Legal Commentary

No "Indispensable Men"

By Big Tent Democrat

Kevin Drum quoting DeGaulle - "The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men." The point is getting through:

A substantial swathe of policy elites, starting with Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke and George Bush and now evidently including Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers and Barack Obama really do seem to think that saving the firms is the key. That the world as it existed in the years 1996 to 2006 represents some kind of ideal of economic activity, and that the[ir] job is to put humpty-dumpty back together again. . . . [T]hat’s not what we ought to be trying to do . . .

Brian Buetler finds support from Paul Krugman:

I’ll leave to others the question of who knew or should have known that the bonus firestorm was coming; but it’s part of a pattern. At every stage, Geithner et al have made it clear that they still have faith in the people who created the financial crisis — that they believe that all we have is a liquidity crisis that can be undone with a bit of financial engineering, that “governments do a bad job of running banks” (as opposed, presumably, to the wonderful job the private bankers have done), that financial bailouts and guarantees should come with no strings attached.

This was bad analysis, bad policy, and terrible politics. This administration, elected on the promise of change, has already managed, in an astonishingly short time, to create the impression that it’s owned by the wheeler-dealers. And that leaves it with no ability to counter crude populism.

Precisely.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on March 20, 2009 (boomark / email).