President George W. Bush just announced the formation of the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Literacy. He linked its formation to the subprime credit meltdown. The President thinks it will lead to better understanding on the part of ordinary people of the economic realities that confront them. Part of the group’s mission is to ensure that people “know what they are getting into,” he said.
Here’s a suggestion: start the campaign with the investment bankers who created the structured investment vehicles and other instruments that nobody seemed to fully understand, the credit components of which were never completely disclosed to investors and the consequences of which have seen some of the greatest losses in Wall Street’s history and continue to shake capital markets around the world.