Some faces may change in the top-heavy, bloated bureaucracy of Washington and all the state governments, but the bureaucracy will remain intact.
The Grammar Curmudgeon
No system disappears quickly because habits live on.
I employ case studies of failure into my courses, emphasizing that they teach us much more than studies of success. It is not that success stories cannot serve as models of good design or as exemplars of creative engineering. They can do that, but they cannot teach us how close to failure they are.
Greed, accident, or malice may have harmful results, but, barring something truly apocalyptic, a resilient system can absorb such results without its overall health being threatened.
Maybe I'm naive, but I still have a little bit of faith in the structure of the United States government and thinking that one man can't ruin everything. I don't know if it's just because I'm hopeful or cynical, but I just don't think one man can change everything. It's just like I didn't think Obama could save the country by himself. I don't think Trump can ruin the country all by himself. I don't know. I hope I'm right.
The role of liquidity in systemic events provides yet another reason why, in the future, a more system wide or macroprudential approach to regulation is needed.
An institution is beyond any individual. It breathes and lives on its own and always will.
The incentive for the outsider is to attack the system right up to the moment he is co-opted by it. The incentive for the insider -and this took some getting used to- is to allow yourself to be attacked, and then co-opt your most ferocious attackers, and their best ideas. The effect on the system as a whole is to make it more stable, because everyone winds up working on its behalf.
I don't have any interest in changing a system, because the system will simply get bucked back by people who haven't changed.
We can't rely - or no country can rely on just a single personality to carry it forward. And so what the American founding fathers understood was that institutions were built for human imperfection not human perfection.
