Everyone now agrees that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson badly botched the Lehman Brothers crisis of 2009. But at least he had an excuse. Panicked by the speed of Lehman’s meltdown, he had no time for second thoughts. By comparison the German-led group of EU officials who engineered this weekend's Cyprus bank bailout don’t have a leg to stand on. Although they had years to consider their options (Cyprus’s problems are closely related to, and have long been almost as obvious as, those of Greece), they have opted for a “solution” that amounts to probably the single most irresponsible decision in banking supervision in the advanced world since the 1930s.
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