John Thain from Merrill Lynch--A Mini-Bernie Madoff

This will be a short one. Mr. Thain, who certainly should obviously be more astute, pushed out $4B+ in bonuses before the BofA transaction closed. There is no one who should have known better than to avoid this behavior...he seriously breached his fiduciary duty to his creditors, his shareholders, the government, the taxpayer, the acquirer and such, in exactly that order. I expect that when NY Atty General Cuomo is done with this investigation, Thain will be facing serious penitentiary time, which he should. And I don't think his jail cell will be anywhere as nice as his office, or his commode, but it will probably at least have one.

Thain and his top lieutenants have attempted to cloak themselves with the notion that they themselves didn't benefit. But they tried to buy the loyalty of the thousands on Wall Street who have become hooked on year-end bonuses to stay with their firms. Well guess what, with what's going on in Wall Street, simply doing your job properly ought to insure that loyalty, and let's face it: Wall Street is BROKEN possibly forever.

Merrill Lynch lost billions of dollars in 2008 and hurt innumerable small-fry. The fact that they have triggered massive billions in bonuses should be investigated, and frankly, if this money can be recaptured via the doctrine of fraudulent conveyance, it should be.

Then we throw all these scheming bastards in jail and let them rot.

We'll see what happens...but that's my view.

And I will go toe-to-toe with anyone who disputes me on this. If I had done a similar thing at one of our small companies, my butt would be hanging by a rope.

Geez.

Here's a recent update on these issues:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/bloomberg/20090130/pl_bloomberg/assovtyss6g8