The quarter's Ms. Magazine

[ismnotwasm]

is especially good. I know not everyone is a fan of Ms. or NOW but I wanted to point out one article.

The article is about Brooksley Born, A DC lawyer who warned of the dangers of the derivatives market in 1998.

The article starts:
"What is it about women who have the courage to be whistle blowers, to stand alone and speak truth to power?
Brooksley Born whose prescient warning in 1998 about th financial bubble was crushed by some of the most powerful men in Washington, epitomized that truth teller
"Part of it may be because women are not permitted to be totally insiders in these cultures--like the culture of financial regulators," Born, who was then head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)recently told Ms."Women may be somewhat less invested in being supportive of their friends, or of the conventional wisdom, because they are not quite insiders
I did feel to some extent as though I was the little body saying, "The emperor doesn't have any clothes. The reason the little boy could say that was he wasn't yet sufficiently part of the culture to know that it was unacceptable for the emperor not to have any clothes on."
If only Born's voice ad been heeded when she said that the unregulated over-the-counter (OTC)"derivatives" market needed oversight. Think of the banking meltdown that might have been avoided. Think of the homes, pensions and jobs lost, the millions impoverished.
Yes it is that simple: There was nothing inevitable about the current financial melt down other that the stupidity, greed and arrogance, that enabled it. The price for not heeding Brooksley Born will be paid for generations to come.

More in this article here
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2009/marapr/features/born.html

and a Wiki page on Ms. Born
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooksley_Born

(---yes virginia, economics *is* a feminist issue, concern and fight---)


Later in the article I found this very interesting, in part because I've always that Larry Summers was a pig, and never understood his appointment;

"During a congressional conference committee meeting on an appropriations bill, an amendment was added preventing the omission from taking any action on over-the-counter derivatives for six months," Born told "Washington Lawyer "This occurred within a month after Long-Term Capital Managements collapse!"
Lawrence Summers, who would take over from Rubin as the head of Treasury the following year, had presented the case for a see-no-evil policy before the Senate Agriculture Committee on July 30, 1998:
"in our view," he said "the release has cast the shadow of regulatory uncertainty over an otherwise thriving market." Summers insisted that the "sophisticated financial institutions" who were party to derivatives contracts were "eminently capable of protecting themselves from fraud and counter party insolvencies" and that there would "seem to be little scope for market manipulation."

How hollow those assurances sound a decade later when Summers, born again as the top economic adviser to President Barack Obama, helped draft a proposal to Congress calling for the regulation of those derivatives because there had been so much market manipulation by financial institutions.

Larry Summers. Still a pig

[ThomCat]

1. I will never understand why the people who are consistenly wrong

keep getting promoted, just because they are cooperative good ol' boys, and the people who are right keep getting fired.

Larry Summers is a perfect example. He has never been right about anything ever in his entire career. He is apparently an economic imbecile. But he is the go-to guy to enable corruption.

At some level there really should be people concerned about who was right, who knows what they are really talking about, and who was able to do things right.

It is really disheartening that at every level, no matter how high you go, being part of the crew, being one of the boys, will always get you up to the top no matter how badly wrong you are.

Even in an Administration that promised all kind of "Change we can believe in," and was supposedly going to ban the influence of lobbyists, nothing has changed.

:(