Say What?Thank you to John Cassidy for his February column “The Case for Optimism.” It counters the typical media take and offers a possibility of hope for our economy. I sure do hope his counterintuitive opinion proves true.

Ron Hartman
Location Withheld

Cassidy overlooked an aspect of our economy that should fill him with pessimism. With a material increase in the supply of money and no offsetting increase in actual productivity, this country needs to fear inflation. Cassidy is correct to write that “gloom spreads like a virus” and to point out that we have a new administration with a mandate to expand government spending. Unfortunately, all the words and actions of the new administration seem to portend doom as well as gloom.

Martin Gorski
Darien, Illinois

Reading Cassidy’s column, I recalled an important lesson my father often gave me. Once, many summers ago, talking about my neighborhood lawnmowing business, he reminded me to always do a good job. “Do your best,” he said, “because bad news travels 10 times faster than good news.”

Robert Henry Walz
Vancouver, Washington

Don’t Kill the MessengerIn “First, Fire the Regulators” [February], Jesse Eisinger emphasizes where to draw the lines between different governmental agencies. Instead, he could have concentrated on the authority given to individual examiners to dig for dirt and blow whistles when mischief is afoot. It certainly won’t help the financial system to create new agencies if they are staffed by deskbound hacks wallowing in a go-along, get-along culture. Examiners should be permitted to report inefficiencies and ineffectiveness within their respective agencies directly to their state legislatures and Congress. Examiners are well-placed to give a worm’s-eye view of the failures of their respective agencies but don’t have the incentive to protect their turf that their superiors so often do.

David Weinkrantz
Brooklyn, New York

The Conversation John Paulson made $3.7 billion betting against the rest of us. What’s to be mad about?

The financial crisis has treated hedge fund manager John Paulson very well. In February’s “The Man Who Made Too Much,” contributing editor Gary Weiss details a $22 million investment in a credit default swap that earned Paulson a cool billion when Lehman Brothers failed. The pitchfork-wielding segment of Condé Nast Portfolio’s readership is typified by RTTEch82: “This guy needs to be whacked!” But middle-grounders such as zyodei think Paulson is not a villain but a “convenient scapegoat for millions of people who believed the hype and made poor decisions.” Finally, there are champagne-popping lionizers who believe we had the wrong Paulson on the bailout: “People like Paulson deserve to win for having the courage of their convictions, for following reason and prudence, and for avoiding the calculus, if one can even call it that, of the greedy, madding crowd,” an anonymous reader wrote. “Those who colluded in the bubble’s formation—the rating agencies, the investment banks, the so-called regulators and the Federal Reserve, the imprudent and dishonest mortgagors and mortgagees, and the CFOs and CEOs who allowed their companies to invest in trash—they deserve what they got.” Says RozTrotter: “Pish, posh. The greed on Wall Street was shameful, and now we’re all paying for the few.”