"What, me worry?"
Words.
"It's been a year since the financial system collapsed like a botched souffle, and the sense of acute crisis has eased. The wizards of Wall Street are raring to get back to business as usual -- and if we let them, we'll have only ourselves to blame when the next meltdown comes.
The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve get too little credit for skillfully managing this terrible recession in a way that has kept it from turning into an all-out catastrophe. Too-big-to-fail financial institutions were put on life support or eased into oblivion in creative ways that involved massive injections of taxpayer funds -- but prevented massive defaults. The auto industry, a victim of collateral damage, was expensively defibrillated and once again has a pulse. Nearly 100 banks have failed so far this year -- compared with 25 in 2008 and just three in 2007 -- but depositors' money was saved.
In the process, though, the behemoth financial firms have gotten even bigger. And now that the economy has begun to revive, the stock market is getting happy again. I'm as pleased as anyone else to see a rising Dow, but somebody needs to slap the incipient grin off Wall Street's face."
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