Quote of the Day (November 26, 2008)
November 26, 2008
"Now, obviously, [Oppenheimer Securities analyst] Meredith Whitney didn't sink Wall Street. She just expressed most clearly and loudly a view that was, in retrospect, far more seditious to the financial order than, say, Eliot Spitzer's campaign against Wall Street corruption. If mere scandal could have destroyed the big Wall Street investment banks, they'd have vanished long ago. This woman wasn't saying Wall Street bankers were corrupt. She was saying they were stupid. These people whose job it was to allocate capital apparently didn't even know how to manage their own...."
-- Michael Lewis, "The End of Wall Street's Boom," Portfolio magazine (December 2008)
Posted by DJ | November 26, 2008 at 09:56 AM
Truth be told, it's not just the "bankers" who were stupid here. The stupidity reached down from the congress all the way to the consumers. And besides, with junk bonds and dotcoms, it's not like we haven't seen Wall Street types acting stupid previously.
It looks like "bankers" have replaced "big oil" as the faceless authors of our miseries nowadays....