Thursday, November 24, 2011

Your Philosopher Kings in action, a comedy in one act

By the Bard of the Hudson, Jon Stewart.




About spot on, if you ask me.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Please summarise for those in Canada. Apparently we're not cool enough to watch videos on the interwebs.

Borepatch said...

Anonymous, the gist was that John Corzine was CEO of Lehman (maybe Goldman Sachs). Then he became a big shot New Jersey politician. When he lost reelection, he went to another Wall Street firm as CEO, where he ran it into the ground with a risky, over-leveraged bond strategy.

Jon Stewart is basically mocking the idea that politicians can provide oversight to Wall Street, because they came from Wall Street and return there.

Strange that the video is blocked in Canada.

WoFat said...

Stewart does a fine job, from time to time.

MSgt B said...

HAppy Thanksgiving Patch!

Anonymous said...

Thanks, Borepatch. Yeah, if the video's source is NBC, Comedy Central, or a couple of others, we can't actually watch them up here. I dunno why, I guess they figure their advertisors haven't paid up for viewers in the Canadian market. *shrug*

But yes, Wall St. and Washington are conjoined twins. I suspect that this is probably the case here too, but we never notice since we spend so much time watching what goes on to the south.

Dave H said...

Anonymous: There are funny licensing rules about passing copyrighted material across national borders. It's a holdover from the day when print publishers and authors sold rights to different people in different countries.

Jon Stewart's point was that as an elected official John Corzine said we needed strong regulatory oversight to prevent financial firms from taking too many risks with thier customers' money, but as a financial firm CEO (after he left office) he took the very same risks, and lobbied his contacts in the government to keep regulators off his back.

I think he did it to make a point. "See? I told you this would happen."

Anonymous said...

If you have female company, think of something sentimental to discuss before you start slicing. When your eyes tear up, walk over to her and give her a hug [url=http://www.delicious-potato.com].[/url]