Thanks for sharing, EZ.

Sheila Bair, along with former Commodity Futures Trading Commission chair Brooksley Born, on the accounts I have seen, come off as among the saner voices of reason on how to think about the appropriate policy conclusions to draw from the huge changes in the financial sector over the years (former Goldman Sachs high-level executive Gary Gensler, who turned against the Clinton Administration's anti-regulatory stance by 2002, is portrayed as another).

This, from Ron Suskind's excellent Confidence Men, pp. 171-172, on Born: 

A showdown of sorts occurred in 1998, when the CFTC's commissioner, Brooksley Born, said that something must be done to better regulate that already sizable world of financial derivatives.  Born, once a pioneer in her own right as the first female editor of the Stanford Law Review, found herself across the table from a group of unsympathetic men: virtually every senior financial figure or regulator of that era, from Rubin and Summers to Alan Greenspan and then-SEC chairman Arthur Levitt.  The financial services industry had been fighting with strength and success for more than a decade to keep their flash-fire terrain of financial derivatives separate from the rules--such as collateral and clearing requirements or standardized contracts and open trading exchanges--that governed the trading of sleepy, "tangible" products...Born was unconvinced by their pitch of having created a brave new world.  A financial product was still a product, she asserted, every bit as sensitive to issues of price discovery, fair dealing, credit and collateral, shortages, gluts, and market panics as were silver or soybeans.  Larry Summers, leading a regulatory vanguard of men, disagreed and was soon on the phone, from his office as Deputy Treasury secretary, "with thirteen bankers."  He brusquely lectured Born...The next meeting was face-to-face with all the men--including the trio of Greenspan, Rubin and Summers--who said she must cease and desist.  They said a golden age was dawning, in which sophisticated investment houses had created new, ingenious ways to manage risk.  Born stared them down, quiet, sober, and unmoved.  She'd spent her whole life as the lone woman in rooms of supremely confident men; she wouldn't budge.  After the meeting, the Clinton Administration's regulatory barons, egged on by Wall Street, went to Congress and had her agency neutered.

What followed was a Cambrian explosion of derivatives traded OTC, or "over the counter," in the dark pools managed by the investment banks, large commercial banks, and related financial firms...

A real tell for me will be whether, if Obama does win, Tim Geithner, or someone with a worldview and commitments similar to his, is our next Treasury Secretary. 

Suskind would not state this as his conclusion but I conclude based on his reporting that Geithner--along with Summers and Emanuel--was during the first two years of this Administration simply insubordinate.  They did not seem to understand that they are there to serve the President, to carry out the President's wishes.  Some of them might have thought they'd *like* to be the President, or at least have the role of decider-in-chief, on economic policy.  And some of them clearly did believe they knew better than the President, apparently concluding from that that therefore it was ok to do what they thought rather than what the President wanted.  Never mind that no one voted for Larry Summers or Rahm Emanuel or Tim Geithner.

Our country could, for starters, sure use a Treasury Secretary who understands that s/he works for the President and is obliged to carry out the President's wishes whether they agree or disagree with a particular decision.  We also could really use a Treasury Secretary who does not see his job as the Wall Street megabanks' chief lobbyist in Washington, strategically located inside the Executive branch of the US government.  I tried but was unable to discern, in Suskind's rich account, any evidence of Geithner making any distinction whatever between what Wall Street megabanks wanted, versus what was in the broad public interest.  At least during the first 2 years of this Administration, which is as far as Suskind's account extends. 

It was famously said during the post-WWII era heyday of General Motors that what was good for General Motors was good for America.  For Tim Geithner, what is good for high finance (or, more accurately, what high finance says it wants--the two do not appear to be the same) is good for America.  At least during its heyday, when that sentiment was expressed, General Motors didn't arrange for bailouts from the taxpayers, at any time, let alone after their own disastrous and irresponsible decisions had left them in desperate need of one.    

Bair's book is getting favorable reader reviews at amazon so far.  Have you read it, or, do you plan to?

Since I've quoted and otherwise drawn extensively from the Suskind book in this thread I'll link to some of the pushback the book generated at the time of publication, a little over a year ago, in a Washington Post piece : http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/book-portrays-dysfunction-in-obama-white-house/2011/09/16/gIQAdxloYK_story_1.html

I love Summers' classic non-denial denial in his quoted email.  So typical of how this town operates.