Pity the Poor Banks

From the tone of articles in yesterday's and today's Report on Business you would think the Bolshevik vanguard had occupied Wall Street and that revolution was at hand.

The fact is that a key element in the Obama administration's hesitant and belated efforts to reign in the banks was Paul Volcker, Fed Chairman under that noted lefty, Ronald Reagan.

The ineptitude and self-defeating behavior of the banks in the period leading up to the debacle of the past couple of years imposed huge costs on society as a whole. Governments exist in large part to protect citizens from such spillover effects.

Whether through regulation, direct control or the breaking up of institutions "too large to fail", our governments have a duty to prevent and where this fails to alleviate the catastrophic effects of the behavior of the few on the many, whether it is from airplanes flying into buildings or bankers engaging in dubious activities with implicit public backing.

We have spent trillions to rescue these clowns from their own lunacy. At the very least we owe it to ourselves to put measures in place that prevent a repeat, at least in the short term.