Word: lesses
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...clearly want action: some 62% believe financial regulations need to be tougher, and 67% want the government to force pay cuts on top executives at Wall Street firms that received government bailout money. It's a bit of a turnaround for a country that has been leaning toward the less-regulation-is-better model of government. Yet most people are still wary of giving Washington too much say in running businesses. The majority, 57%, don't want government interfering with free enterprise. At least until it runs off the rails...
...forget, too, that a fair number of Wall Streeters got wiped out because their wealth was tied to their firm's stock price. Dick Fuld, the former CEO of Lehman, had shares and options worth about $1 billion at their peak. He got less than $1 million when he sold them after the firm went bankrupt. (He still took home, before taxes, $490 million from his stock-based compensation, so don't cry for him.) James Cayne, CEO of the defunct Bear Stearns, was in a similar situation. If Fuld and Cayne had known their firms were as badly...
...billion of Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) money was the beginning and will be the end of the bailout. TARP lent $238 billion to more than 680 banks, according to SNL Financial, a research firm; 44 of these banks have repaid a total of $71 billion. Thus, there's less than $170 billion, a relative pittance, of TARP money invested in banks...
...when the likes of Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase, which were well capitalized and well run, say they didn't really need TARP money in the first place, that's more or less accurate. However, that doesn't mean that Goldman, JPMorgan and every other bank in the country weren't bailed out. Had the world economy melted down and more giant institutions failed, even strong firms like Goldman would have gone under. In July, Goldman acknowledged this, more or less, when it graciously - yes, graciously - paid a full price of $1.1 billion to redeem stock-purchase warrants it gave...
...retirees who use interest income to supplement Social Security. If you had $500,000 stashed away - not a bad nest egg - you could earn a no-risk $20,000 to $25,000 annually (before taxes) two years ago buying bank CDs or short-term Treasury securities. Now you earn less than $5,000 in an average one-year CD, about $2,000 in a one-year Treasury. This offers retirees unpleasant choices: reduce their standard of living, eat into their principal or take greater risks to restore the lost income. (Watch TIME's video "Uninsured Again...