If ever there were a sign that things are going our way at last—the ‘our’ in this case referring to us regular folks—it’s the news that the Royal Bank of Scotland is now worth 7 percent less than yesterday and Bank of America 6 percent. Of course, it’s just one day, and who knows how serious Obama is about getting real reform of Wall Street out of our lapdog Congress or whether he’ll be able to do it having wasted so much of his political capital trying to please both. But the symbolic shift from Geithner to Volcker was swift and delightful.
Volcker is the former Fed chief who kept saying the collapse of 2008 should lead to structural reform in the rapacious and overstuffed (shall we add ‘criminal’?) financial sector while Geithner’s solution was indistinguishable from those of banker lobbyists. So finally we have someone in charge who thinks the destruction of millions of jobs and the loss of millions of family domiciles should have some consequences for those responsible so that it can’t happen again.
It took losing Ted Kennedy’s seat for Obama to figure out THAT? I’m glad he got hip, but I still don’t know what planet he really lives on.
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