Tuesday, February 10, 2009

We need emergency remedial financial training for all these elected lawyers before they make the current mess much, much worse.

From Paul Kedrosky:

"
Congress Needs Remedial Financial Training

I’m as upset at the Fed, Treasury, and Wall Street as the next semi-sane person, but Congress pisses me off too. Just try to watch today’s hearings with too many House and Senate members getting basic terminology wrong (“default credit swaps”?); implying that people without money in a brokerage account aren’t dependent on financial markets; confusing income statements and balance sheets; babbling in a fact-free way about a return to the gold standard; and so on.

It’s so, so, so discouraging that these politicians are on the signing side of centi-billion dollar checks flowing into the financial system. We need emergency remedial financial training for all these elected lawyers before they make the current mess much, much worse."

Me:

"We need emergency remedial financial training for all these elected lawyers before they make the current mess much, much worse."

Sometimes, people ask me why I keep quoting Burke or Dr. Johnson or Adam Smith or Groucho Marx on today's topics, and I never know quite what to say. But I do, really. Listening to politicians today is painful. On the other hand, people called pundits today seem equally as bad. No one ever tells them "I don't believe that you know anything about what you're talking about."

The other day, a poster questioned my view of Bagehot. I spent a couple of hours answering him. Finally, I just put together a list of people who agree with me. I couldn't believe that I was taking up time, including my own, talking about Bagehot, when there's hardly a person on earth who cares about him, beyond a certain small number of fanatics. I had to explain to the person that this isn't my job.

I can only stand putting these questions into a worthier form of discourse. That's why I don't blame all the focus on Keynes, no matter how silly it gets. At least he could write and had a general knowledge that he could apply to economic questions. That's why I read the blogs that I read. It's important to know that somewhere on earth people can still make sense.

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