Seeing Through Wall Street

Restoring trust to the economy will require bringing transparency to the markets.

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 23, 2008, at 1:02 PM ET

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There is an odd symmetry to a year that began with a subprime meltdown—initially affecting those at the lower end of the economic spectrum, before it lit the fuse that burned down the entire house—and ended with the Bernard Madoff scandal, an old-fashioned Ponzi scheme whose victims were nominally sophisticated investors. Clearly, nobody has been immune to this now-global plague. Every effort to rebuild an economy in free fall has been one moment too late or one step too short, and the remedies, though expensive, have so far at least failed to address underlying structural issues.

Yet certain truisms have continued to prove their validity. As Justice Brandeis observed, sunlight is the best disinfectant. The transparency that comes with the glare of sunlight is hard for companies and government to deal with—and so is resisted.