David Brooks Said What?

Are my eyes deceiving me, or is David Brooks arguing that Gramm-Leach-Bliley wrecked the economy and wondering if it was greed or stupidity that killed it?

Jerry Z. Muller wrote an indispensable version of the stupidity narrative in an essay called “Our Epistemological Depression” in The American magazine. What’s new about this crisis, he writes, is the central role of “opacity and pseudo-objectivity.” Banks got too big to manage. Instruments got too complex to understand. Too many people were good at math but ignorant of history.

The greed narrative leads to the conclusion that government should aggressively restructure the financial sector. The stupidity narrative is suspicious of that sort of radicalism. We’d just be trading the hubris of Wall Street for the hubris of Washington. The stupidity narrative suggests we should preserve the essential market structures, but make them more transparent, straightforward and comprehensible. Instead of rushing off to nationalize the banks, we should nurture and recapitalize what’s left of functioning markets.

Both schools agree on one thing, however. Both believe that banks are too big. Both narratives suggest we should return to the day when banks were focused institutions — when savings banks, insurance companies, brokerages and investment banks lived separate lives.

We can agree on that reform. Still, one has to choose a guiding theory. To my mind, we didn’t get into this crisis because inbred oligarchs grabbed power. We got into it because arrogant traders around the world were playing a high-stakes game they didn’t understand.

Granted, it only took him 16 months into this economic disaster for him to actually figure out what the problem was, but that's progress for the Village. I completely disagree with him that stupidity was the problem and not greed, the banksters knew exactly what they were doing with these securitized pieces of garbage and tried to outsmart everyone in the room in order to make craploads of money.

Still, I can't take too much away from Brooks on this one. He's right: banks got too big no matter how you look at it.