The Table: The Hubris Of Eliot Spitzer

Hubris, shady legal practices, manipulation of the markets.... and frequenting expensive prostitutes. The Table returns, with Megan McArdle, Matthew Yglesias and me.

Comments

The Table gets both cheesier and classier all the time. How do you do it?

Another good episode. But it would have been better to have Ross on to give a more conservative view of these topics.

Posted by lampwick | March 14, 2008 8:46 PM

The conundrum for me on who do you charge - the johns or the pimps, is this: if you replace prostitution with say marijuana (or alcohol, though cars add complications to that analogy) you end up with a lot non-violent buyers in jail and the more violence prone, underground business continues (perhaps curtailed by a smaller market but prices will correct) ultimately, filling jails and ruining lives of people who non-violently are looking for what may be considered a biological imperative of a sort, reducing stress.
We can act as though we are new beings governed by rationality but we deny our biological background at our peril.
It is a conundrum because I truly don't have an answer.

Posted by carsick | March 14, 2008 8:49 PM

I think Eliot Spritzer wanted to be Eliott Ness. Fell short of that, but he has become an "Untouchable".

Posted by robert ethan | March 14, 2008 9:21 PM

I'm not annoyed that Megan McArdle would dismiss Eliot Spitzer's Wall Street record. She is delivering the brief for the prosecution. But I'm annoyed that no else at the table could be bothered to deliver the brief for the defense.

After all, McArdle's case is essentially speculative: maybe Spitzer's case against various Wall Street firms was weak, and maybe his defendants settled because he threatened their credit. "Nice little investment banking firm you've got there...shame if something should happen to it."

Putting that speculative claim up for comparison with Spitzer's record, however, shows it to be absurd. Mutual funds were allowing their best clients to conduct afterhours trading. Gosh, why didn't they want that in the newspaper? Investment banks "parceled out shares of hot initial public offerings to favored executives in the hope they'd send investment-banking business their way," as Daniel Gross so aptly summarizes in Slate. By god, they should have fought their case to the Supreme Court!

In any field of law, a defendant who settles out of court is assumed to do so because of the fear of being found guilty in a court of law. If McArdle, to the contrary, thinks that Spitzer's settlements resulted from some kind of shakedown, she should prove it case by case.

I would add that Spitzer also made a priority of litigating on behalf of immigrants denied minimum wage by exploitative retail employers. These people had no political clout, and their cases attracted only minor press coverage. But Spitzer fought hard to set the precedents that improved the wages of people who are routinely exploited in our society. It would be nice if someone could be troubled to cover that.

Posted by tomh | March 16, 2008 11:46 PM