Last edited Sat Mar 14, 2015, 01:39 PM - Edit history (1)
Friday, 25 February 2011 16:43
by: Dan Gardner
In the words emblazoned on the cover, they were "The Committee To Save The World."
Truly, they were supermen. But where are they now?
The G20 finance ministers met in Paris recently to talk about the meltdown of 2008, the imbalances in the global economy today, and the threat of disasters to come. The meeting produced only an ambiguous statement but Jim Flaherty, Canada's finance minister, boasted that Canada was instrumental in brokering the agreement -and would continue to push toward Flaherty's goal of an international system for identifying dangerous imbalances and correcting them before anything explodes.
Doesn't that sound like a job for The Committee To Save The World? After all, The Committee saved the global economy during the Asian meltdown of the late 1990s. Or so Time said. If they saved us before, they can do it again. Right?
Sadly, Flaherty must find new superheroes, for The Committee To Save The World is no more.
The third member of The Committee -the lumpy and glum one -was Lawrence Summers. In 1999, he was the Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, then Secretary. His career has been up and down since. More down than up.
The second was Robert Rubin. He was Treasury Secretary in 1999. Later, he joined Citigroup and made more money than a Roman emperor. But today, he's best known as the guy who convinced Bill Clinton that derivatives didn't need to be regulated. Which is a big reason why 2008 blew up real good.
The smirking superhero was Alan Greenspan. It's hard to remember now but there was a time when we worshipped the man. He was a genius. He knew everything. Or almost everything. For one thing, he didn't know that unregulated shadow banking combined with easy money would produce an explosive capable of demolishing the global economy. That was rather a big thing to not know.
Having been thoroughly discredited, The Committee To Save The World will never again be asked to save the world.
more at link:
http://www.dangardner.ca/articles/item/107-hooray-its-the-committee-to-save-the-world.html
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