PPT assigns foxes to guard henhouse
Oh, this makes me feel better. From The Wall Street Journal:
Treasury Undersecretary Robert Steel will tell Congress on Wednesday that federal overseers are creating two private-sector groups, one for hedge-fund managers and another for hedge-fund investors, to develop practices for protecting investors and guarding against risks to the broader markets.
The President's Working Group on Financial Markets, the interagency group, "is looking to highly respected leaders in these industries to create these guidelines because when leaders adopt best practices, others in the industry feel pressure to do the same," Mr. Steel said in the text of prepared remarks.
The House Financial Services Committee is holding a hearing on hedge funds to explore how federal overseers monitor systemic risk, and to learn whether any improvements are warranted. The hearing comes amid turmoil at some hedge funds after bets on subprime mortgages — made to borrowers with weak credit — went bad.
Am I the only one who reads this to mean the Plunge Protection Team (the informal name of the "President's Working Group") was caught off guard by the subprime meltdown, so it's looking to some of the main actors to help figure out what went wrong?
My favorite line of the story is the last one:
Mr. Warsh did not address monetary policy or the economic outlook in his prepared remarks.
No, no need to address monetary policy. It's only the root cause of the subprime meltdown.
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