Corporate waste must be checked

I used to think China produced the world's worst State-owned enterprise (SOE) bosses, whose leadership failure brought one factory after another to collapse in the market-oriented reform in the 1990s.

I used to think China also produced the least competent county-level bureaucrats who were good at nothing but wasting public funds on banquets.

But I realized I was wrong after learning about the US$440,000 party bill of some AIG executives at a posh resort just days after they received a hefty US$85 billion bailout package from the US federal government, after piling up net losses of US$18.5 billion in the last three quarters.