People Who Got Lost Suggesting Path Forward
I like writer Michael Lewis a great deal, but his latest piece for the NYT OpEd page irritated me. Yes, it was an obvious idea, having Lewis co-write a long piece on Where We Go From Here with David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital. And yes, the recommendations with which they close, while superficial, are correct, albeit obvious and not new.
But my trouble with Lewis is that while he is a felicitous and funny writer, he missed most of what was important about the current crisis. He has spent more than two decades trafficking in Wall Street superficialities and light entertainment, rather than using his insider status to help people understand why systemic financial risks are growing and likely to cause immense societal damage. To treat him now as an objective and informed observer with an eye to the financial path forward is, well, difficult to justify.
To give just one example, and as he has conceded, his new book “Panic!†started off as being about why most market panics turned out to be less consequential than market participants thought they were were, from the crash of 1987, to the dot-com bubble, etc. He had planned to apply the same approach to subprime crisis, but the real world overtook him and he found out his usual irreverence was inappropriate in the circumstances. This time was different, even if Lewis has made a career out of essentially saying that nothing is new under the sun on greed-driven Wall Street.
After having read all of this you still want to read Lewis/Einhorn, you can read it here and here.
