Who are they and what was their role in the financial meltdown?

That's the question William D. Cohan asks in The New York Times in reference to well-heeled, high-power Wall Street Barons some of them in key positions in the Bushama administration.

Until people such as Warren Spector, the former co-president and head of the fixed-income division at Bear Stearns, and Dan Jester, a mysterious former Goldman Sachs banker turned Treasury official — among many others — come forward and share with us the roles they played before, during and after the crisis, there is little hope that the members of Congress working on financial reform legislation will be able to craft a bill that will succeed in its mission, and the longer they will spend dithering with the ill-conceived ideas being pushed by the former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker.

Why is that important the public knows that, asks Mr. Cohan? Because the same people who broke the system are now in charge of repairing it.

between Sept. 14, 2008 and Nov. 26, 2008 — the darkest days of the financial crisis — Tim Geithner, then head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and now Treasury Secretary, spoke on the phone with Jester 103 times. Paulson — not Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, or Christopher Cox, the Chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission — was the only person to whom Geithner spoke more often.

Plus ça change, plus ça reste la même merde.