Friday, January 26, 2018

Why are not the absurd risk weighted capital requirements for banks more questioned?

John Kenneth Galbraith in his “Money: Whence it came, where it went” (1975), about such silences wrote: 

“If one is pretending to knowledge one does not have, one cannot ask for explanations to support possible objections” 

“What people do not understand, they generally think important. This adds to the prestige and pleasure of the participants” 

"What politicians do not understand, adds to their fear of that in rejecting the resulting action, they may be doing serious damage” 

Upton Sinclair Jr. would have been more direct with his “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” And so, the Academia (also desperately wanting to be counted among the Pigs on Orwell’s farm) kept silence.