The Consensus on Big Banks Starts To Move
By Simon Johnson, co-author of 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and The Next Financial Meltdown
The ideology of unfettered finance is crumbling. Whatever you think of the merits of the Goldman case from a legal or short-term perspective, the SEC’s allegation – and Goldman’s response – have further moved the mainstream consensus away from “finance is generally good” to “big banks are frequently scary.”
Senator Ted Kaufman should get a great deal of credit for his well timed charge on this issue – as I argue in BusinessWeek/Bloomberg. But Lloyd Blankfein also gets an inadvertent assist, quoted in the Financial Times yesterday as saying that the SEC case against Goldman would “hurt America.”
Mr. Blankfein is starting to sound – and act – a lot like Nicolas Biddle, head of the Second Bank of the United States (by far the most powerful commercial bank of the day), during his confrontation with President Andrew Jackson in the early 1830s.
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