Jon Tester asks a good question

The senator from Montana wonders: Why didn't you warn us a little earlier about the possibility of complete financial Armageddon?

Published September 23, 2008 7:06PM (EDT)

No wonder grass-roots Democrats like this guy:

Montana Sen. Jon Tester, to Paulson, Bernanke, SEC chairman Christopher Cox, and Federal Housing Finance Agency director James Lockhart:

I'm a dirt farmer. You guys have been in the business -- the former chairman of Goldman Sachs.

Why do we have one week to determine $700 billion that has to be appropriated, or this country's financial systems go down the pipes?

Wasn't there some opportunity sometime down the line where we could have been informed of how serious this crisis was so we could take some preventative steps before this got to this point?

Perhaps back in the spring of 2007, say, when Paulson and Bernanke were telling us that the subprime problem was "contained"?


By Andrew Leonard

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21.

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