Past FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair

“I also quoted a favorite passage of mine from Robert Frost’s poem “The Black Cottage”:

Most of the change we think we see in life

Is due to truths being in and out of favor.

The “truths” that form the bedrock of our democratic culture fell out of favor in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Personal accountability, honest dealing, the right to reap the rewards of your hard work and entrepreneurship, the obligation to suffer the consequences if you fail—those were the kinds of ideals most of us grew up with, but they were forgotten in the shortsighted avarice that consumed our financial markets. The role of government in a free society—not to protect us from ourselves but to protect us from one another, as Ronald Reagan once described it—was lost as Washington deluded itself into thinking that self-correcting markets could somehow substitute for basic common sense. It would be hard to find anyone on Main Street who was not in one way or another hurt by the horrible debacle. Government fundamentally failed in its role of protecting us.”

Excerpt From: Bair, Sheila. “Bull by the Horns.” Free Press. iBooks.

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