I confess that whenever I hear Robert Rubin, what Oliver Cromwell once said to Parliament springs to mind: “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately … Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”
The urge came upon me when I read Mr. Rubin’s latest attempt to vindicate himself in Newsweek (”Getting the Economy Back on Track)”.
As one of the people whose policies threw the global economy off the rails, Rubin may be uniquely qualified to provide solutions as to how to get the economy back on track. But that would presuppose that the man actually acknowledged mistakes (as some of his other Goldman Sachs/Clinton Administration colleagues, such as Gary Gensler, have done) and displayed at least a marginal understanding of where he went wrong.
No such luck. We get the usual self-serving “nobody could have possibly predicted a crisis of this magnitude” right at the start:
While some people saw one or more of these factors, virtually no one involved in the financial system — whether institutions, investors, regulators, analysts, or commentators — recognized the breadth of forces at work or the possibility of a megacrisis, and this included the most experienced among us. More personally, I regret that I, too, didn’t see the potential for such extreme conditions despite my many years involved in financial matters and my concern for market excesses.
Actually there were ample numbers of people who recognized the makings of a mega-crisis. But they were generally ignored, marginalized, and shunted to the sidelines. Ask former CFTC head Brooksley Born if Mr. Rubin manifested any concern for market excesses when he was Treasury Secretary. In a Treasury Department meeting of a presidential working group that included Born, Greenspan, Larry Summers and Rubin, each took turns attempting to change her mind. Rubin took the lead, she recalls. “I was told by the secretary of the treasury that the CFTC had no jurisdiction, and for that reason and that reason alone, we should not go forward,” Born says. “I told him . . . that I had never heard anyone assert that we didn’t have statutory jurisdiction . . . and I would be happy to see the legal analysis he was basing his position on.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/robert-rubin-is-back-noooooo-2010-1If this asshole worms his way into the administration, my head will fucking explode.
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