Citizen Cayne

Last summer, I took some guff for saying that Bear Stearns leader James Cayne should go. Warren Spector may have been the pointman on the mess, but Cayne, as leader, should go--the buck stops here, and all that. Now that Bear Stearns is in full meltdown, this morning losing more than 40 percent of it's already reduced stock value, maybe it's time for holding him responsible for what's happened.

As for the rest of us? Look, not every company is going to come out of this thing alive. It's called capitalism and at some point someone's going under or getting bought out at a fire sale price or whatever. I think the regulatory efforts of Hank Paulson and the proposed mortgage answers of Barney Frank make sense. We need to fix a system that should have been fixed a long time ago but that doesn't mean that some once venerable companies won't be transformed or even disappear.