Meredith Whitney on Charlie Rose:
The larger issue that is so important to focus on is something your friend Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote about, which is the whole notion of what are the rules? What is a contract and how do we protect contracts? How do we protect the legal system in this country? Because if the rules are constantly changing, you are going to have a freeze in commerce, you are going to have a freeze in spending, which is obviously a freeze in commerce, and people are going to be too scared to act. And I think a lot of companies have already behaved that way. They are too scared to act because the rules are changing on them constantly.
It doesn’t even matter if they’re wrong to think this and/or act this way. If they do, it has terrible consequences. You can’t compel people to have faith.
A paradigm shift, a political transition is a perilous time. Some of the personnel issues affecting the new Obama administration are apparently tied to the problem of purity – the desire for a clean break. But such a change may be impossible: you can’t just sever the ties between the government and the financial sector. They’re far too intertwined. It’s the equivalent of de-Baathification. You have to affirm the financial sector, warts and all, to attain power in the U.S.. It’s how the world works today. There is only gradualism when taking apart a bomb.
Update: President Obama: “It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger. You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk [to] them, ease that finger off the trigger.”