Laugh hard it’s a long way to the bank
One would hope this is a day of reckoning for the nation’s top bank executives when they testify before a House committee. Most likely though, it will be a toothless dressing-down, where executives squirm their way out of accountability, and rationalize symbolic sacrificial gestures like flying coach.
But after yesterday’s shocker when U.S. Treasury Chief Tim Geithner unveiled his $2.5 trillion rescue plan for banks and was ridiculed by investors, we kind of went, “huh?” And when Geithner finished, the Dow dropped a grim 382 points. Shares of Bank of America, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley fell 10 ten percent, and Goldman Sachs fell 8 percent. Appropriately.
Pundits cried now isn’t the time for on the job training. Well, blaming the messenger, the new guy, is par for the course without memory of how we got here. There’s no easy way out. One of the more radical solutions is a nationalization of banks. But let’s face it: A $2.5 trillion bail out might already qualify as nationalization in some Nordic countries. Grist contributor Tom Philpott, says “rather, as the banking system teeters, we should be thinking about other finance models, other styles of economic development.” To address the dilemma, he will examine two books : Woody Tasch's “Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered” and “Gus Speth's The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability.”
Both sound like a pretty good read and we’re especially excited to cross from crisis to sustainability. Um, who isn’t? In his review, brilliant environmental reporter and Columbo look-alike Ross Gelbspan wrote on the latter: This book is an extremely probing and thoughtful diagnosis of the root causes of planetary distress. But short of a cataclysmic event---like the Great Depression or some equally profound social breakdown---Speth does not suggest how we might achieve the change in values and structural reform necessary for long-term sustainability. "People have conversion experiences and epiphanies," he notes, asking, "Can an entire society have a conversion experience?" You just wait writer boy. The bank is calling.
