Pecora Talk

Interesting...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will meet with Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid tonight--a weekly meeting--and will discuss the creation of a congressional panel to investigate the causes of the financial crisis and worsening recession, Hill sources say.

In 1933, a Sicilian-born American lawyer named Ferdinand Pecora became the chief counsel to the Senate Banking Committee, and conducted a wide-ranging investigation on the causes of the financial crisis that prefigured the Great Depression. Today, Pelosi says she wants Congress to take a similar look into the collapse on Wall Street.

Reid spokesman Jim Manley says that the majority leader is broadly sympathetic to the idea of congressional action, but notes that a panel could be figured in a number of different ways.

A Pecora Commission with broad powers and the ability to convert those powers into action would be very powerful. To be a fly on the wall of that conversation...