My picture hangs on the cubicle of every credit card company in the country with the caption: "Under no circumstances give credit to this woman."  I am ashamed - and rightfully so - of the irresponsible way in which I treated my credit (although we're talking here about the original debts and interest, not the late fees and usorious interest that continued to pile on long after it was obvious that I was dead sticking).  Apparently, though, in these situations of utter shame what one needs to do is embrace one's errors ride them up, not down and few have embraced their errors with as much as exuberance as David Sambol of Countrywide Financial and his enabler Bank of America.

I have never understood the concept of a retention bonus.  No wait I understand the concept: keep people running the ship in order to right said ship - kind of like asking the captain of the Exxon Valdez to back up and take another run at it.  Now say you buy into that concept - I don't but say you do - should you then have to entice the captain to try again?  And if you buy into the idea of enticing him - I don't but say you do - should that enticement be a sum that would make people run out and play the lottery were it the lottery jackpot?  And doesn't the fact that the captain ran the ship aground in the first place give you some pause and, hey, shouldn't the captain feel some responsibility for running the ship aground and be willing to stick around enticement free? 

Late last week Bank of America announced that it was giving Angelo Mozilo and David Sambol $10 million and $9 million respectively in stock options.  Okay, as stock options to executives that a company is pushing out the door, these numbers are small (although $19 mil  does translate into $20,000 of mortgage relief for 950 families).  Had Bank of America's largesse ended there then maybe - given today's surreal real estate environment - it might have been somehow weirdly understandable; of course, it didn't end there.  In addition to the cool $9 million Mr. Sambol is getting, Bank of American is also paying him a $28 million retention bonus.

What has David Sambol done to merit this rather hefty enticement to right the ship?  He was one of those at the helm guiding it - yeah, I understand, makes perfect sense.

I have written about my own shame in ruining my finances and losing my home and about the lack of shame that many current home owners seem to feel today when they walk away from their homes.  Where, however, is the shame of Bank of America and David Sambol?  How can I post about expecting home owners to bear at least partial responsibility for their actions when Bank of America is rewarding one person to the astoundingly melodic tune of 37 million dollars for encouraging those home owners to act irresponsibly?  None of these figures take into account the money these men (Mozilo and Sambol) have already taken out of Countrywide which is by some estimates in the hundreds of millions.  But before my moral outrage gets the best of me, I need to climb down off what Bill Gross terms "the moral hazard high horse" and reassess my thinking.  

While Mr. Sambol is being paid an exorbitant sum, we must remember the billions he lost when Countrywide's stock went to hell in a handbasket, plunging from around $40 to its current five dollars and change.  I am sure Mozilo, Sambol and James Cayne of Bear Stearns (who last week sold his BSC stock at the bargain basement price of $61 mil) would all be collecting aluminum cans were it not for the generosity of Bank of America and the stock slummer to whom Cayne off loaded his shares.  I mean we wouldn't want Angelo Mozilo to have to stop wearing those nifty chalk outline pin stripe suits of his (I can think of some stripes that might be more becoming).  And after all at least the companies involved are well rid of these men who are in large part responsible for driving their companies into the ground.  Oh wait, I'm wrong, BOA didn't get rid of Mr. Sambol, they gave him a "retention bonus" - his previous performance was so darn astute that they want him to stick around.  Makes sense, if you want to repair an industry, who better to ask than the one of the guys who broke it.  Kind of along the lines of asking Kevin Mitnick to help you with your network security.

Anyway, who am I kidding, it's not the whole idea that people should be held accountable for their actions that galls me in this; it's the fact that I have once again made the error of considering my mistakes to be evidence of shortcomings when I should have seen them as knowledge to be brokered.  Why didn't I go to Citibank and say, "I owe you guys thousands of dollars on my cards that I can't pay so why don't I just teach people how not to owe thousands on their cards that they can't pay, you forgive my current debts and give me a whole new higher line of credit?"  It just never crossed my mind.  Silly me.  Silly me.