It's All Eliot Spitzer's Fault

that I started paying more attention to what's going on in the economy.
Update below
Oh, I had been reading the excellent analysis by two of Daily Kos' best bloggers, Bonddad and Jerome a Paris, for a year and their warnings helped me protect the tiny little bit of money I had. When the Singapore market went crazy last year, I plunked all my money in a safe fund. When I rolled over that IRA, I put it in Treasuries.
But though the gloom-and-doom warnings cast a cloud over my mood, my formerly optimistic outlook on life, I didn't really pay close attention.
As the noise increased for more regulation, I agreed because I am a good progressive.
Then came Spitzer's downfall and second guessers in the 'spere began to grumble that maybe he was "got," punishment for his in-your-face attack on the Bush administration, that blamed it for the subprime mess.
One of the most prominent grumblers was Greg Palast, a bit of a wild man journalist whose views get pumped by some progressives, but mostly by himself.
Spitzer's op-ed in the Washington Post just happened to be published at the same time he was in D.C. with Ms. Dupre.
I read Palast's take on that, I heard from a friend who heard him on the radio. Some bloggers picked it up.
But so did the former Comptroller of the Currency under both Clinton and Bush, who said Spitzer was either sorely misinformed or politically motivated since he didn't seem to understand the financial system very well, nor the regulatory environment.
So, I started reading more.
Paul Krugman's got a nice, short summary today.
But even though it's longer, I highly recommend another New York Times piece
that filled in many of the blanks for me.
As for Eliot, I sort of suspect that the feds had some political motivation. Why not take down a rising Democratic star if you can, especially one who's plagued not only your Wall Street friends, but the Republican power structure in New York state?
But I don't really think his subprime rant was the reason.
(I should note that at least one article I read explained that Spitzer's crusade against financial industry wrongdoers often resulted in crushing the innocent who didn't have the resources to fight and instead settled. The story, which I have lost the link to, also noted that the settlements Spitzer got went into state coffers and not into victims' pockets. So he may not have been such a hero after all.)
Update 8:23 a.m.
There's another, much longer story in the New York Times that I'm trying to read. Here's the link, but you may not be able to bear it.
One quote so far stands out, because I remember hearing this months ago, repeating it to a friend with far more financial savvy than I have, and being dismissed. "They don't really understand what they've done," I said. "Oh, they understand," she assured me.

Even the people running Wall Street firms didn’t really understand what they were buying and selling, says Byron Wien, a 40-year veteran of the stock market who is now the chief investment strategist of Pequot Capital, a hedge fund.

“These are ordinary folks who know a spreadsheet, but they are not steeped in the sophistication of these kind of models,” Mr. Wien says. “You put a lot of equations in front of them with little Greek letters on their sides, and they won’t know what they’re looking at.”