I think there were plenty of people who knew it was a disastrous policy. What more did those women provide? Nothing I’ve heard/read.

What these women provided was a totally proper voicing their professional opinion that a great, and obvious disaster loomed in our future if we allowed the markets to continue to self regulate.

In the case of Brooksley Born, she offered a proposal for legislation to regulate derivative trading that was promptly shot down through the coordinated efforts of Greenspan, Rubin and Levitt, who proposed and got a legislative injunction against the CFTC to prevent any further effort on her part to rein in the wayward market.

What happened was the Dems & Repubs were debating how much regulation was/is needed in our system and the Repubs, obviously, wanted to deregulate so they could steal everything that wasn’t nailed down. They also wanted to destroy Clinton’s housing plans to prevent Dems from being seen as successful by the electorate.

No, on the contrary, there was very little in the way of debate, instead of debate, there was a successful effort to marginalize Born and in the end that effort was successful in both stopping her from doing her job, and in dissuading her from further public service.

What’s the obvious reply to that salvo?

Clinton & co decided to let them eat ‘the whole thing’ and they did. Now we see what it’s led to and the Dems are going to roll it all back to safe levels, the ones Ms. Warren and everybody with a brain knew was good. But, more than just *doing* that, they have the public with them now. The public has seen and felt the disaster of the Repub ideas.

Giving Clinton and company credit for letting the Republicans “eat the whole thing” is a weak effort at revisionism, and ignores the simple and might I say obvious reasons Clinton did nothing to stop the run away train that was our economy during his tenure, and that was that we were on the manic and profitable side of an inflating bubble, and Clinton was doing what most politicians do when things are going their way, that is to say nothing.

Now we can really fix the system and perhaps improve it here and there.

Ah, I see, now that we’ve vanquished the evil republicans, we can do a little tinkering here and there, and before you know it, we’ll be rockin’ and rollin’ again. So nice to know that things aren’t really out of control, and all that’s needed is a few adjustments here and there.

Ms. Warren is, as they sometimes say, a talented kibitzer. She comments from the sidelines. But, she isn’t keeping up with the game or ahead of it. She’s commenting on things done 6-9 months ago and she still doesn’t have it all right.

Ms. Warren is the farthest thing from a kibitzer; she’s a totally qualified professional who has been put in a position of responsibility. It is both appropriate and well within her rights, and her job description to raise the issues she has raise and to challenge the continuing fraud that has been, and still is being perpetrated on our country by the leaders of our financial sector, with the aid of our elected representatives.

I, for one am glad that she doesn’t consider her job to be “keeping up with the game or ahead of it.”

Ms. Warren is most certainly not commenting on things done 6-9 months ago, or even 6-9 years ago, she is explaining a decades old, coordinated attack by the rich and powerful, on the regulatory system that until the 1970’s provided a much needed counter to the inevitably destructive forces of greed masquerading as financial innovation.

Harvard prof, eh? Well, they gave us Dubya, so they can’t be all that great.

Your snarky attempt to dismiss Elizabeth Warren as just another Harvard professor, whose status is in some oblique way related to the immensely unpopular George W. Bush, is incredibly telling, and weak.

It has all the earmarks of egotistical ass-talking, but hey, I’m new around here and I could have you all wrong.

Even if the unemployment rate heads up to the low double digits, only about one in ten houses will be dark, but it may be a higher toll for retail, I fear.

Yes, I’d say that’s likely. How bad is entirely unclear. The problem for retail businesses isn’t the mortgages, but the credit market. They’re simply getting cut off by banks with less to loan. And, until things stabilize further it isn’t so likely the gov’t. would dare to inflate the economy to support them.

So, we’re going through a sort of roll-back of the economy. A lot of ground is being lost because of stupid laissez faire economic ideas — so much for Milton Freidman.

As for the mortgages it was more greed and stupidity than fraud. They knew, or should have known, that 100% mortgages on marginal properties at inflated values isn’t a recipe for success. Actually had they been able to peddle their crap, they might have made the money they hoped to make. The music stopped and they were left holding the bag. Tough.

I don’t know if they consciously did this thinking the gov’t. HAD to bail them out, but it certainly looks that way.

For now it appears Treasury is holding them up, but there hasn’t been any announcement that we were going to take all the toxic assets off their hands at full price to ease them of their stupid deals/plans. While they appear to be insolvent zombie banks I haven’t heard anyone say what will become of them down the road. If Geithner’s plan to have their toxic assets sold off to other private entities happens, then they might salvage some value. If not it would appear the banks will continue to let the value of those mortgages slip slide away. If only they had used HOPE for Homeowners to write them down a bit and fix them, then they had hope to save more value. Stupid is as stupid does!

What we need is a massive movement demanding the inmates be returned to their locked down rooms.

Well…there was the election and the Bushies left office. Dunno if they were locked down though.

It seems that we have all the players that caused the crisis employed trying to fix it. They are incompetent or criminals.

Rubin & Geithner were in the Clinton admin., but I don’t recall them having the power to over-ride the Repub Congress. They are far from incompetent.

Criminals? What do you think they’ve done that’s criminal wrt this crisis? Sorry, I don’t see it.

Why is it that so many of the voices that warned us about the inevitible outcome of following the ideology of de-regulation came from women, and why did so many of those women lose their jobs for telling the truth to power?

I think there were plenty of people who knew it was a disastrous policy. What more did those women provide? Nothing I’ve heard/read.

What happened was the Dems & Repubs were debating how much regulation was/is needed in our system and the Repubs, obviously, wanted to deregulate so they could steal everything that wasn’t nailed down. They also wanted to destroy Clinton’s housing plans to prevent Dems from being seen as successful by the electorate.

What’s the obvious reply to that salvo?

Clinton & co decided to let them eat ‘the whole thing’ and they did. Now we see what it’s led to and the Dems are going to roll it all back to safe levels, the ones Ms. Warren and everybody with a brain knew was good. But, more than just *doing* that, they have the public with them now. The public has seen and felt the disaster of the Repub ideas.

Now we can really fix the system and perhaps improve it here and there.

Ms. Warren is, as they sometimes say, a talented kibitzer. She comments from the sidelines. But, she isn’t keeping up with the game or ahead of it. She’s commenting on things done 6-9 months ago and she still doesn’t have it all right.

Harvard prof, eh? Well, they gave us Dubya, so they can’t be all that great.

Given that it was just more rationalization for doing exactly the wrong things they have been doing all along, and refusing even to entertain doing the right things, as the Obama and his team have all along, how and why might I be surprised?