Web Letters: Stress Test: Obama's Rosy Scenario

Institutional Risk Analytics has "enormous prestige in financial markets"? Since when?

I've worked in investment banking for twenty years, and I had honestly never heard of IRA before this year, when Chris Whalen became a ubiquitous presence in the media. I've still never met a client of IRA, nor do I know of a single investment bank, commercial bank, hedge fund or investment firm that is a client of IRA.

Their main job seems to be booking media appearances for Whalen, whose cartoonish conspiracy theories, particularly about Goldman Sachs, are borderline delusional. I assure you, Whalen is not a well-known or respected bank analyst. He's just one of the yahoos on CNBC, and he happens to confirm Greider's pre-existing worldview. That doesn't make his firm an authority on anything, and it definitely doesn't mean his firm has "enormous prestige in financial markets."

Nick Jones

New York, NY

Hoover's "wildest" prediction, one that got the most derision, was his 1930 projection of a wide and general prosperity for 1955. When that year actually arrived, he was found to have underestimated the real growth by half.

John D. Froelich

Upper Darby, PA