Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2008
Wall Street
The shift of financial activity from bank balance sheets to the off-balance-sheet realm of securitization and derivatization loosely defined as Wall Street wouldn't have been such a disaster if it had actually worked as advertised — spreading risk, encouraging innovation, bringing the best minds to bear on the biggest financial problems. Instead, Wall Street's leaders did an atrocious job — rewarding the foolhardy, steering capital to the least productive uses and running away from responsibility for their errors. And they got paid tens of millions of dollars a year for it.