Two former Wall Street insiders wrote an excellent editorial in the New York Times:
We’re concerned that nothing has really been fixed. We’re doubly concerned that people appear to feel the worst of the storm is over — and in this, they are aided and abetted by a hugely popular and charismatic president and by the fact that the Dow has increased by 35 percent or so since Mr. Obama started to lay out his economic plans in March. But wishing for improvement and managing by the Dow’s swings are a fool’s game. (Disclosure: One of us, Mr. Lewis, was convicted on federal charges of stock manipulation in 1989…
They go on to ask President Obama some real questions that the MSM isn’t asking, such as:
- Six months ago, nobody believed that our banking system was well designed, functioning smoothly or properly regulated — so why then are we so desperately anxious to restore that model as the status quo?
- Why is so much effort being put into propping up those at the top of the economic pyramid — the money-center banks, the insurance companies, the hedge funds and so forth — when during a period of deflation like the one we are in, any recovery will come only by restoring the confidence of the people down at the bottom of the pyramid?
- Instead of promising the imminent return of good times, why isn’t Mr. Obama talking more about the importance of living within our means and not spending money we don’t have on things we don’t need?
- Why is the morphine drip still in the veins of the financial system?
- Is there to be any limit on bailouts? … Will we soon be bailing out Dartmouth, which just lost its AAA bond rating? Is there no room left for what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter termed “creative destruction”? And what is the plan to get the American people out of all these equity stakes we now own and don’t want?
- Why has Mr. Obama surrounded himself largely with economic advisers who are theoreticians and academics — distinguished though they may be — but not those who have sat on a trading desk, made a market, managed a portfolio or set a spread?
- Why isn’t the Obama administration working night and day to give the public a vastly increased amount of detailed information about what happens in financial markets?…
- Why is the government still complicit in making the system ever less transparent, even when it comes to what should clearly be considered public information?
- And what has become of the S.E.C.’s year-old investigation into who made short-dated, out-of-the-money bets in March 2008 hoping Bear Stearns would fail — bets that were suddenly worth millions of dollars when the company did collapse later that month?
- Why do we still not know why Mr. Paulson, Mr. Geithner and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, allowed Lehman Brothers to file bankruptcy last Sept. 15 but then, a day later, saved A.I.G.? Or why last November this trio decided to absorb potential losses on $301 billion of Citigroup’s shaky assets, when conventional wisdom among insiders held that they were worth only $150 billion at best?
- Also, before Dick Fuld, Lehman Brothers’ chief executive, appeared before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform last October, it demanded from company executives boxes of documents about what happened at Lehman and why. Where are those documents?
- Why hasn’t President Obama insisted on public hearings over what happened during this financial crisis?
- Why are we not looking to change our current civil and criminal racketeering statutes, which are playing a perverse role in investigations of the crisis?
Do any reporters have the backbone to ask these questions of Obama and his economic team?