Showing posts with label PBS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PBS. Show all posts

Apr 26, 2009

Moyers Delivers on the Financial Crisis

Bill Moyers' Journal features an exhilarating conversation with scholars Simon Johnson and Michael Perino on the economic crisis.

The conventional wisdom is that the financial chimeras, like CitiBank, Bank of America, and AIG, who are targets of popular outrage, receiving massive government bailouts (to prevent a depression and promote a recovery), comprise too-big-to-fail entities. If they go down, we all go down.

"The guys who remain are more powerful, okay? And their position is, 'Look, if you want a recovery, if you want get your economy back, you've got to be nice to us,'" said Johnson.

Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT's Sloan School of Management, and Perino is the Dean George W. Matheson Professor of Law at St. John's University School of Law in New York.

Johnson blogs with James Kwak on The Hearing at the Washington Post.

Apr 24, 2009

Bill Moyers to Host Simon Johnson and Michael Perino

What to know a critical step in the economic recovery?

Bill Moyers Now tonight will host Simon Johnson and Michael Perino on the demand for a new Pecora Commission, an investigation into the causes of the great crash and depression demanded by an angry American public.

Much New Deal regulatory legislation was passed as a direct result of the findings of the Pecora Commission.

That's what's missing now, a full public accounting and understanding of what went wrong and why and where we going.

The Obama administration has addressed these concerns, but mostly in generalities and absent an indictment of the regulatory, structural and political failings, a pointing of fingers that it has apparently resolved to avoid.

Its efforts on transparency and accountability are welcome, seemingly sincere, but incomplete.

For genuine insights into what is happening and where we need to go on the political end of pointing fingers, watch Bill Moyers Now. One of Moyers' guest tonight is Simon Johnson who has written perhaps the best feature-length piece on the crisis in The Atlantic: The Quiet Coup (May 2009).