A Fighting Chance

Meanwhile, if we were going to get this report done in just two weeks, we needed help, and we needed it fast. In time, we would reach out to experts and hire a full staff. But right now, we didn’t have a second to lose.

In those early days, I turned to some of my former students for help. They were young and smart, and, most of all, they were willing to lend a hand on short notice. At that moment, before we had staff or infrastructure, they were more valuable than diamonds.

Ganesh Sitaraman was an American success story. His parents had emigrated from India before he was born. As a kid, he was an Eagle Scout, and eventually he made his way to Harvard Law. In my 1L class, he had his hand up every day, raring to go. Most of my students move on once class is over, but not Ganesh. He kept showing up every week or so to talk about economics and social policy. By the time the crisis hit, Ganesh had graduated, but he was still at Harvard on a fellowship.

Dan Geldon was Ganesh’s near opposite. In a big class, Dan was quiet to the point of invisibility. But it would be a mistake to underestimate Dan: he has an iron will. His older brother once told me that when Dan was seven, the family was eating a meal at McDonald’s. Dan was halfway through a cheeseburger when he put it down and announced that he had decided to become a vegetarian because eating meat wasn’t right. His mom and dad smiled indulgently, and his older brother rolled his eyes. But twenty-five years later, Dan still doesn’t eat meat.

The minute I asked for their help, Ganesh and Dan jumped in. We talked for hours and wrote furiously. Nearly every day, with help from Ganesh, I finished a draft of the report and shot it off to the other panelists. They edited and flagged questions and added pieces and sent it back. Each night at about ten, I sent the latest version to Dan. He worked on it all night, filling in the research and answering panelists’ questions. Each morning, I picked up the draft again, and we started the process all over.

The final report was only thirty-seven pages, which is unusually short for a government report. But we really wanted something that was concise and clear, and that’s a lot harder than it looks.

The country was awash in news programs featuring financial experts who spoke about the crisis using language that to most people sounded like gibberish. Collateralized debt obligations, special-purpose entities, synthetic derivatives—whatever the topic, the explanations offered by the talking heads all had the same subtext: Only the insiders are smart enough to understand what’s really going on, so just trust us.

I didn’t buy that. In fact, I thought it was the oversight panel’s job to make sure that everyone could understand what was going on. The issues swirling around the financial crisis were important—too important to be hidden away. I remembered the early conversation with Mr. Kashkari and the rest of the TARP team at Treasury: instead of going along with the idea that we should “trust the insiders,” I thought oversight ought to mean holding the insiders accountable and making them earn that trust.

Our report started with a grim update on where the country stood. In the preceding three months, 1.2 million people had lost their jobs. Millions more were on the verge of losing their homes. The stock market had lost 40 percent of its value. All three auto companies reported that they were on the verge of bankruptcy. And there was no end in sight; the economy was getting worse by the day.

At this point, a typical report would have kept pumping out more data, but we decided to focus not on what people already knew, but on what they didn’t know. So we asked questions.

Our questions—ten of them in all—became the centerpiece of the report. They were fairly simple, and we wrote them using good old plain English. For example, we asked the Treasury Department:



? Is your strategy helping to reduce foreclosures?

? What have financial institutions done with the taxpayers’ money received so far?

? Is the public receiving a fair deal?

I loved the simple language of the report. Cutting through the jargon and tangled verbiage made it possible for everyone to join the inquiry. Plain language was also about blowing the Bullshit Whistle. (Sorry about the dirty word, but I can’t think of another way to say it.) Yes, the crisis involved complicated financial dealings, but a lot of the supposed complication was nothing more than BS designed to cover up what was going on. And Treasury had already made it clear that they had no plans to be especially forthcoming with COP. The only way to know what was really happening was to ask some plain questions and get some plain answers—no wiggling around, no hiding away.