The media are really covering the financial crisis as each day brings more revelations. Start today with Louis Uchitelle on Obama advisor Paul Volcker who wants to redivide commercial and investment banking with the latter no longer enjoying a government guarantee but who has been kept out of the decision making link here. Then go link here to watch how the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] was on to the "dark" market in derivatives as a bomb waiting to blow but was blocked in its attempts to gather information on what was happening.

Finally, Felix Salmon directs us link here to Andrew Ross Sorkin's new book, Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System---and Themselves, which breaks some pretty stunning news, dating from the end of June, 2008. At that point, it was still months before the now-famous but then-secret waiver, issued in mid-September, which allowed Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to talk to Goldman Sachs; he'd promised not to do that when he moved from Goldman to Treasury but he did it anyway.

A major feature of all these is the cast of characters, starting with Alan Greenspan, hired by Reagan and kept on by Bush 1, Clinton, and Bush 2, and self-described as a "strong" libertarian and free market ideologue of the Ayn Rand school. Then there is Robert Rubin as Treasury secretary, and his minions, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, most recently joined by FED chairman Bernanke. They and Wall Street are still running things.

Most people are libertarian in some aspects of their political beliefs, but the belief that government is always bad and that markets will take care of, for example, our foreign policy challenges is stretching and has brought us to where we are now.

One of the most striking things about last night's Frontline presentation, was Greenspan's assertion that the wasn't concerned about fraud, since the market would limit it.

Now I know Greenspan probably left graduate school well before information economics really took off, but did he really not follow his field post-grad sufficiently to just not get how information asymmetries breed fraud, and not understand that increasingly sophisticated economic models all pointed to the fact that second-best was as close as we get to anything optimal, and that even this requires structured contracts enforced by some kind of government entity?

Clearly, we have a huge problem with the ideological blinkers that some of our best known luminaries are apparently wearing.

One of the most abysmal aspects of this financial debacle, is that the SAME people that got us into this mess, are receiving accolades for the improvement thats taken place since last years meltdown?!!?!?!?! Why? They seem to keep getting appointed to regulate their own industries... No conflict of interest there.

Think about this, why would a financial exec go from making 200 Mill a year to a governmental appointment that pays 58k??? If that sounds like a setup for a joke, it is :(

I can only think of one reason.. Anyone else?