12 May 2011

William D. Cohan in NYT: don't let go of anger at Wall Street

William D. Cohan, author of House of Cards, a Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, and Money and Power, How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World, has an important op-Ed in the Times. The title sums it up: the American people have been far to passive in the wake of the most gigantic financial fraud in all of History. Here.

No one has really paid a price; in fact, quite the opposite, the perpetrators got their casinos rebuilt and recapitalized at public expense, and got to keep all the loot, while ordinary working people got stiffed. Most people are just too busy trying to keep their heads above water and too unfocused to really understand what's been happening. The Administration made a decision, a terribly, terribly wrong decision, early on, that restoring the status quo was more important than fixing what caused the problem in the first place, so there's really no one in Washington who cares about restoring the financial system to a healthy and equitable balance. The result: it's still just about as broken as it was before the meltdown, and very little in the way of new regulation is in place and working to make sure another fraud bubble doesn't just happen again, with even worse results.

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