Attorney General Eric Holder’s testimony to Congress last week also confirmed the latter point: some banks are so big that the Department of Justice is afraid to bring legal charges against them, for fear of how that would affect the economy. Senator Warren of Massachusetts continues to press this issue relentlessly and very effectively.
via Simon Johnson: Big Banks Have a Big Problem – NYTimes.com.
“The problem was not a lack of information,” Binyamin Appelbaum writes in the New York Times. “It was a lack of comprehension, born in part of their deep confidence in economic forecasting models that turned out to be broken.” It was total systemic failure, from 2006 into 2008, to diagnose a crisis and act to stop it, based partly on overconfidence that, in the economy, we had built an unstallable machine — that the plane could, quite certainly, fly itself.
Truth and Traditions 