"going down faster than the Titanic" ... and here'The crux of it all, as I've said before ("don't blame the American sheeple; they were just taking the cheap money -- told they could afford it"):
Peter Morici, professor, University of Maryland School of Business, former chief economist, U.S. International Trade Commission
Performance-based compensation practices at Lehman andthroughout Wall Street, which pay big bonuses when bankers bet rightbut only imposes losses on shareholders when they bet wrong, haspropagated the kind of toxic financial engineering that causedmortgage-backed securities meltdown, general credit crisis, and thenear death experience of many Wall Street banks and securities dealers.
Sooner or later after enough dominos fall, compensation structures andbusiness practices will return to more conservative norms of ten andtwenty years ago. Only then will the credit crisis resolve and theeconomy have a decent shot at full recovery.
(similar applied in Canada and the U.S. in situations like bonusing Finance/Accounting staff at Nortel based on reported financial results; guess what you get? fake numbers, of course -- dopes!)
from G&M snaps from economists and managers:
https://www.globeinvestor.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080915.wquotes0915/GIStory/
Warning: some of it is rather depressing ...