Paul Krugman has a column in the New York Times faulting the Republicans on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission for objecting to the use of the term "Wall Street":
Last week, reports Shahien Nasiripour of The Huffington Post, all four Republicans on the commission voted to exclude the following terms from the report: "deregulation," "shadow banking," "interconnection," and, yes, "Wall Street."
When Democratic members refused to go along with this insistence that the story of Hamlet be told without the prince, the Republicans went ahead and issued their own report, which did, indeed, avoid using any of the banned terms.
Truth is, the term "Wall Street" isn't really particularly useful in explaining the financial crisis. Countrywide was based in California. Pimco is in California. Northern Rock is in Great Britain. Warren Buffett is in Omaha. Bear Stearns was in Midtown. The Federal Reserve is in Washington, D.C. Bank of America is in Charlotte, N.C. "Wall Street" can be shorthand for the financial services industry in general, but it can have a way of concentrating blame or responsibility in Lower Manhattan that more accurately belongs spread out more broadly.
