excerpt:
Wall Street CEOs like to think they are the adults, the big men in the room, the ones who know how the world works. Well, you know what? They screwed up their own banks, the financial system, and the economy like a bunch of two-year-olds. Every single major bank would have failed in late 2008 without massive government intervention — because of wounds that were entirely self-inflicted... The financial crisis should have put to rest for a generation the idea that the big boys on Wall Street know what they’re doing and the politicians in Washington are a bunch of amateurs. Yet somehow the bankers came out of it with the same unshakable belief in their own perfection that they had in 2005. The only plausible explanation is some kind of powerful personality disorder.....
Yes, they [Obama, Geithner, the White House] deserve more gratitude. They saved the bankers twice — once by protecting them from their own mistakes, and again by protecting them from Sherrod Brown, Ted Kaufman, and all the other “populists” who wanted fundamental changes in our financial system. As should be clear, for all my differences with Tim Geithner, I would rather have him calling the shots than Jamie Dimon or Lloyd Blankfein. But Obama and Geithner should know better than to expect gratitude from a bunch of narcissistic, delusional crybabies. And in that sense, both parties to this toxic relationship — the Wall Street bankers and the Obama administration officials — deserve each other.
John Clarke and Bryan Dawe calculate the cost of the European debt crisis. ABC News.
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