“Hubris, Entitlement, Adrenaline” and Eliot Spitzer

Those are the three factors Eliot Spitzer cites as having caused the infamous “failure to exercise judgment” that toppled him from office as Governor of New York State. Yet Spitzer could as easily be talking about the causes of the market collapse that paralleled his own fall in early 2008. On that subject Spitzer offers plenty of equally candid remarks, chastising Alan Greenspan, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and other top economic minds in his Big Think interview.

“I don’t think Greenspan really understood markets,” Spitzer asserts, in a statement that would have seemed unthinkable five or ten years ago. Geithner, he believes, is “not corrupt, just wrong.” Still, as he calls out other public figures for being foolhardy, he admits that “I’m certainly in that category as well.” And while Spitzer dissects both the global and the private disaster in detail, he looks forward with some optimism as well, reflecting on his new life as a professor, on the brand of change that comes from people outside of public office, and even (with a bit of a rueful twist) on love.