Monday, July 14, 2008

Financial meltdown quote of the day

From the International Herald Tribune:
"The real outrage is that none of this had to happen," said William Fleckenstein, co-author of "Greenspan's Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve" and president of Fleckenstein Capital in Issaquah, Washington. "We did not have to ruin the financial system and ruin the financial lives of a huge chunk of the middle class in the United States.

"It is crystal clear," he adds, "that the Fed not only made mistakes, they had the pompoms out, cheering for deregulation. Until people recognize why we are in this mess, I don't see how we get out of this thing."
For the record, way back in the early part of this decade Bill Fleckenstein was the first person in the press I'm aware of who recognized the housing bubble for what it is. He writes a weekly article for MSN Money.

2 comments:

  1. if you speak out, you are dismissed. that's the lesson former Treasury Secretary John Snow learned, that's the lesson former OFHEO Director Armando Falcon learned.

    our politicians (i'll never again refer to them as "our leaders") are owned by Wall Street and corporate lobbyists, not American interests.

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  2. Much of the financial leadership in the US cannot be trusted to make reasonable decisions.

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