Op-Ed Columnist - Making Banking Boring - NYTimes.com - The Diigo Meta page

• 14 Apr 09
  

  Steven Josselson

  economics nytimes finance nyt recession economy paulkrugman wallstreet banking markets financialcrisis deregulation Delicious

• 13 Apr 09
  

  Claude Choukrane
• 12 Apr 09
  

  C Visser

  NYT 20090410 Paul Krugman

• 11 Apr 09
  

  yogi1994
• 10 Apr 09
  

  Jerrell Whitehead
• 

  williamstatler

  cleaning up banking

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  nspalmer

  Krugman argues that we need to "make banking boring again" by reining in its dangerous practices and wildly out-of-control salaries.

  banking recession regulation economics

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  ghostdansing
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  barbcrick
• 

  Tyler Britt

  paulkrugman oped nytimes finance economy banking money boring meltdown

• 

  Bengt Mettinger
  • Instead, however, finance turned into the monster that ate the world economy
  • The banking industry that emerged from that collapse was tightly regulated, far less colorful than it had been before the Depression, and far less lucrative for those who ran it. Banking became boring, partly because bankers were so conservative about lending: Household debt, which had fallen sharply as a percentage of G.D.P. during the Depression and World War II, stayed far below pre-1930s levels.
  • 7 more annotations...
  • • Strange to say, this era of boring banking was also an era of spectacular economic progress for most Americans.
    • After 1980, however, as the political winds shifted, many of the regulations on banks were lifted
    • And the financial industry exploded in size. By the middle of this decade, it accounted for a third of corporate profits
    • Only a few people warned that this supercharged financial system might come to a bad end. Perhaps the most notable Cassandra was Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund,
    • But my sense is that policy makers are still thinking mainly about rearranging the boxes on the bank supervisory organization chart. They’re not at all ready to do what needs to be done — which is to make banking boring again.
    • Part of the problem is that boring banking would mean poorer bankers, and the financial industry still has a lot of friends in high places. But it’s also a matter of ideology: Despite everything that has happened, most people in positions of power still associate fancy finance with economic progress.
    • Can they be persuaded otherwise? Will we find the will to pursue serious financial reform? If not, the current crisis won’t be a one-time event; it will be the shape of things to come

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