Who's To Blame For The Financial Crisis? : NPR

I, for one, am beginning to loathe that I waste any of my time watching cable TV news and opinion programs.  The quality of the talking heads on MSNBC, Fox and CNN is (perhaps always was) in free fall.  I can, perhaps, tolerate Chris Mathews a bit; I terribly miss Tim Russert -- but he mainly did his Meet the Press show rather than much specific to cable.  But I don't realize most of the cable programs are just so much cotton candy until I hear real debate.

I most realize it when I actually listen to real, substantive, witty, thoughtful, hard, and fact laden debate.   Like the difference between a quality hard-wood cabinet maker and a rough carpenter.  Yeah, they both work with wood, but one's a craftsman and the other, well, a day laborer.

Listen to this recent debate on NPR's program Intelligence Squared.  I've not heard the full podcast quite yet.  I caught the last half of it airing this evening on my way home from work (far too late).   The debate - the proposition - "Blame Washington More Than Wall Street for the Financial Crisis" - was timely and really made me think.   The panel exchanged polite barbs (distinct from the often thoughtless vitriol of left/right pundits on cable programs), pushed their position with both factual support as well as comical retorts.  There's a few great lines in this -- the best that I heard was from John Steele Gordon who stated that

While Wall Street constantly needs reform...it does not need reform as much as Congress...Institutions tend to evolve in ways that benefit their elites ... the poster child for this is [not Wall Street but] Congress...People lament that Wall Street took its checkbook down to Washington to get the regulation it wanted rather than have stricter regulation.  But Wall Street was not [in Washington] debauching a virgin, it was paying a harlot.

In the end, the position taken by Mr. Gordon and Niall Ferguson (for the proposition) won more of the audience's change over vote.  They convinced me.  While there's plenty of blame to go around, when systemic risks crashes down the house, those holding the reigns of the regulatory structure are ultimately accountable.   In any event, if you are following the debate concerning the financial crisis, you'll want to hear this and see who convinces you.

via Who's To Blame For The Financial Crisis? : NPR.