I finally got around to seeing Inside Job, Charles Feruguson’s Oscar-winning documentary on the 2008 Crash.
Oy. It’s depresssing on many levels, as it does a great job of explaining the roots of the whole mess.
What it’s particularly good at it is explaining not only the revolving door between the top banks and the government, which I already knew about, but — and here’s the part I didn’t really understand — that there was a third revolving door — academics.
These guys would alternate positions at, for example, Morgan Stanley, the White House, and Columbia University (while they took overlapping consulting gigs in which they didn’t always tell things like they were).
The Occupy movement is calling for a lot of these bankers to go to prison — and so is Feruguson. And they probably would have if Eliot Spitzer hadn’t killed his own career.
(By the way, I was a little relieved that although members of the tribe were represented in this gang, the bad guys weren’t all Jewish — we don’t need to add any more fuel to the Elders-of-Zion fire.)
I have no idea if the worst offenders will ever be prosecuted, much less serve time, but can we get them to be at least kicked off the faculty of these august, Ivy League universities?
And while we’re at it, can we also make sure that anyone who told the Congress and the President that deriviatives didn’t need to be regulated … can we make sure that these folks never get a job in government ever again?