"Romney’s choice of Mankiw, one of the leading architects of and apologists for the crisis, as his leading economic advisor would be a superb issue for Obama to use in his reelection campaign but for one tiny problem. The Obama administration’s policies on financial regulation are created by the likes of Rubin, Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke. They differ only on the margins from Mankiw. The entire crew of leading economists for the last three Presidents and Romney has proven catastrophically wrong about financial regulation.

The remarkable thing is that they do not drop their dogmas even after they engineer multiple crises over the course of three decades. We will soon experience the 30th anniversary of the Garn-St Germain Act of 1982, which set off a renewed “competition in laxity” among the States (principally California and Texas; whose S&Ls, collectively, caused roughly two-thirds of all S&L losses) and produced the criminogenic environment that led to the second phase of the S&L debacle.

There are economists and scholars from other fields that have track records of success as financial regulators. Note to Obama and Romney: there is no rule requiring you to choose as your leading advisors the purveyors of green slime and crisis. A significant number of Mankiw’s students walked out of his class to protest his presentation of failed dogma in the guise of economics. It is time for all of us as citizens to walk out on politicians who choose ethical and economics failures like Mankiw and Geithner as their advisors."

-Bill Black (who spent years working on regulatory policy and fraud prevention as Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention, Litigation Director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and Deputy Director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement, among other positions.)