The stranger, a Western businessman, slipped into the chair next to me at an Asia Society lunch here in Hong Kong and asked me a question that I can honestly say I’ve never been asked before: “So, just how corrupt is America?” Thus begins a column by Thomas Friedman that ends with a line that I have repeated again and again: Which is why we don’t just need a financial bailout; we need an ethical bailout. Read the whole article. There is an eye-opening accompanying article in the NY Times outlining how Fairfield Securities fed money to Madoff Securities and how much the Noel family who ran Fairfield made and charged for, in retrospect, doing nothing. One wonders whether this is all corruption or just good, old-fashioned incompetence. Why, one wonders, would people put millions of their own money into a fund about which they knew absolutely nothing?!