One ray of light, one bolt of gloom

Although the financial meltdown is a disaster for the country, Mr. Oros
said, “the opportunity going forward is unprecedented. It is fantastic.
It is as if I had been training for this for the last 40 years of my
career.”

Oros is currently a partner in a private equity firm.  The rest of the article, however, is deeply scary.  It’s about how much lawyers and lobbyists are benefiting from TARP and related measures.  Consider this form of optimism:

“It is a good time to be me,” said John L. Douglas, a partner in
Atlanta at the law firm Paul Hastings and a former lawyer for bank
regulators who helped create the agency that administered the last
federal bailout, the Resolution Trust Corporation.

We’re in a race to see whether politics will become the dominant means of allocating financial wealth in this country.  That could be the single biggest domestic issue today, but too few economists are speaking up about it.