation committee was asked to grant $20 million in “special payments” for three executives who were leaving, Mr. Waxman said. An e-mail exchange recommending a delay in bonus payments was apparently brushed aside.
Another document showed that executives were warned in a January 2008 meeting that the company was facing liquidity problems. Yet the firm moved forward with capital outlays, including $5 billion in bonuses, $4 billion in shares, and $750,000 in dividend payments between 2007 and the firm’s bankruptcy filing on 15 September.
During the hearing, Republicans on the committee called for a more thorough investigation of the role of Congress in the financial crisis, in particular into its role in pushing the mortgage finance giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to guarantee billions of home loans to underqualified buyers. “The reason we haven’t scheduled hearings on these two institutions, and haven’t requested documents from either of them, is because their demise isn’t someone else’s fault, its ours, and we don’t want to own up to it,” Representative Christopher Shays, a Republican from Connecticut, said.

Rico says it must be nice to have the money to throw around like that, but he was right: they deserve hanging...