Friday, December 19, 2008

Ponzi Nation: What Spitzer, Madoff, Geithner, and Adam Smith Can Teach Us About Our Own Mass Stupidity

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/politics/2008/12/spitzer-geithners-the-status-quo.html

If this keeps up I will subscribe to Vanity Fair. They just have some excellent business articles.


And so I asked Eliot Spitzer what he made of incoming Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and sure enough he gave a reply markedly lacking in discretion: “Tim is a good guy, but he’s not a thinker. He’s the status quo.” I asked if F.D.I.C. Chairman Sheila Bair, the Republican who is improbably the left’s favorite financial regulator right now, might have been a better choice; he wasn’t sure if she could handle “the politics” but said she had been the “voice of reason” in the whole debacle. He did not know whether reports that Geithner is behind a movement to oust Bair for not being a “team player” were true, but he said he shared my concerns that the regulatory team being assembled would not do enough to challenge the logical flaws and undemocratic principles that characterize Wall Street’s, ahem, conventional wisdom.


I know people are down on Spitzer but he did a great job looking into the problem childs of wall street. Better to be hated then loved if you are regulator.

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