stan o'neill made $50 million in 2006. this is right before the whole thing hit the fan. >> how well did their companies do as a consequence. >> in 2006 merrill link was nearly bankrupt. in 2007 bear stearns nearly went bankrupt and actually did. it was a run on the bank in 2008. >> explain to me how you think capitalism is supposed to work. we believe that people should make whatever they can make because they are managing their companies well, creating useful products, contributing to the prosperity of america. can o'neill made enormous amounts of money compared to most of us. their companies went bankrupt. >> was capitalism working? >> i think it was to a certain extent. you can't regulate greed. you have to essentially kill everybody on the planet because it's a basic human instinct. some of us have more than others. if you want to regulate greed, good luck. you need a bigger government than barack obama ever envisioned. >> do you think that that -- the compensation system contributed to bad decisionmaking? >> absolute

when it joined the rein of stan o'neill. basically now running the biggest brokers department on wall street. bigger than merrill's. remember when they combined the smith barney with the dean whiter, mortgage brokers? i think he got 18, 20,000 brokers right now. he's the leading candidate. it's not a done deal, but from what i hear, and people pretty high up in the firm are telling me he's the likely -- >> he wants to get in, charlie. >> i heard you talking before that you were at least inferring -- they weren't taking enough risk and they were bringing in a guy -- >> i didn't -- i didn't -- i didn't infer that. what i said was the problem that john mack has, he had a pretty tough three years. >> yeah. >> he changed -- in 2005, he changed the business model from an advisory model, right, where they basically made money advising on mergers and acquisitions on the brokerage department. it was run by phil persell. when he got thrown out, mack came in. and changed it to a proprietary model, taking risks on trades, taig taking ri

systematically undertaken by the biggest financial institutions in the country and i have yet to hear stan o'neill of merrill lynch or chuck prince of citigroup apologize for the recklessness that they unleashed, but we did they do a lot of it and the closer you look at what happened, the more outrageous it becomes. how much time to wipe out? i would like to wrap up in the remaining minutes the things i learned in the course of working on this book that went beyond my own personal saga. almost all of the public attention and debate about my book has been about whether i am a creepo or irresponsible, did i do it right, and i do it wrong, those kind of questions. the real question is not whether i made her in this judgment. i did. the question is why eight to 10 million or so make horrendous judgments. it's always quick to be the case that some people at any given time are going to borrow more than they should and they are going to get in trouble for it, but has never been the case we have this kind of wreckage at one time. so many people, so overextended in such a compressed period of time and that