First appeared at BlownMortgage.com
There has been a deliberately high signal-to-noise-ratio ("the ratio of a signal power to the noise power corrupting the signal") around the financial fiasco. The reason for this is the same reason that a magician does patter — to divert your attention from the sleight-of-hand.
We have heard long explanations about how no one could have seen this coming and how we can’t fire the people who got us into this mess to get us out of it and how we are going to borrow our way out of a debt crisis and how the value of loans shouldn’t reflect actual market conditions when the market is a mess. All of which can be translated to, "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."
I am not sure if this rises to the exact level of a conspiracy or if it just coinciding self-interest by people who stand to lose a lot of money if that curtain is pulled back. I am sure that the effect is the same as a conspiracy.
However, Bill Black thinks it’s a conspiracy and that’s good enough for me. In an interview on Bill Moyer’s show Mr. Black — the senior regulator during the S&L crisis & now a prof of economy and law at U. of Missouri — applies a brilliantly sharp Occam’s Razor to the entire fiasco. In less than half-an-hour he explains what went wrong, why and why what we’re doing won’t work. This is a truly bipartisan dissection. Watch it and learn.
My favorite part is his conclusion (transcript here):
So stop that current system. We’re hiding the losses, instead of trying to find out the real losses. Stop that, because you need good information to make good decisions, right? Follow what works instead of what’s failed. Start appointing people who have records of success, instead of records of failure. That would be another nice place to start. There are lots of things we can do. Even today, as late as it is. Even though they’ve had a terrible start to the administration. They could change, and they could change within weeks. And by the way, the folks who are the better regulators, they paid their taxes. So, you can get them through the vetting process a lot quicker.
(Hat tip to Infectious Greed, Financial Armageddon, and Washington’s Blog)
Here’s part 1 of the interview, go here for part 2 and here for part 3.
"The tragedy of this crisis is that it didn’t have to happen at all." — William Black
Collateral Damage 