The latest round of failures (Lehman, AIG) has lots of people pretty scared. The left can be expected to call for re-regulation of everything. The right will say just tough it out, and to Hell with widows and retirees whose pensions provide basic security.

“We do not need a regulatory ‘surge’ on Wall Street,” he added. “We need a complete rethinking of how we make global financial markets more transparent and how we ensure that the risks within those markets — many of which are new and many of which are not well understood even by the experts — are managed and monitored properly.” --David Rothkopf, a former Commerce Department official via Tom Friedman here.

Getting that understanding requires the best efforts of some of our finest academics, the well educated thinkers that the current crowd in Washington calls elitists.