Jun 19 2009
Go ahead and fix the blame, later
Barry Ritholtz posted a comment the other day complaining about the number of folks suggesting that we stop the blame game. His expressed point of view is that we most certainly should not allow those who bear responsibility for the mess we’ve gotten into to get by without being indentified. Moolanomy also recently discussed a series of blame based Time articles. I’m fine with all that, but there are two problems I have with the fixation on blaming.
1) Much of the blaming is being done in a “It’s not my fault” way where folks are trying to make themselves look good (or at least avoid looking bad) by pointing the finger at others. Believe me, there is plenty of blame to go around. Anyone trying to tell you that it’s exclusively the fault of one group or institution is either delusional or misrepresenting the facts to suit their own agenda.
2) The process of sorting out what went wrong is almost always best done when the dust settles and rational thinking can be applied to the problem. We are still too close to events to have a properly unbiased general view on things. The result of trying to sort out blame on the fly tends to be bad decisions made in the attempt to fix or reverse the problems. That’s why I’m not a big fan of this rush to regulation that seems to be going on. It’s almost going to be an over-reaction because that’s the way these things almost always play out.
My major gripe with all this blame business is how Obama and his crew have kept us locked in on blaming the prior administration by constantly droning on about how they “inherited” the current situation. So what? The Bush administration inherited the tech bubble fallout from the Clinton administration. Each administration inherits problems from the prior one. I’d like to see Obama & Co. get over it and stick to forward looking statements. It’s not like he didn’t know what he was getting into. This was a mess well before the election.
Here are some other posts which might interest you:
