But mostly [Bob Freeman] worries about the inexorable march of time, and whether he can ever get back what he lost so suddenly the moment Tom Doonan showed up in his office more than 23 years ago. Whether Barack Obama is a one-term president — as Dick Cheney would have it — or gets a second term, the moment to consider pardons in this administration for those wronged by the judicial system is a ways off. For Bob Freeman that moment cannot come soon enough.

via A Wall Street Witch Hunt – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com.

It’s hard to feel sorry for any of these guys – and let’s face it, he did commit a crime.

Absolutely brilliant. It’s hard to understand why more people don’t get it – the problem is not whether the Democrats or Republicans are in charge of the government.  The problem is that corporations run the Democrats AND the Republicans.  Goldman Sachs has its claws in deep in both parties.  It would be nice to see a Treasury Secretary who had no ties to Goldman, wouldn’t it?  Or better yet, one who has no ties to Wall Street.

Not that there may not be clever guys on Wall Street, but it’s hard to see how someone like Master of the Universe Rubin can come from one megafirm, work as Treasury Secretary, then leave office and go to work for another megafirm and not be considered to have at least a tiny conflict of interest.

via Goldman Sachs on pace for record bonuses: report | U.S. | Reuters.

…Mr. Lewis maintained that federal officials pressured him to keep the merger alive, and acknowledged that his job had been at risk if he did not. But he resisted lawmakers’ efforts to characterize the situation as a threat. And he backed away from earlier statements in which he suggested that Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson had urged him not to reveal Merrill’s troubling state before the merger was sealed, calling them “two honorable people” who had “good intentions.”

via Bank of America’s Lewis Tells of Pressure to Buy Merrill Lynch – NYTimes.com.

I still believe that the federal government’s tinkering with private companies was necessary.  It’s not as extraordinary as many people would have you believe – if federal regulators can prevent a merger, it’s not a large step to imagining them forcing a merger.  But what I find deeply disturbing about this news story is the pressure not to disclose Merrill’s “troubling state.”  Why do we need auditors and Sarbanes-Oxley and corporate governance to ensure the transparency of financial statements if, the first time those statements don’t serve the government’s needs, they are suppressed?

I think we’ll look back on the Paulson/Bernanke/Bush management of the crisis as worsening the whole problem rather than solving it.  I don’t think Obama’s team has been perfect, but either through luck, perception or greater skill they’ve seemed to save Bernanke from the worst of the mistakes he made hand-in-hand with Bush and Paulson.

And now Mr. Obama has apparently settled on a financial plan that, in essence, assumes that banks are fundamentally sound and that bankers know what they’re doing.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Financial Policy Despair – NYTimes.com.

I know Krugman’s a bit too strident and “liberal” (if, by liberal, you mean a Nobel-prize winning economist who disagreed vehemently with Bush administration policy) for many, but he’s showing here that he doesn’t restrict his criticism to the right.  I am no economist, but I am an auditor with a long history of working at the corporate headquarters of these banks, and I could not agree more with him.  The concept of buying up the toxic debt was discarded even by the disastrous Bush financial team, and I was shocked and surprised to see the Obama team even consider it as a good option.

Why is everyone so afraid of nationalizing the banks?  At this point it would probably cost less and arguably might result in some benefits.  To me, the best result of the toxic buy-up would be rewarding the same idiots who caused this mess in the first place.   It’s sad that the Obama administration has so quickly and easily fallen into the pattern of the past few administrations and shown that Democratic or Republican, the guiding philosophy is always corporatism.

Never Say Thank You – NYTimes.com.