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it would be nice if we could stop referring to what wall street was doing as "innovation" and praising them for being "innovative."

the words should be reserved for people who devise a way or an instrument that makes the world and its workings more, not less, transparent.

jawbone -- let's swap in the faa!

A caller to the Diane Rehm Show this past Friday had a pertinent and important observation.

He noted that when an airliner crashes millions are spent to ascertain to the smallest component what went wrong, so that the a similar crash can be avoided if at all possible in the future.

He wondered why this huge crash of our financial system, leading to a crash of our entire economic system, is not being investigated in similar detail.

Susan Page replied that in the future hundreds of academics will write books about this situation, but that as of now the crash is still like the plane on a downward trajectory, not yet fully smashed into the ground. The economy hasn't bottomed out yet.

C'mon, Susan! Now is the time to demand that records be retained and turned over, least they be deleted, destroyed, amended, etc.

eCAHNomics
very good point
no one cared that bush's pals got away with stealing at enron, so more of bush's friends stole even more. spectacular finish for the-worst-president-ever

With the crooks in charge (Bernanke, Summers, Geithner to name 3) there will be no meaningful correction for what happened. Remember that nothing that was done post-Enron prevented a much greater financial collapse.

Lehman vs. Bear: Paulson looking after his own. Lehman was a Goldman Sachs rival, whereas there were business connections that made it important for Paulson to bail out Bear to save Goldman Sachs' skin.

re Bear Stearns and the meltdown - many people in the financial world were deeply concerned for years (before Bear Stearns collapsed). The CDS market was clearly a disaster waiting to happen.

It's just not true that the interconnectedness, and the impact and likelihood, of potential failure was "unknowable".

This is probably not particularly relevant, but I am wondering how the "roads in" have changed and how it affects the climate in these mega-billion firms.

James Cayne, Hank Greenberg, and others of the "old guard" came from outside the now-standard Harvard/Yale/Princeton then HBS/MIT-Sloan/Chicago business school route.

The lust for vast wealth seems to have changed only insofar as it has grown greater. But did those who fought their way into the game show greater 'creativity'? It seems like, for all the exceptional academic/institutional credentials, there is a cookie-cutter/not-so-old boy routine for joining the ranks.

I think we will call this the “Great Correction” as money is revalued against credit. Hopefully happiness will also be revalued against materialism.