The other night on the Bill Moyers TV program Bill had a guest on by the name of Dr. Robert Johnson. Johnson is the former chief economist for the US Senate banking committee and now he works for some capital fund management company. He seemed pretty clear headed and he had a sober assesment of the financial mess that we're going through with the bank bailouts and he had a damn good idea what to do about them. His idea is this: if a bank wants bailout money then the top brass at that bank must hand in their letters of resignation, the stock of said bank gets devalued until it is worth zero dollars and zero cents, and the FDIC runs the bank until such time as it regains solvency. The genius of his idea is that the bank gets saved and the people who are responsible for it's failure are the ones who take the biggest hit financially and they lose their jobs as well.One would hope the new Secretary of the Treasury was watching the same program I was and that he'll implement Johnson's ideas.
