A debate that wasn't about 25% of the federal budget

This is all just too much all at once! If John McCain can’t pay attention to the politics and the policy at the same time, how can the rest of us?

I was very disappointed with both candidates tonight with respect to what they would do about the financial crisis. I’ve been trying – and failing – to get a post up on just exactly what is going on. For now, this is the best I've found.

I do think, though, that there are at least two of no-brainers:

1) No one – or almost anyone – is going to jail over this. But if you want to look for wrongdoing, it appears that you can find it at the ratings agencies. Like everything else about this crisis, it’s complex, but the ratings agencies had the wrong incentives if they were calling these subprime mortgage-backed securities AAA. Our government needs to do something about that.

2) You can’t just give a mortgage on any terms to anyone. This is unequivocally an area where we need more regulation.

Why not say those things?

In any case, I do want to say this. Facing what we’ve been told is a historic crisis demanding immediate action on a massive scale ($700B is equal to one quarter of the federal budget; for comparison, I learned yesterday that our annual aid budget to Israel is around $2B), Harvard’s President Faust did a smart thing yesterday in pulling together a number of economic, financial, and legal experts to help us with our self-governing responsibility to understand this thing. Because the fact is, when taxpayers turn over $700B to one person with no strings attached and instructions to fix an urgent and critical problem that is as opaque to most of us as what’s under the hood of our cars, well, pretty soon you don’t just have a financial crisis, you have a democratic crisis.

UPDATE: How neglectful of me. In case you are not in the habit of clicking through to the comments, Pickle Reader Emily left this:

that economic panel is really interesting. highly recommended and available without a login at.

http://post.harvard.edu/haa/html/index.shtml