Janine Wedel - Unaccountable - How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt Our Finances, Freedom, and Security

83. In 2010, Rubin rebutted his many critics, saying that he did, in fact, support such regulation in the broader sense. But as journalist Dan Froomkin points out, even if he was theoretically worried about derivatives, he hardly did enough practically to stem the threat and, in fact, was part of the group opposing Brooksley Born’s 1998 push to regulate. Rubin said that the 1998 opposition stemmed from very specific legal advice he received, not from an ideological opposition to regulation in general. See Dan Froomkin, “Rubin: I Actually Supported Regulating Derivatives.” Huffington Post , June 6, 2010 (updated May 25, 2011) (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/20/rubin-i-actually-supporte_n_545113.html).

In a late 2009 Newsweek article titled “Getting the Economy Back on Track,” Rubin counsels the public on economic recovery and on what went wrong. Though he had top jobs at Citigroup and Goldman, he describes his career in a most vague way: “many years involved in financial matters.” Newsweek ’s author bio lists him as a former Treasury secretary, co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow of the Harvard Corporation, but no corporate title is to be found therein. Robert E. Rubin, “Getting the Economy Back on Track.” Newsweek , December 28, 2009 (http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/12/28/getting-the-economy-back-on-track.html).

84. Institute for New Economic Thinking, “Panel Discussion—Rising to the Challenge: Equity, Adjustment and Balance in the World Economy.” Bretton Woods Conference, hosted by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, April 10, 2011 (http://ineteconomics.org/net/video/playlist/conference/bretton-woods/R).

85. Jeffrey Brown, “Newsmaker Interview with Lawrence Summers.” PBS, April 22, 2010 (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/jan-june10/summers_04-22.html). Summers also warned against the demonization of mainstream economics by people who “don’t do math” and flagged the dangers of overregulating in the wake of a crisis.

86. In a quick Google search of “Summers apologies,” I found myself on the literary journal McSweeney’s , which had a compilation of Summers apologizing, except that they were satirical apologies. They were takeoffs from embarrassing remarks made in 2005, while president of Harvard, about women and science, and his subsequent non-apology apologies. See: Laurence Hughes, “The Collected Apologies of Lawrence H. Summers, President of Harvard.” McSweeney’s, February 25, 2005 (http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-collected-apologies-of-lawrence-h-summers-president-of-harvard). Those hoping Summers will offer a full-throated “I was wrong” about a far bigger misstep—the deregulation he championed during his tenure—may be in for the long haul.

87. For an initial report, see, for example, “Cracks in the Crust: Iceland Banking Collapse.” Economist , December 11, 2008. For a report on lasting devastation, see, for example, Omar Vladimarsson, “Half of Icelanders Still Struggle to Make Ends Meet, Poll Shows.” Bloomberg, April 5, 2013 (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-05/half-of-icelanders-still-struggle-to-make-ends-meet-poll-shows.html).

88. With regard to neoliberalism, I employ this term only sparingly because it can describe considerably different policies, not to mention differing local adaptations to them. For further detail, see Janine R. Wedel, Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market. New York: Basic Books, 2009, p. 213, note 11.

89. The scholar at the University of Iceland is Stefan Olafsson. See Stefan Olafsson, “Icelandic Capitalism—From Statism to Neoliberalism and Financial Collapse,” The Nordic Varieties of Capitalism, ed. Lars Mjøset. Bingley, U.K.: Emerald Publishing, 2011, pp. 1-52 (http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Nordic_Varieties_of_Capitalism.html?id=aI3pWg-Az4oC). The quote is on p. 24.

90. These articles give a sense of Iceland’s go-go Iceland feel: Jake Halpern, “Iceland’s Big Thaw.” New York Times, May 13, 2011 (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/magazine/icelands-big-economic-thaw.html?pagewanted=all); and Michael Lewis, “Wall Street on the Tundra.” Vanity Fair, April 2009 (http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/04/iceland200904).

91. Roger Boyes, Meltdown Iceland: How the Global Financial Crisis Bankrupted an Entire Country. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2009.

92. See Thorvaldur Gylfason, “From Crisis to Constitution.” VOX, October 11, 2011 (http://www.voxeu.org/article/crisis-constitution-insights-iceland). and Robert Wade and Silla Sigurgeirsdóttir, “Lessons from Iceland.” New Left Review, 65, September-October 2010 (http://newleftreview.org/II/65/robert-wade-silla-sigurgeirsdottir-lessons-from-iceland)

93. See: “The Past (Lucrative) Life of Fed’s Mishkin,” The Wall Street Journal , August 1, 2007, http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2007/08/01/the-past-lucrative-life-of-feds-mishkin/

94. “The Rick Mishkin Steak n Shake Connection.” Time, August 1, 2007 (http://business.time.com/2007/08/01/the_rick_mishkin_steak_n_shake/).

95. Wade and Sigurgeirsdóttir, op. cit.

96. Ibid.

97. The FME stands for Financial Supervisory Authority. See Robert Wade and Silla Sigurgeirsdóttir, “Lessons from Iceland.” New Left Review , 65, September-October 2010 (http://newleftreview.org/II/65/robert-wade-silla-sigurgeirsdottir-lessons-from-iceland), p. 27.

98. Luca Lombardi, “The Case of Iceland—the Illusion of an Amicable Default.” Socialist Democracy, November 2, 2011 (http://www.socialistdemocracy.org/RecentArticles/RecentTheCaseOfIcelandTheIllusionOfAnAmicableDefault.html); for a timeline of the crisis, see BBC News, “Timeline: Iceland economic crisis.” BBC News, February 2, 2009 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7851853.stm).

99. From the Wade and Sigurgeirsdóttir article: “In conditions where the currency was already tumbling, the foreign-exchange reserves were exhausted and there were no capital controls, the peg lasted for only a few trading hours; it was perhaps the shortest-lived currency peg ever. But it was long enough for cronies-in-the-know to spirit their money out of the króna at a much more favourable rate than they would get later. Inside sources indicate that billions fled the currency in these hours” (Wade and Sigurgeirsdóttir, op. cit.).

100. Rowena Mason, “David Oddsson, Iceland’s former prime minister and central banker, turns editor.” The Telegraph, September 28, 2009 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/6240803/David-Oddsson-Icelands-former-prime-minister-and-central-banker-turns-editor.html).

101. Wade and Sigurgeirsdóttir, op. cit.: http://newleftreview.org/II/65/robert-wade-silla-sigurgeirsdottir-lessons-from-iceland#_edn34

The name of the leading Reykjavik daily is Morgunbladid . Roger Boyes writes that the paper “was a mouthpiece for David Oddsson’s Independence Party. Morgunbladid had been founded in 1913 and was the grand dame of the Icelandic press, so grand, and enjoying such monopoly, it chose not to publish on Monday so that its editors could go for long weekends. Parliamentary reporters often sat in on—and contributed to—internal sessions of the Independence Party” (Roger Boyes, Meltdown Iceland: How the Global Financial Crisis Bankrupted an Entire Country . New York: Bloomsbury, 2009, p. 64).

102. Andrew Higgins, “Iceland, Fervent Prosecutor of Bankers, Sees Meager Returns.” New York Times, February 2, 2013 (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/world/europe/iceland-prosecutor-of-bankers-sees-meager-returns.html?pagewanted=all).