Equal opportunity destroyer

Barry Ritholtz is lamenting the wasted days and nights and opportunities of Barak Obama:

The Tragedy of the Obama Administration

On election night six years ago, I wrote The Tragedy of the Bush Administration.

The rest of that piece went on to lament how George W. Bush was granted that rare opportunity to grab the brass ring, to rise to the occasion — and failed miserably.

Here we sit, not half a century later as originally surmised, but a mere six years later. I once again find myself lamenting the opportunities wasted by a US President in response to a great cataclysm. In the case of President Obama, it was his response to the financial crisis. The opportunity for greatness presented itself, and was . . . ignored.

And what an opportunity it was: Over the prior 3 decades, the economy of the United States had been “financialized.” We became much more involved in ‘financial engineering’ than any other more productive engineering. Along with this financialization came increased revenue for the biggest banks and investment houses; greater profits, influence, and power. A wave of deregulation swept over the sector, freeing the banks from meddling oversight.

Thus, as the finance sector got larger and more important, it was paradoxically under ever less scrutiny, supervision, and regulation. With that new found freedom from oversight, the banks promptly blew themselves, and the global economy, to smithereens.

This was the environment in which the President came into office. What did he do in this scenario?

• He appointed two of the architects of the crisis to major White House economic positions: Lawrence Summers as CEA Chair, and Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary.

• He made the enormous tactical error of focusing on Health Care Reform, while the banking crisis was still in full flower.

• He failed to marshall adequate resources to respond to the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.

Yes, like his Yale, Rhodes Scholar and other predecessors, President Obama (Harvard) has shown that Wall Street is an equal opportunity destroyer.