The American Spectator

The Spectacle Blog

Today Richard Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, ripped Chris Dodd's financial regualation overhaul proposal. Shelby warned that "This committee has not done the necessary work to even begin discussing changes of this magnitude," and, according to the Wall Street Journal, recommended a thorugh investigation along the lines of the Great Depression's Pecora Investigation.

In 1933, Ferdinand Pecora became the chief counsel for the Senate Banking Committee's investigations into the stock market crash of 1929. He spearheaded an exhaustive, multi-year search into the crash's causes that helped shape many New Deal regulations and provided most of the data for later histories of the Depression. The New York Times published a new look at the Pecora Investigation in January, and it's worth a reread.

(An aside: if you click through to the Times article, take a look at their picture of Pecora... one wonders if the Times meant to display that particular image.)