20 million and change

“I just want someone smart running the country again,” said Tim Robbins recently on the Jon Stewart Show. The left-of-center audience erupted with cheers.

What an elitist! He thinks it takes intelligence to run this country, when all it really takes is a good shade of lipstick and a wink.

But who would want to run the country now, I think, in the worst of times? Bill Clinton thinks it’s the best time to be chief executive of the USA. “Anything you do has got to be better than this,” he says with his blue eyes flashing. A good ol’ boy philosophy if ever there was one.

But Presidential politics is a crapshoot—you win or you lose. Finance is where it’s at if you’re a smart boy or girl, or even if you’re not. Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers until its recent collapse, walked away with $500 million in cash over the last five years as he drove the Chevy off the levee for the rest of us.

He says he can’t sleep at night wondering where he went wrong.

Does anyone want to tell him?

Five hundred million dollars is a good start for where you went wrong, Dick. How can anyone justify that kind of excess when 90-year-old women shoot themselves in the chest because they can’t pay the mortgage?

Days before Lehman’s demise, Fuld authorized a $20 million payment to one of its employees who was being fired. Fuld explained to Congress, with a straight face, that it was not severance pay, just part of their contractual agreement with the employee. So breaking his contract would have been wrong, but letting the company tank was okay? The worst the guy could have done was sue you, and you were going belly-up anyway.

My daughter wants to take an economics course so she “can figure out what happened” to our economic system. I don’t have the heart to tell her it might not help. Most of the people teaching economics today still believe in the unregulated free market system.

Even Bill Clinton, arguably one of the most intelligent chief executives, presided over the dismantling of the regulations put in place at the end of the Great Depression to prevent anything similar from ever happening again, signing the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. I don’t presume to know what economic system would be better than the one we have now, but I know we need more stringent government regulations in the financial sector when we get back on our feet.

A friend asked me recently if my family was going to be okay after the bust, assuming, I suppose, that we had investments. “Oh, sure,” I said, “all our money is in debt and real estate.”

My flippant response was half-true. Our real estate is real—we can live in it—it’s worth more than we owe and we don’t need to sell it. Our debt, of course, is not money we have but money we owe, and the interest rates will surely rise as the ship sinks.

But we also own a small business so we don’t have plans to retire, even though my husband turned 70 this year. The business will likely survive. It is not deeply in debt, and it’s located in the heart of the city. Our IRAs were drained by college costs over the years. There’s not much there to lose and maybe when we need it, it will be worth something again.

Most people are not so fortunate. Like Richard Fuld, they wake up at night wondering what they could have done to avoid a mess like this.

Electing an intelligent leader might be a step in the right direction. I’ll leave it to you to guess who.