Steven Pearlstein, business columnist at the Washington Post, basically wrote today what I tried to write last night. Only his is much better (and longer). Pearlstein has written the best stuff I’ve seen on this “crisis”. Anyway, I’ll just quote him at length, because it really is that good:
What responsible, honorable people do is apologize for their mistakes, promise that it won’t happen again and vow that they’ll make it up to us once the crisis has passed. But in the past year, we’ve not heard any of that from the titans of Wall Street.
Political systems, communities, markets all share one common characteristic — at their core, they all require a level of trust among the participants if they are going to work. In recent years, we have allowed that trust to erode to the point that our political system is paralyzed by partisan bickering and communities are fractured into enclaves of race and class. Now markets are collapsing because investors realize they have been misled by corporate executives, investment banks, ratings agencies and regulators.
As a country, there is an urgent need to rebuild that trust. In different ways, that is what both the McCain and Obama campaigns are all about. And it is the same challenge that now faces us in this financial crisis. At some level, we all know that we’ve driven the economy and the financial system into a ditch and that we’re going to have to spend some money to get out of it. But until Wall Street can muster the decency, the humility and the good sense to acknowledge its colossal screw-up, it shouldn’t be surprising that Americans are balking at writing the check.
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