- Garrett Morlan
Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner has become the government whipping boy of the financial crisis. One of his loudest critics is Senator Maria Cantwell, who has openly wondered why he still has a job. Is she on to something?
Geithner’s role is so complex it takes an expert on the banking industry just to explain it, much less to have an opinion about it. Adam Haslett—who has spent the last five years researching the financial industry for his new novel, Union Atlantic (reviewed in last Sunday’s NYT Book Review)—makes sense of it, and weighs in on whether Geithner is good or bad at his job, in The Stranger this week. It’s a fascinating analysis, well worth your time, even if (like me) most of what you read about the financial industry makes your brain hurt.
A sample:
The argument seems to be that if you prevent people from earning $60 million a year, then all the “talented” ones will leave the regulated banks for firms where they can earn that much or more, and this will be bad for America’s banks and thus the country. Talented? Really? I mean, seriously.
And:
The banks that were too big to fail are bigger now than they were before the crisis began—much bigger. As far as the economy goes, we may be only at the midpoint of the crisis.
And:
For the last 30 years, government policy makers, Geithner among them, have accepted the basic fallacy that the free market is a natural phenomenon and thus, ultimately, a subject of science rather than politics. This, more than any particular policy decision or response to the crisis, is the ethical and intellectual failing at the heart of American governance in the conservative era. To treat the economy as a beast that must be kept in good health rather than a collective human effort to fairly order all the various enterprises of life. To treat it as an invention of nature rather than of man.
As long as the media remains entranced to this notion, reform will remain mired in half measures. The fact is, all corporations are artificial entities granted charters by the state. And the state is us. We establish the rules by which they function. They are no more a phenomenon of nature than a voting booth or a school-board meeting.
You gotta read this thing. It’s right HERE.
