Draw Breath

The San Francisco Chronicle has a depressing piece on the proposed solution to the sub-prime crisis. It makes a gloomy companion piece to this article from the FT in August, outlining the various frauds (criminal and not) surrounding this shoddy saga.

Unlike the Enron debacle, if this one shakes out into a full-blown crisis (as it well might), there'll be no getting away from systematic failures of surveillance, governance and the like. Or to mix a couple of metaphors, when there are more bad apples than good, you start thinking that something's wrong with the basket (hat tip to Meditations71 for passing on the SF Chronicle article).