Have been catching up on US writers recently, and having just come into the office to discover our parent company is to be nationalised, I'm hoping those sleepless senators listened to voices like Joseph Stiglitz
If, as Paulson claims, banks get paid fairly for their lousy mortgages and the complex products in which they are embedded, the hole in their balance sheet will remain. What is needed is a transparent equity injection, not the non-transparent ruse that the administration is proposing. [...] The fourth problem is a lack of trust, a credibility gap. Regrettably, the way the entire financial crisis has been handled has only made that gap larger. [...] With lack of oversight and transparency the cause of the current problem, how could they make a proposal so short in both?
Aside from really pissing me off (odd getting pissed off at finance ministers but there's a first for everything) this comes just days after Tim started posting a set of thought pieces on transparency (he asked me to help with these which is how transparency has become an overnight obsession) which introduced me to Alan Knight and his organisation, Accountability.
Tim has posted a video of Alan talking about the need for credibility in the markets and the development of reporting and assurance in the markets. In particular, he describes using wikis as tools to empower the stakeholders of his new accountability standard.
Now there's a thought, didn't your mom tell you to never let yourself get pushed into things? Shame there wasn't time for congress to invite constituents to help write the recovery bill together via a US governement wiki!
