You were warned. It’s always worth some digging through the archives when things fall apart. This article from 1999 in The New York Times suggests at least some modern-day Nostradami predicted what might follow from bank deregulation:
Congress approved landmark legislation today that opens the door for a new era on Wall Street in which commercial banks, securities houses and insurers will find it easier and cheaper to enter one another’s businesses…
The opponents of the measure gloomily predicted that by unshackling banks and enabling them to move more freely into new kinds of financial activities, the new law could lead to an economic crisis down the road when the marketplace is no longer growing briskly.
”I think we will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930’s is true in 2010,” said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota. ”I wasn’t around during the 1930’s or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was here in the early 1980’s when it was decided to allow the expansion of savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness.”
Prescient. Not that anyone listened… the measure passed the Senate with a vote of 90 to 8; in the House it went through 362 to 57.
Finally something good to come from the recession. Folio mag says celebrity magazines might not survive the GFC. That’s the best unexpected benefit from the economic downturn since the people responsible for muzak went bust.
Why the safest place to be is up in the air. Jonah Lehrer has written a book about how humans make decisions (not very well apparently). In an interview with SEED magazine, he explains that humans aren’t necessarily natural decision-makers and sometimes overriding what seems instinctive isn’t such a bad thing…
… pilots have really rigged the system: First, they have learned how to make decisions because they practice it, and they’ve also developed systems like autopilot, all those computers in the cockpit that help them compensate for the innate limitations of the human brain. That’s why, as bizarre as it sounds, the safest place to be just about anywhere is 30,000 feet up in the air traveling at 500 mph.
Parisians, not rude, just impossibly polite apparently. Argument ici.
