The theme of our age

Ezra Klein references the old Shaggy hit "It wasn't me" to characterize Alan Greenspan's testimony yesterday. It's not just Greenspan, Robert Rubin is pulling it too. The point isn't that these people have plausible deniability, they don't, the issue is that there's no real recourse anyone has to hold them accountable. They can lie to your face because there's no consequence. I noted below that institutional investors demand risk so that they can have an opportunity for high returns. This isn't necessarily just from on high, pension funds need the high returns to fulfill their obligations, and those obligations were entered into by labor and management. The fact is that we don't have the economic growth to come through over the long term through a conservative investing strategy, so the managers start rolling the dice. If they fail and it blows up, they're fired, and if they luck out, they're ...