Answering Without Answering

From left,
--Lloyd C. Blankfein of Goldman Sachs
--Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase
--John J. Mack of Morgan Stanley
--Brian T. Moynihan of Bank of America.

I sure hope we get a LOT of coverage of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.  I'm not in the mood for the newspaper to serve up a lot of Bread and Circuses when stuff like this is going on.  The questions being asked by this commission are some of the most important ones of the entire decade.   

And what are their answers? Not much.  Economist-pundit Paul Krugman notes, tongue in cheek, "If you were hoping for a Perry Mason moment (on Wednesday) — a scene in which the witness blurts out: 'Yes! I admit it! I did it! And I’m glad!' — the hearing was disappointing...". 

But for me, as a scientist, the absence of answers can be an answer in itself.  When these smartest-CEOs-in-the-room get up there and say It's all a mystery to us ("an act of God" (?!) theorized the CEO of Goldman-Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein) then we're at a moment where, to loosely  quote Donald Rumsfeld, there's what we know, what we don't know, and WHO we know doesn't know.  That who  would of course be these four fellows pictured above

So far WBAI-FM has covered the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission better than NPR.

Photo Credits from left, Hannelore Foerster/Bloomberg; Jin Lee/Bloomberg, Jin Lee/Bloomberg, Sara D. Davis/ Getty

Comments

[Peter]

As an ex-lawyer (who like to think he thinks like a lawyer when he wants to), I'm always struck by how few of these congressmen know how to cross-examine witnesses. Those who know how should be given far more time than the inept questioners.

I always end up screaming, "Ask him that! Ask him that!" at the TV, so I rarely watch this kind of stuff.