I finished Sheila Bair's "Bull by the Horns" and recommend it. She mentions the Naked Capitalism blog and correctly argues that Obama, Geithner and Summers should have done more about mortgages and the housing market. DeMarco gets some decent mentions interestingly given his destructive behavior and she fails to mention how the Fed focused on housing too.

She does lay the blame squarely with Alan Greenspan and the culture of deregulation he created at the Fed, which is not a Republican viewpoint even if she is a Republican. She does blame Republicans for choosing party over country.

She is a deficit nag like everyone else, something that is compulsory in Washington I guess.

The big blind spot is the housing bubble though. No mention of bubbles or bubblenomics. Lots of discussion of the inepitude of bank management and the greed of trader types. She has an excellent description of a scene where she gave a speech to financial types and they all blamed the borrowers and absolved the lenders which in her mind is ludicrous.

Interestingly she mentions Simon Johnson but disagrees with him about Too Big To Fail banks. Read what Johnson has to say about her here. He notes:

(Disclosure: I’m a member of the nongovernmental Systemic Risk Council that Ms. Bair created and leads; I was also appointed to the F.D.I.C.’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee while Ms. Bair was still chairwoman.) 

Ms. Bair, a Republican from Kansas, worked with Bob Dole and was appointed to the F.D.I.C. by President George W. Bush. Her defining positions were against the interests of the very largest financial institutions.