A Srinivas Rao
I cannot but contain the quiet indignation and outrage while watching the film “Inside Job” (2010) by Charles Ferguson. The film is an intelligent critique on the financial crisis of 2008 pieced together with good research into the “Fall of the Wall” of our present times i.e. Wall Street. This film while a critique on the disastrous consequences of deregulation in the financial services industry in the US, throws into the foreground the underbelly of corporate cupidity and caprice and more so the hollow posturing of professionalism. That the US Federal Reserve is influenced, not merely by lobbying by, but staffed by Wall Street at its highest levels of policy making (Rubin, Paulson, Geithner-almost as though Goldman Sachs and Citigroup ran the Treasury) to stymie any regulation of the industry shows how thin the Government line is, in being a custodian of a public trust and espoused values. That, the champions of deregulation included several professors and economists from the best Business Schools and Economics faculty (Summers, Bernanke, Hubbard, Mishkin) makes it sound almost hopelessly corrupt. While some have pointed out that it was the Democrat led Clinton Administration that not only repealed the Glass Steagall Act in 1999 but initiated wholesale deregulation, purportedly against the campaign contributions by professional services firms, it is a partisan view. In this entire tale what gets overlooked is the fact that the genesis of this lay in dissolving the sentinel like vigil for over seven decades, the regulation to avoid conflict of interests and monopoly power instituted by the New Deal of the depression years of 1930s and in it lay the foundations of the institutional infrastructure of the American Corporation; the prototype for all corporations worldwide.
