Post-Crisis Wall Street Suffers Convenient Amnesia

With bailouts, Treasury went too easy on financial industry
By Matt Cantor,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 13, 2009 11:22 AM CDT
Post-Crisis Wall Street Suffers Convenient Amnesia
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson arrives to speak about markets and climate change at he "Resources for the Future" in Washington, Monday, Jan. 12, 2009.   (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

We keep hearing that “Wall Street as we know it ended” in September 2008, but in fact, “the great upheaval of last fall may not have been severe enough,” writes David Weidner in the Wall Street Journal. The government formed a financial “death panel,” choosing which firms to bail out and which to let fail—and now, the rescued entities are railing against government regulations, apparently having forgotten the crisis.

"The root of the problem" is “Wall Street's rising resentment toward critics and its unabashed defense of greed over safety.” JPMorgan’s CEO has slammed regulatory practices, having seemingly forgotten that his firm would have been “leveled” without the government’s help. “The thing about the government-run death panel is not that it put some of these firms out of their misery, it's that it let those carrying the disease live,” notes Weidner.
(More Wall Street stories.)

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