Saying sorry on Wall Street
Jyoti Malhotra -
Thursday, September 25, 2008 12:26 AM
You may kiss my hand, Queen Elizabeth of the UK would mutely indicate, as she proferred a gloved limb for the natives during her visit to India in 1997 (some of us refused of course, preferring the more distant 'namaste'). But I'm jumping ahead of the story, which is really about Nicholas Gore-Booth, British high commissioner to India at the time, who told a bursting-at-the-seams press conference that the Queen would not say sorry about the massacre of a few hundred Indians at the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar in 1919.
History cannot be repeated, declared Sir Nicholas in perfect Oxbridge English, and that was all that was needed for the attending journalists to take off. The Queen, or was it Charles, had apologised to the aborigines in Australia, so why make an exception for India, they asked. The British had clearly never wanted to give up the Empire...It all made great copy, of course.
And now, Steven Pearlstein, a business columnnist with the 'Washington Post' is talking about the two words no one in Wall Street has the courtesy to utter, even as the US government promises to pay $2300 per man, woman and child, a bailout totalling $700 billion, to two former investment banks : We're sorry.
"We've now entered the political phase of this financial crisis, in which the outcome will be determined not by the fear and greed of investors but by the hopes and anxieties of the voters," says Pearlstein. It wouldnt hurt Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America and Morgan Stanely to stand hat in hand outside Capitol Hill and volunatarily offer to suspend their extravagant compensation schemes until the crisis has passed, he said.
But Pearlstein knows that humility is hard to come by. If Wall St, begins to say sorry, where would it stop? Would Bush have to apologise for declaring to the world that there had in fact been no WMD in Iraq? Would Tony Blair have to apologise on behalf of his irrepressible spokesman Alistair Campbell who famously said, "We dont do God," when in fact Blair was veering around to Catholicism even when he was PM (he converted after he quit). Or, would the Chinese ever say sorry for cracking down on Tibet?
Gore-Booth was right. You only go down on bended knee when you have no option but to.