The New Republic

Conflicts of interest? Wall Street's financial stranglehold over Washington?

Only someone oblivious to the systemic, historical relationship between New York and Washington would make this point without a shred of irony.

Ben and Simon discuss the particular conflict above as though, aside from one or another potential weak link in the chain, the relationships between Wall Street and Congress were pure as the driven snow.

And sound too.

Maybe Congress should invite them to Washington when "reforming"  the regulatory constraints on the banks is in full swing. They can help point out the needles in the regulatory haystack that might need some tweaking. Then, along with the Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, they can assure the world the crisis is over and will never happen again.

The bottom line is this: Eisler and Johnson focus their attention on the corruption flowing from Wall Street, South down I95, into the Oval Office and Congressional banking committes. But listening to their "analysis", one would never be inclined to investigate the relationships from Washongton to New York.

[not to mention the manner in which this narrative is taken up by the media and spun around and around]

One gets the impression the federal govenment WANTS to stop all the embedded conflicts in interests---but the guys on Wall Street are just too shrewd for them.

Johnson in particular comes off as the deer caught in the headlights. He can't quite grasp how the same relationships just keep going around around in the same circles. He's puzzled: why do they keep going back to the same people? It's perplexing: why do Wall Street firms wedge themselves into relationships that put themselves on both sides of the fence.

This all quite "strange" to him.

For example: George W. Bush, Geithner Inc., Goldman Sachs and the New York Fed. A very "strange" relationship indeed. Why didn't anyone make note of how this might strike some as analagous to the fox guarding the hen house?

george walton

- iambiguous

May 19, 2009 at 7:33pm

Ben "Easy on the" Eisler

- mcorey.geo

May 19, 2009 at 8:23pm

Why is Johnson the only one at TNR voicing this common-sense, obvious meme?

Perhaps because he's not angling for a post-journalism job at, er, Government Sachs or some  carpetbagging bankshare-speculator?

- teplukhin2you

May 20, 2009 at 1:16am

Erwin Chemerinsky, founding dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law, defends Obama's

- Anonymous

May 20, 2009 at 5:31pm

In part two of an interview with TNR , Bruce Riedel, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co

- Anonymous

May 21, 2009 at 4:19pm