Dear President Obama

Dear President Obama,

Thank you very much for taking the time to read my letter. I know that your responsibilities are vast, but it means a lot that you consider interacting with your citizens an important one. I am a freshman at The University of North Carolina at Asheville and am in an honors language class that is based around documentary film. This week we watched Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job. Admittedly, though I am an attentive student and an inquisitive individual, I am not the most familiar with the complexities of the current financial crisis that plagues our country. Inside Job was highly didactic and gave me a basis for understanding the situation. I must say I was shocked by what I learned.

The film reveals to its likely uninformed audience, a clear idea of what activity on Wall Street really looks like. I was introduced to derivatives and to how they allow investment banks to bet on anything, even such immaterial things as the weather, and still make a profit. I also learned that “big wig” individuals use this profit for frivolities such as expensive “escorts,” elaborate drug habits, and extravagant homes, and cars.

Elliot Spitzer, the very man who’s personal business regarding his activity with prostitutes cost him his New York governor office in 2008, humbly said “there’s a sensibility that you don’t use people’s personal vices in the context of Wall Street cases, necessarily to get them to flip. I think maybe after the cataclysms that we’ve been through, maybe people will reevaluate that, I’m…I’m not the one to pass judgment on that right now.” Perhaps your administration believes that the cases are not the same.

You have been quoted as saying “A lack of oversight in Washington and on wall street is exactly what got us into this mess. We need to change Wall Street’s culture.”

And yet you have since made appointments to your administration that are counterintuitive to your proposed priorities.

In 2006, when subprime lending was at its highest and Ben Bernanke was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, he received numerous warnings about the dangers of unregulated derivatives. He and the Board refused to do anything, or to look into the possibility that the bubble could burst and have overwhelmingly destabilizing effects. Therefore I was surprised and confused to learn that in spite of his negligence in his position, during your Presidency, Bernanke was reappointed as Chairman in 2009. You appointed Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary after his less than adequate role as the President of the Federal Reserve during the crisis. Gary Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive, who helped ban regulation of derivatives serves now as the Chairman of Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Though you have spoken about change being needed, as of mid 2010, you had made no attempts to recover any of the compensations given to financial executives during the bubble. Not a single senior financial executive had been criminally prosecuted or even arrested. Not a single financial firm had been prosecuted criminally for securities fraud or accounting fraud.

I know your job as executive is extensive and that it takes time for policy to be proposed and enacted. I believe in many of the things that you have established as important. But I also believe you can do better by America. For our sake and the sake of posterity, remain strong in your opinions on regulation and reform of our economy. Take action; it will not go unnoticed. Make people take responsibility for their actions. Don’t let the corruption take place under your nose. I beg this of you Mr. President. The future of our nation wholeheartedly depends on it.

Thank you of your time.

Respectfully,

Sarala Mahlin Korn