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Warren on the Bailout

By Ethan Brown

Must-read interview with Elizabeth Warren in the Boston Globe today.

Numerous critical points from Warren.

• 1--No clear goals from Treasury for TARP
• 2--The financial services industry wants to operate in a business as usual environment.

But Warren rightly points out that "their system has collapsed." Worse:[More...]

the insiders don't seem to have appreciated the seismic shift in their world when they need money, gifts, subsidies from outsiders. Anyone who thinks that they can take tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money and continue to operate business as usual lives in a fantasy world that I don't understand. Culture clash? No! This is not a culture clash. This is not about taxpayers who don't get it. This is about people who think [in a] fantasy, that their world is prosperous and continues to create value that can be parsed out privately, when they are relying on huge subsidies from the taxpayer. It's just wrong!

• 3-- Warren grasps the huge moral dimensions/implications of the bailout:

  Every time I do the paperwork for the panel and note a $10 billion expenditure, I think about how many schools that might have built, how many hospitals that might have updated. Those dollars are not just ink on a page. They're real.

• 4--A better, more just system can emerge from this crisis or we can go back to the old ways of staggering through boom-bust cycles.

  It's the design of the rules going forward that will tell us or that will determine whether we are moving to a cyclical economy with high wealth, high risk, and crashes every 10 to 15 years. Or whether we will emerge, as we did following the new regulatory reforms in the Great Depression, with a more stable economic system that benefits people across the economic spectrum. It's an amazing moment in history.

It is indeed. And Warren is one of the few public figures rising to the moment with real integrity and with the public interest at heart.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on April 12, 2009 (boomark / email).