Let’s say Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, and other lawmakers incensed over AIG’s bonuses win their battle. The AIG
“„For the crisis to have occurred, there must have been (1) a source of vast amounts of liquidity, (2) a reason for most of that liquidity to go to one sector, the housing sector, rather than being spread around to a variety of industries, and (3) a failure to detect and prevent the bubble from developing in the industry where the excess liquidity found a home.
“„The managers at places like AIG were part of the problem, and they surely don’t deserve rewards for their performance, that is not the argument here, but they and others like them were only one part of the problems we now have, they didn’t cause the problems by themselves…I wish I could point to a single villain, it would be easier in a many, many ways to be able to do that, but I don’t think we can, and doing so runs the risk of delaying the reform that is needed by causing us to focus on only a small set of the larger set of “villains”.
“„There’s plenty of blame – and reform – to spread around.