Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Politico’s Ben White appears to have joined the Maria Bartiromo be-kind-to-Wall-Street camp. Bartiromo lectured fellow participants on Meet the Press last September that “We need to get beyond the conversation of is Wall Street evil.” (Perhaps the statement should be phrased: “Wall Street needs to stop being evil so we can get beyond that conversation.”)
White took it one step further last week, suggesting in a column that Wall Street is fully reformed and no longer dangerous, thanks to those omnipotent folks in the Nation’s capitol whose financial reforms have gotten Wall Street purring like a kitten.
In a piece preposterously titled “How Washington beat Wall Street,” White writes that “In 2009, Washington went to war against big Wall Street banks hoping to blow up the kind of high-risk, high-reward strategies that helped spark the financial crisis. Five years later, that war is largely over. And Washington won in a blowout.”
If there was any blowout, it was on the tires of that financial reform caravan in Washington.
The article frequently feels like White has slept through the last five years – he certainly slept through the September 23, 2013 Time magazine cover story that explained in excruciating detail “How Wall Street Won.” White must have also snoozed through all those Congressional hearings of the last two years documenting how Wall Street was still rigging markets and looting consumers around the globe and how JPMorgan snuck its high-risk derivatives trading over to London and lost $6.2 billion of its depositors’ money – long after the Dodd-Frank reform legislation was in place.
White’s view of things is so outlandish in this column as to seem like a Saturday Night Live spoof. For example, White writes: “Morgan Stanley, Goldman’s one-time bitter rival in the swashbuckling world of high-risk trading, is transforming into a staid money management firm with a side business underwriting stocks and offering merger advice.” Notice that there is no mention of Morgan Stanley’s highly suspicious oil and gas empire.
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