Courtesy of Pam Martens.
As far as we can tell from his online bio, George Melloan has never worked a day inside a Wall Street firm – at least not in the past half century since that time has been spent writing or editing for the Wall Street Journal. But that small detail does not in any way inhibit Melloan from telling those of us who had long careers inside the belly of the beast how we should revise our thinking about what we saw and heard with our own eyes and ears.
Michael Lewis, Yves Smith, Frank Partnoy, Gretchen Morgenson, Greg Smith, Nomi Prins (all with a strong foundational basis for their writings from having worked on Wall Street) apparently need to be set straight by Melloan’s outsider views.
Nomi Prins has just came under the sharp pen of Melloan in a Wall Street Journal review of her new book, “All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power.” As we have previously written, this book is so timely and important to the national discourse that even Melloan has a tough time hating it, writing that Prins “spins an enormous amount of research into a coherent, readable narrative. Even her frequent kvetches about the lifestyles of rich and famous bankers are entertaining.”
But then there’s that word “spins” in the above sentence. That’s what Melloan has been forced to convince himself of — that we Wall Street expats are spinning our facts and distorting his outsider’s narrative.
Melloan, who characterizes everyone who does not see things his way as a “populist,” says that Prins adheres to “populist tradition” and treats history “as a long-running conspiracy of powerful money lenders against ordinary folks like herself.”
Prins, like any ethical reporter, goes where her facts lead (and she backs up those facts with 69 pages of footnotes). If Prins found “a long-running conspiracy of powerful money lenders” it’s because every serious Senate or House investigation in the past century has found a Wall Street conspiracy.
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