But regulators don’t operate in a vacuum: Press coverage and regulation (and lawmaking, for that matter: See finance reform) go hand in hand. At its best, as in this case, it can be a virtuous circle—regulators pick up on something the press does or vice versa, and push the story along or press coverage makes it more likely that regulators act. We don’t know what facts the Times dug out on Christmas Eve that the SEC didn’t already know, but we do know the regulator is more known these days for its near-comic haplessness than for its competence and aggressiveness.
At its worst, this relationship between press coverage and regulatory enforcement helps explain the failures of both in the years the financial industry went off the rails. One doesn’t work without the other. The press prepares the ground for regulators—and the other way around.
For the public, the Times was there first. That matters.
This is kind of interesting:
http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/003253.html
" Do you noticed what Alan Greenspan left out here? It's not just he "knows" most of the people who profited off this crisis. HE'S WORKING FOR THE RICHEST ONE. John Paulson made literally billions of dollars by betting against the housing bubble, and hired Greenspan in January, 2008 before everything completely collapsed. (And not just that: Paulson also took a fraction of his billions and endowed an Alan Greenspan Chair in Economics at NYU.)
In other words, either Greenspan just called his boss a man who's not particularly insightful and just got lucky...or Greenspan (and Paulson) know this is the line of crap you have to peddle to the rubes. I'm going to guess it's the latter.
2. Greenspan is conflating two very different things. Yes, it's hard to call when a bubble will collapse, which is necessary to do in order to make lots of money. In fact, if Dean Baker—who'd been pointing out the bubble since 2002—had been a hedge fund manager, he might well have lost all his clients' money by betting that the bubble would collapse before it did. But it's not difficult to know if a bubble exists. And that's what matters for the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
EXTRA CREDIT: Alan Greenspan is also extremely worried that we won't have the political will to slash Social Security and Medicare."
This needs some more reporting. None of these guys have their interests aligned with the public.
#1 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 19 Apr 2010 at 06:23 PM