Depending on your point of view, this is either sad, funny, weird, pathetic, or just idiotic:
The four Republicans appointed to the commission investigating the root causes of the financial crisis plan to bypass the bipartisan panel and release their own report Wednesday, according to people familiar with the commission’s work …
During a private commission meeting last week, all four Republicans voted in favor of banning the phrases “Wall Street” and “shadow banking” and the words “interconnection” and “deregulation” from the panel’s final report, according to a person familiar with the matter and confirmed by Brooksley E. Born, one of the six commissioners who voted against the proposal.
That’s from a report on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission by Shahien Nasiripour of The Huffington Post, emphasis ours.
Well, we suppose it would be unfair to blame these Republicans for being too busy to read this paper by Gary Gorton, from earlier this year:
There is nothing mysterious or irrational about the [financial crisis] panic. There were genuine fears about the locations of subprime risk concentrations among counterparties. This banking system (the “shadow” or “parallel” banking system) ‐‐ repo based on securitization ‐‐ is a genuine banking system, as large as the traditional, regulated and banking system. It is of critical importance to the economy because it is the funding basis for the traditional banking system. Without it, traditional banks will not lend and credit, which is essential for job creation, will not be created.
Except, hang on, what’s that at the top of the paper? … “Prepared for the US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission”.
Oh.
There have been signs of internal bickering within the FCIC for months, and nobody was really surprised when the commission postponed the final release date of its paper to January. But that report will now represent just the opinions of the five Democrats and one independent on the panel.
As Nasiripour writes, here’s what we’re left with:
With four commissioners now essentially going around the panel to describe their thoughts on the roots of the financial crisis, the public may not get the full picture when it comes to understanding how the actions of a few led to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
Instead, the public will receive a report that could be discredited as being partisan, and another that is expected to largely conform with a Wall Street-friendly view that blames government for the crisis.
Another letdown from a high-profile bipartisan panel, though at least the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform managed to be taken seriously and gain support from both sides of the political aisle.
But if the FCIC wants to salvage something from all this nonsense, it could do worse than go with this idea from Reuters columnist Felix Salmon:
Given that putting this report together seems to be impossible, here’s my suggestion: it should go open-source. The FCIC’s great advantage over other narratives of the crisis is its subpoena power: it has access to enormous amounts of information no one else has seen. If it can’t collate that information into a definitive report, it should make all the information public—including everything in that notorious Goldman Sachs data dump—and let all of us have at it. Collectively, we should be able to do at least as well as the partisans in DC.
Agreed.
Related link:
A history lesson for the FCIC – FT Alphaville