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Earth to Doug Holtz-Eakin

I had thought I was done with the occasional Doug Holtz-Eakin-bashing after the 2008 campaign. I only did it because I felt that he not only should, but did, know better. So in a way it was a compliment. And indeed much of the time during the 2008 he was saying inconvenient but true things, rather than those crazy hack things that a campaign normally assigns to run-of-the-mill politicos, rather than to serious credentialed economists.

But now I see word (from a number of sources) that Doug is joining the organized Republican dissent from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. They are not only filing a dissenting report stating that there was nothing wrong in the way financial institutions were operating - it was all Fannie, Freddie, and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (that evidently slow-acting time bomb that also somehow exploded across Europe) - they also demand (and vote) that the words "Wall Street," "deregulation," "interconnectedness," and "shadow banking" be expunged from the report.

My apologies to Doug and the others if this report is incorrect. But if true, this is disgraceful and indefensible. They are trying to muddy indisputable truths, for what can only be crass reasons that involve (I presume) ideological agendas and campaign contributors. This amounts to playing with matches by a fuel tank, given the risk (or should I say certainty) of all this happening again if too little is done to address the underlying causes of what happened.

One cannot honestly and in good faith dispute "interconnectedness" and "shadow banking" (a.k.a. non-bank banking for regulatory purposes) as actual phenomena that were near ground zero of the 2008 financial crisis. I know there are career costs to inconvenient honesty, but there are also many careers that one can have.

Full post as published by Start Making Sense on December 15, 2010 (boomark / email).