Rich Bastards Find Common Ground In Preserving Rich Bastard System
7th October 2009
Tim Cavanaugh at Reason magazine doesn’t like investment bankers much.
I’ve seen this fear of the appearance of conflict of interest before. It never translates into any concern that you might actually have a conflict of interest and thus shouldn’t be doing what you want to do. That pattern holds here: At several points in Sorkin’s story, officials who used to work at Goldman or Morgan, who have multiple professional and personal overlaps with the firms, are quickly granted waivers from Treasury and Fed conflict-of-interest rules so they can help out their old allies. Hypocrisy being the tribute vice pays to virtue, we should probably be grateful that anti-conflict niceties exist at all. But it’s just the old constitution-is-not-a-suicide pact dilemma: The rules exist right until the moment they’re actually needed; then you suspend the rules.