Mystery Men of the Financial Crisis

[Joanne98]

Now that we have pulled back sufficiently far from the near “destruction of the modern financial system” — as the former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson described the events of 2008 in his new memoir, “On The Brink” — to focus on how to prevent such a calamity from recurring, the time has come to hear from those players in the drama who really know what happened and why.

Until people such as Warren Spector, the former co-president and head of the fixed-income division at Bear Stearns, and Dan Jester, a mysterious former Goldman Sachs banker turned Treasury official — among many others — come forward and share with us the roles they played before, during and after the crisis, there is little hope that the members of Congress working on financial reform legislation will be able to craft a bill that will succeed in its mission, and the longer they will spend dithering with the ill-conceived ideas being pushed by the former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker.


Who the heck is Dan Jester? And why isn’t he telling us what he did during the A.I.G. bailout and other pivotal moments of the banking crisis?
.To date, these elusive but important Wall Street executives have kept an exceedingly low profile, hoping against hope that the whole thing just blows over. We can’t let that happen. There is just too much at stake now, and Wall Street has proved repeatedly over the past 40 years — since the firms went from private partnerships (where partners had their entire net worth on the line) to public companies (where bankers and traders were encouraged to take huge risks with other people’s money) — that it is incapable of regulating itself.

We need to get beyond the amusing political theater of the recent Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission hearings featuring tight-lipped Wall Street chief executives like Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman, John Mack of Morgan Stanley and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase — and the artfully crafted statements they compiled with the help of $1,000-an-hour Wall Street lawyers. We need to hear the nitty-gritty of what caused the crisis from the people who know why things happened the way they did but haven’t yet been asked to speak up by someone with subpoena power.

Continued>>>
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/mystery-men-of-the-financial-crisis/?hp

[WhiteTara]

1. I hope they get to talk to the men in grey suits

whose faces we never see. They are definitely the ones in the know.

[pleah]

2. K&R

[Uncle Joe]

3. Kicked and recommended to subpoena Jester.

I believe the author makes valid points regarding effective regulatory reform but I wouldn't totally dismiss Volcker's ideas out of hand.

Thanks for the thread, Joanne.