>Joe Stiglitz and Doug talk in their intereview about how the financial
>industry assured everyone that nothing bad would happen by overthrowing
>Glass-Steagal because they would erect Chinese Walls. And of course both
>noted that these walls turned out to be pretty damned porous.
>
>And it just suddenly struck me -- why would anyone think "Chinese Wall"
>was a great name for an impermeable barrier? Most of the dynasties that
>ruled China for the last 2000 years were barbarians from the north who
>made it through. The most famous historian/theorist of the Great Wall and
>the role it played in Chinese History, Owen Lattimore, once famously
>described it as "not so much a barrier as a membrane."
Good point. So maybe the use of the name Chinese Wall to describe something that sounds impermeable but wasn't was yet another instance of unconscious truth-telling.
Doug