From today's WaPo:
"When bankers are particularly confident, when the industry and others are especially vocal about the costs of regulatory burden and international competitiveness, and when supervisors cannot yet cite recognized losses or write-downs," Cole said, "we must have even firmer resolve to hold firms accountable for prudent risk management."
Easy to say now when it's too late. The rest of the article talks about Geithner's feeble attempts to do just that when he was head of the New York Federal Reserve.
Everybody knows that real life in the mainstream America is just an extension of high school, and Geithner is like the nerd appointed monitor with the task to make the jocks on the football team behave during homeroom. Not gonna happen. Powerful people get what they want unless people with more power stop them.
It seems that for this Wall Street crowd you need people with a police or prosecutor's mentality to play the regulator's role--not some chummy wannabe. I suppose there are people who are the financial regulator equivalents of a Patrick Fitzgerald, but they would never get appointed during a Republican administration. Let's see if Obama finally changes things up so that it's not just the rules that are tough, but also the people who are appointed to enforce them.
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UPDATE: As if in answer to my question where is the Patrick Fitzgerald for the financial industry, Moyers interviews William K. Black, who is that guy. He strongly indicts both the fraudulent behavior of America's elite bankers and the Obama administration for covering up their fraud. If a sledgehammer is what is needed to take down the corrupted Wall Street system, he's one guy we should all call upon to swing it.