Danny Schechter - ColdType

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lying anyone, including their own auditors and Boards who
might question them.
“It amounts to little more than the temporary dominion
of a bully, writes Lewis Lapham in a special issue of Lapham’s
Quarterly on money, “The bully is bigger than it was, bigger
and harder to see in the massive cloud of metaphor circling the
globe at the speed of light. How then identify the perp with a
name, age, license number and last known address?”
The arrogance of these CEOs is now being used to offer up
a psychological rationale for the financial crisis, as writer Malcolm
Gladwell does in the New Yorker, writing “the first wave
of postmortems on the crash suggests a third possibility: that
the roots of Wall Street’s crisis were not structural or cognitive
so much as they were psychological.”
Responds James Kwak of the Baseline Scenario website:
I think this is a bit much. The fact that some Wall Street
actors were megalomaniacs does not change the facts that
regulators did not regulate, or that rules and guidelines were
inadequate. Nor is overconfidence inconsistent with incompetence….
… all of these problems are endemic to modern American
capitalism, not just Wall Street banks (although Wall Street
trading floors are particularly fertile breeding grounds for
overconfidence, given the nature of trading gains and losses,
and the amount of money being made). I would tend to put it
more in the category of problems that will always be with us
than the category of specific causes of the financial crisis.
Neither Gladwell or Kwak even cite crime as a factor, much
less the factor. That is another problem that will “always be
with us.”