Friday, April 22, 2011

Institutional Corruption on Wall Street

Here is Eliot Spitzer giving a talk at Harvard on institutional corruption on Wall Street. Spitzer begins speaking at 05:18 into the video. At 09:55 he gets down to the topic of discussion:



If you want to get "the bottom line" of the talk, fast forward to 1:11:25 and he summarizes his 10 points. But if you do that, you will be missing an excellent talk on the 2008 Financial Crisis and the corruption that facilitated it. As Spitzer points out many times in this talk: that corruption continues and it is now pointing us toward the next big financial crash.

In the Q&A at 1:16:05 Spitzer gets to my frustration with Obama: a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Sadly, Obama wasted this once in a hundred year chance to ratchet up the people's control of the economy and the government. Instead, Obama listened to advisors who assured him that "more of the same" would do just fine to get us through the crisis. But those "advisors" were deeply implicated as participants in the crisis and their "stay the course" advise has mean a very slow recovery from the Great Recession and no lessons learned on the part of the great malefactors of the 2008 financial crisis.

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