Pitchfork Watch

Some normally mild-mannered commentators have had it. I'm seeing more and more of this. Rod Dreher:

If Obama is ultimately forced to nationalize American banks, he had damn well better throw the entire leadership class of those failed institutions out on their ear. It is revolting, the idea that those top bankers could have driven their institutions into the ditch, and still be in the driver's seat after the taxpayers, at monumental expense to themselves and their children and children's children, will have hauled them out. This is the sort of thing of which political revolutions are made.

Barry Ritholtz:

These insider purchases were made from the proceeds of ill-gotten gains — the vast sums of money that management has been overpaid for the fine job they did driving these companies into the dirt. The thought process must have gone something like this: Now that we have been paid 100s of millions for turning our stock price into fertilizer, let’s take a few cents of that money and buy a few shares of stock. The entire sordid episode is sickening, and hardly cause for investor appluase. Instead of buying stock, these incompetant corporate clowns should be falling on their own swords. If they don’t do so soon, it will be time for investors to start gathering pitchforks and torches, to chase the money losing managers out of town.

Sometimes capitalism needs to be saved from itself. The longer we go without some high profile non-Madoff prosecutions or a general self-purge by the financial establishment, the greater the likelihood of a lurch toward radicalism at some point in the future.