feeding frenzy: "So now he's in "a state of shocked disbelief" about the financial meltdown. I guess that's what happens when someone so powerful finds his lifelong ideology colliding with the real world."

Well said!

Chris Cox of the SEC made even bigger and more costly mistakes - and he didn't even participate in the big bonuses Wall St. got, LOL.

So have we finally learned our lesson that de-regulation is NOT the end-all, be-all that was promised? We have sufficiently good laws, maybe even too many of them - all we need to do is actually enforce them! Cox had every right to investigate the CDS market if he had chosen to do so, and could have pushed for greater transparency. But he deliberately left key positions vacant (which they still are, four years later).

A close relative who works as an analyst says that Chris Cox is an idiot.

The vacant positions that occurred during the last 8 years in many regulatory agencies--OSHA,FDA, etc. actually worked to de-regulate. When you are short staffed--you cannot check & issue penalties. Thats de-regulation, and partly why we end up with tainted dog food and baby formula.

There is lots of other de facto deregulation that has taken place under the radar screen in the past 7.5 years. When you have an administration that is ideologically opposed to government doing what it does best, and say instead that government does not do these things well, you produce a self-fulfilling prophecy by deliberately underfunding programs you're opposed to, even though they were authorized by Congress, or you hire incompetent individuals to run those agencies.

The Katrina debacle is perhaps the most egregious example of this ideology in full operation.