As the war in Ukraine rages on, recent advisories from financial crime agencies in the United States and the United Kingdom indicate heightened scrutiny on financial activity of Russian.
vindicate their approach? does it make it more difficult for information sharing to happen? well, first of all, let me say that the one area i disagree there is this idea that somehow we should celebrate the media for publishing information that should remain top secret. i mean, we re talking about. we re not talking about the leaking of hollywood gossip or even what we talked about last week on this show, you know, bank secrets. we re talking about intelligence that needs to be kept secret and confidential for our ability to fight terrorism. i think sometimes we forget about that. one of the reasons it s so hard for these agencies to share information right now, in my opinion, chris, is because precisely they re worried about this information getting out through wikileaks and putting our performance and our spies at risk. does it increase the danger. if it does that then, steve, does it increase the danger of a terrorist attack? yes, there s no question about that. there s no qu
fact that people in general and a lot of legislators don t understand this stuff. health care reform, we had done this before, there was a whole intellectual structure devoted to understanding health care reform. these guys don t know who to call, they don t know how the deals work. they want to get on the right side of the wall street politics and get it off the table. what is hard to understand for a washington politician, ezra, about eliminating bank secrets, transparency, which blanche lincoln seems to get, and yet there is resistance from senator dodd to blanche lincoln s proposal. what is hard for a politician to understand, ezra, about the ratings agencies being employed by the very banks whose bonds they rate, as opposed to the pension funds, that buy those bonds? let s take the two things separately. on lincoln s proposal which is in many ways a very good proposal and the only part of the reform that is really wall street reform. the opposition, as i understand it, mainly co