Some days I just want to weep

for my country.

Oklahoma City marks 15 years since bombing
By TIM TALLEY (AP) – 44 minutes ago

The Oklahoma City Bombing Anniversary and Home-Grown Terrorism
Jim Wallis
Posted: April 19, 2010 11:53 AM

Could Tea Party Rhetoric Lead to Another Oklahoma City?
April 19, 2010 3:01 PM

Noam Chomsky Has ‘Never Seen Anything Like This’
Posted on Apr 19, 2010
By Chris Hedges

FDIC Closes Six Banks: 48 Shut Down In 2010
TIM PARADIS and MARCY GORDON | 04/16/10 10:10 PM | AP

Investment Banking

Krugman: Looters in Loafers

April 19, 2010, 5:30 am

Last October, I saw a cartoon by Mike Peters in which a teacher asks a student to create a sentence that uses the verb “sacks,” as in looting and pillaging. The student replies, “Goldman Sachs.”

Sure enough, last week the Securities and Exchange Commission accused the Gucci-loafer guys at Goldman Sachs of engaging in what amounts to white-collar looting, The New York Time’s Paul Krugman writes in his most recent op-ed.

I’m using the term looting in the sense defined by the economists George Akerlof and Paul Romer in a 1993 paper titled “Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit,” Mr. Krugman writes. That paper, written in the aftermath of the savings-and-loan crisis of the Reagan years, argued that many of the losses in that crisis were the result of deliberate fraud.

Was the same true of the current financial crisis?

Most discussion of the role of fraud in the crisis has focused on two forms of deception: predatory lending and misrepresentation of risks. Clearly, some borrowers were lured into taking out complex, expensive loans they didn’t understand — a process facilitated by Bush-era federal regulators, who failed to curb abusive lending and prevented states from taking action on their own.
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