Monday, April 5, 2010

How Washington Abetted the Bank Job

from the NY Times. The title of the article frames the issue as malpractice of government regulatory agencies. This tends to obscure the fact that such agencies function at the behest of the ruling class embedded in the financial institutions. As the authors admit:
Our bank regulators were not, as they would like us to believe, outside the disco, deaf and blind to the revelry going on within. They were bouncing to the same beat [as the banks].
 Nevertheless, the article does put the lie to the claims of Bernanke and others who deny any responsibility for what happened.
Well, the truth is this: The collapse of Enron back in 2001 revealed that the biggest financial institutions, here and abroad, were busy creating products whose sole purpose was to help companies magically transform their debt into capital or revenue.