Quickthink

Yoga these days is known as a relatively mild form of exercise. But there was an earlier time when a yoga master named Pierre Bernard created a wild cult around his yoga teachings. He was called the Great Oom, and was one of the more colorful characters who wandered around New York in the 1920’s. Robert Love has written a book about the Great Oom, and it is an interesting story, complete with a reference to elephant enemas. Here is a link to the review by Janet Maslin.

The disaster in Wall Street will start off a wave of investigations why regulators seemed oblivious of the risks involved. So it is no surprise to see one of the first of these, a report by Steve Labaton of NYT. Steve tells us how — back in 2004 —  the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) handed over the keys to the regulatory kingdom to the five big investment banks. How? By lowering capital reserve requirements so that the banks could get much more deeply into —- well you know what.  AND relying on the banks computer models to track what was happening. NOT ONLY THAT, the SEC then apparently did not even staff the department that was supposed to keep an eye on this.

Ah well, and I thought that the incompetence at the top of FEMA during the Katrina disaster was a shock.

Chris Cox, Chair of the SEC during this time,

please take a bow. You get the QT “Honey I shrunk the Financial System” bonehead award of the decade.