He is no more, nor less, than the kind of student that Calvin Trillin wrote about earlier this week.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/opinion/14trillin.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1255655156-uww6HXH8tWN0AusBRg/f8A

Thanks for the Trillin link. That's a great piece. Trilin's (possibly apocryphal) character has it right on the nose — though he fails to note one additional factor, which is that there were no smart people in government, either.

Actually that's not quite true. The problem with the American body politic is not that gifted people don't go into politics. It's that they go into politics with an eye to eventually going into industry.

Actually even that isn't quite true. There are smart people in government. It's just that there aren't very many, and so the overall culture is deeply unimaginative and stolidly conformist. If you're bright and ambitious it's difficult to get anywhere. The ones who succeed are the ones who make sure, in Karl Rove's immortal words, to "be careful not to get too far out in front" of anything new or controversial.

So you have a situation where a bunch of eager investment hounds come to the government and ask for deregulation so they can do wild, new, crazy things with mortgages. Then they come back a few years later and ask for more deregulation, so they can do mortgage derivates. And then risk-laundering. And then just no risk assessment whatsoever.

For the last quarter of the 20th century, the stolid, low-risk, uncontroversial position to take in any given situation was always in favor of deregulation. If someone came to you and said, "This will unleash the power of the free market," they pretty much could get whatever they wanted.

And none of the people who were other than stolid and risk-averse had any interest in letting their imaginations wander down the path of deeper skeptical inquiry. They had jobs waiting for them, after all, once they wrapped up their public-sector work in a few years. Even with no bribes, no funny business, no insider deals, all they had to do was just not get around to looking too closely at what they were doing.

As someone noted upthread, absolutely no one is much concerned with even appearances these days. I find that the most frightening aspect of all.

They don't think there's anything wrong with what they're doing.

It's hard to overstate that fact. These are the people who really, genuinely, seriously believe that they were the ones who "didn't go overboard," who didn't do any of the crazy or illegal stuff that got some of the other firms in so much trouble.

The thing is, they have something of a point.

So far as anyone can tell, almost every single one of these people stayed entirely within clearly defined legal boundaries in the course of doing what they did. Their gimmick was that they kept enlarging the boundaries as they went along. But that whole process took 30 years, and has never been anything other than completely above the board.

That's why Calvin Trillin's piece rings so true. There were people who saw this coming — some with enough money to make a preemptive divestment when it really mattered, and others for whom it was simply the subject of wild howling in the wilderness of general indifference.

It's just that there was a) no money to be made on Wall Street by looking too closely at what they were doing, and b) the nation's legislators, and the general public that elects them and holds them accountable, did not give a rat's ass about any of this until after the economy was starting to topple.[1]

Having been permitted, if not indeed encouraged, to drive the world financial sector over a cliff by an eager public, why would these guys have any modicum of doubt about their fitness for the job of managing the cleanup? They can't see anything wrong in what they did in the first place. So they were greedy. They're bankers.

What then do we do now? Normally it's the job of the loyal opposition — the party out of power — to go after the sitting administration over things like this. But the Republican Party isn't well at the moment, and while we're waiting hopefully for the seizures to subside it will be up to the rest of us to do what we can.

Maybe it's time to revive the idea of selective payments to legislators who are on the right side of these issues. These are people who like to have the lines between their votes and their re-election campaigns drawn for them as clearly as possible. We can't start getting ready for next year's election soon enough, right?

1. In fact, it's probably the case that prior to the crash, the general public, with its asinine knee-jerk opposition to any sort of regulatory imposition on big business, would have opted for even less accountability for the financial sector if the decision had been directly up to them.

There are many boneheaded systems that are imposed on us by conniving power elites. But the self-destructive regime of high finance that has brought the world to its knees is not among them. We chose it ourselves. That fact is probably never far from the thoughts of the people in the White House who think about whether there will be any real repercussions from a Goldman-Sachs dominated Treasury Department.