Suddenly, the agenda has changed.
Focus has shifted from discussion about stalled health-care and cap-and-trade legislation to fundamental issues about the country's — and, for that matter, other countries' — longterm economic and financial stability. We have not had this discussion since the 1930s, when independent commissions' recommendations led to such measures as the Glass-Steagall Act, separating commercial from investment banking.
We probably should have begun the dialogue more seriously in 2009. Entering 2010, smaller banks continue to fail, small business can't get financing, public resentment is building about the greed and insensitivity of big-bank managers whose reckless risk-taking caused the present distress, and our domestic unemployment rate seems likely to remain at or near an official 10 percent through most of the year. A recent walk around Seattle neighborhoods revealed empty spaces and store fronts where thriving businesses existed only a year ago.
Let's start with the global issues. At the see-and-be-seen annual global economic conference at Davos, Switzerland, the tone this year was decidedly different than in others.
Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, observed that the financial crisis had caused fundamental changes between banking and government. Taxpayer money, he pointed out, had rescued the financial system. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in the meeting's keynote address, declared bankers' speculative behavior as "indecent behavior that will no longer be tolerated by public opinion of any country." One banker at the meetings remarked that big bankers now ranked with terrorists as objects of public scorn.
Here at home President Obama, accompanied by former Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker, announced last week that he saw the need for tougher financial regulation, including abandonment of the "too-big-to-fail" doctrine which, during the recent bailout, appeared to dictate that government would rescue a handful of huge financial institutions, whose failures would have wide repercussions, while abandoning smaller ones whose balance sheets might have been healthier. Volcker had been lobbying for such a policy through much of 2009 but had been rebuffed by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and White House economic czar Larry Summers.
During the same week Geithner was subjected to brutal congressional questioning regarding the financial bailout. Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, the real savior of the situation, was confirmed by the Senate for a fresh term as chair, but only by a 70-30 vote — sending a message of congressional unease with past policy.
Sunday's New York Times contained reviews a new book by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz, now at Columbia University, in which he castigates Summers for his championing of financial deregulation in the Clinton administration, as also
