Jeffrey Sachs Calls Out Wall Street Criminality and Pathological Greed One of the things that Matt Stoller has stressed that the possibility of reform is remote until breaks within the elites take place.
Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia professor and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia, is a controversial figure for his neoliberal stance on macroeconomics and his role in promoting the use of "shock therapy" in emerging economies. But it is also important to recognize that criticism from a connected, respected insider has more significance than that of someone like Bill Black, who has made a career of taking on bank fraud but has never reached a top policy-making level. This talk is blistering at several points. It was recorded at a conference "Fixing the Banking System for Good" on April 17 (hat tip Jesse). If you have trouble with the embedded version, try YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7VOWnnEphjI#! 10,800 views (12:30) I believe we have a crisis of values that is extremely deep, because the regulations and the legal structures need reform. But I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis right now. I'm going to put it very bluntly. I regard the moral environment as pathological. And I'm talking about the human interactions that I have. I've not seen anything like this, not felt it so palpably. These people are out to make billions of dollars and nothing should stop them from that. They have no responsibility to pay taxes, they have no responsibility to their clients, they have no responsibility to people. counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and feel absolutely out of control, in a quite literal sense. And they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent and they have a docile president, a docile White House and a docile regulatory system that absolutely can't find its voice. It's terrified of these companies. If you look at the campaign contributions, which I happened to do yesterday for another purpose, the financial markets are the number one campaign contributors in the U.S. system now. We have a corrupt politics to the core, I'm afraid to say.and both parties are up to their necks in this. This has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans. It really doesn't have anything to do with right wing or left wing, by the way. The corruption, as far as I can see, is everywhere. But what it's led to is this sense of impunity that is really stunning and you feel it on the individual level right now. And it's very very unhealthy. I have waited for four years, five years now, to see one figure on Wall Street speak in a moral language and I've not seen it once. And that is shocking to me. And I've waited for a judge, for our President, for somebody and it hasn't happened. And by the way, it's not gonna happen any time soon, it seems. Clearly, Sachs is not taken by Lloyd Blankfein's "doing God's work" claims, nor by the hectoring of overstretched consumers to make their debt payments after banks got overt and back door bailouts, and continue to be subsidized by savers via ZIRP. We can only hope that Sachs' direct talk emboldens others at his level to speak up. _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
