Bill Fleckenstein wrote a great article on the Fannie Mae situation. He calls all the Management teams, like Fannie's whose CEO alone cashed out over $40M for example, a bunch of "Crybaby Capitalists."
Fannie's Management team disregarded a memo from a risk officer in 2004, stating that they were buying junk mortgages and those mortgages posed a serious threat to the financial system. The lesson is to drive you company as hard as possible to reach growth objectives, cash out as much stock as possible along the way, and then look to the taxpayers for a bailout.
