Stress Tests....?

It's been reported that the large banks received the results of their stress tests on Friday, and the results will be publicly announced at the end of this week. So far, this exercise, hopefully an important step in some kind of comprehensive reckoning seems like the brightest spot in the otherwise mostly ad hoc, deal-by-deal, approach taken by the Obama administration.

I thought this analysis of our financial crisis was very insightful:

The Quiet Coup, by Simon Johnson (Atlantic Monthly, May 2009).

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.