What Have We Learned?

Others may favor Nine-inch Nails; for verbal wallpaper, I tend to lean towards public hearings on C-Span. This weekend this has meant the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, rather grandly misnamed as the "New Pecora Commission." It's not as awful as it may sound: Phil Angelides (the chair) and Bill Thomas (the vice-chair) are both wonky smart, and the level of questioning (at least) is on the whole higher than you might expect for this sort of spectacle. From the bureaucrats there is the usual display of bureaucratic butt-covering and from the private sector, the predictable projection of astonished dismay at the idea that anybody might think they were in any way involved with the problem. I did, however, garner two important takeaway points from the array of private-sector luminaries:

1) Nobody had the slightest reason to suspect any of this was going to happen; and

2) Risk was, at all times and without exception, properly priced.