Quotes

''An infectious greed seemed to grip much of our business community,'' the Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, told the Senate Banking Committee yesterday (16 July 2002). The way he sees it, the incentives created by poorly designed stock options ''overcame the good judgment of too many corporate managers." ''It is not,'' he added, ''that humans have become any more greedy than in generations past. It is that the avenues to express greed had grown so enormously.'' Stock options meant that executives could get rich if they faked profits, and fake them they did. — Floyd Norris