Aram Zucker-Scharff

“Ever wonder why the economic experts never seem to change, keep coming back, despite racking up such shattering failures as the housing bubble and the financial crisis and the bank bailouts? Ever wonder why a guy like Larry Summers gets to be chief economist at the World Bank, then gets to deregulate Wall Street, then gets to bail Wall Street out, then almost gets to become chairman of the Fed, and then gets to make sage pronouncements on the subject of—yes— inequality? It’s for the same bad reasons: Because D.C. worships expertise and because Summers, along with a handful of other geniuses, are leading figures in a professional discipline dominated by what a well-informed observer once called a “politburo for correct economic thinking.””

– All these effing geniuses: Ezra Klein, expert-driven journalism, and the phony Washington consensus.

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Why Obama’s Regulators Let Wall Street Bankers Off Easy

If there’s anything more maddening than the sheer scale of the financial fraud that sent America and the rest the planet spiraling into the economic abyss in 2008, it’s the fact that no Wall Street bankers have gone to jail for causing the mess. As in zero, zilch, none at all.

So at his farewell party last month to celebrate a lengthy career at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—the US regulatory agency that supposedly keeps Wall Street in check—James Kidney, a trial attorney who had been hamstrung for years by indifferent bosses, broke his silence and went off on an awesome rant about how no one in the financial sector fears the body supposedly policing their behavior. The SEC, in essence, is a joke.

Describing it as “an agency that polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors,” Kidney told an audience of fellow employees that they had dropped the ball because of a revolving door of corruption between the SEC and Wall Street megabanks. “I have had bosses, and bosses of my bosses, whose names we all know, who made little secret that they were here to punch their ticket. They mouthed serious regard for the mission of the Commission, but their actions were tentative and fearful in many instances,” he said.

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I’ll keep it brief. This site is not normally the place where I address politics or “The News.” I’ve been following the riots around Occupy Oakland with significant concern. However, we’re here to talk about storytelling and there is something going on that you shouldn’t miss when it comes to Occupy Wall Street and storytelling. […]

Image via Wikipedia While Timothy Geithner’s tax issues are troubling, the real issue is not what he was doing when he was filing with the IRS, but what he was doing when working for the Fed on Wall Street. Let’s get the obvious issues out of the way first. Geithner’s tax problems are severely troubling. Over […]