Philly gets it right. Again. Here's what the Wharton School has to say about confidence and trust:

Hope, Greed and Fear: The Psychology behind the Financial Crisis
According to David M. Sachs, a training and supervision analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, the crisis today is not one of confidence, but one of trust. "Abusive financial practices [nice frame] were unchecked by personal moral controls that prohibit individual criminal behavior, as in the case of [Bernard] Madoff, and by complex financial manipulations, as in the case of AIG." The public, expecting to be protected from such abuse, has suffered a trauma of loss similar to that after 9/11. "Normal expectations of what is safe and dependable were abruptly shattered," Sachs noted. "As is typical of post-traumatic states, planning for the future could not be based on old assumptions about what is safe and what is dangerous. A radical reversal of how to be gratified occurred."

People now feel more gratified saving money than spending it, Sachs suggested. They have trouble trusting promises from the government because they feel the government has let them down.

He framed his argument with a fictional patient named Betty Q. Public, a librarian with two teenage children and a husband, John, who had recently lost his job. "She felt betrayed because she and her husband had invested conservatively and were double-crossed by dishonest, greedy businessmen, and now she distrusted the government that had failed to protect them from corporate dishonesty. Not only that, but she had little trust in things turning around soon enough to enable her and her husband to accomplish their previous goals.

"By no means a sophisticated economist, she knew ... that some people had become fantastically wealthy by misusing other people's money -- hers included," Sachs said. "In short, John and Betty had done everything right and were being punished, while the dishonest people were going unpunished."

Helping an individual recover from a traumatic experience provides a useful analogy for understanding how to help the economy recover from its own traumatic experience, Sachs pointed out. The public will need to "hold the perpetrators of the economic disaster responsible and take what actions they can to prevent them from harming the economy again." In addition, the public will have to see proof that government and business leaders can behave responsibly before they will trust them again, he argued.

"Once a person has been traumatized, promises ... are experienced as dangerous -- not safe -- because they require trust to believe," said Sachs. "It is up to the victim to decide when she can trust again. This takes time."

Bingo! "Confidence" == "impunity." That is, in the jargon of Versailles, and in the business press, "confidence" means that the banksters will not be held accountable, and that the looting will resume as soon as morale improves. People are'nt dumb; they know this.

If "peasants with pitchforks" is a trope for wronged people demanding justice, and accountability for those who did the wrong, and transparency so the injustice doesn't happen again, then Obama shouldn't be standing between the banksters and the peasants with pitchforks at all; that's exactly the wrong policy, at least from the standpoint of restoring trust in the country as a whole. What Obama should be doing is holding the banksters accountable, and not looking on benignly while Timmy shoves them more trillions. Because if Obama wants to be seen as personally trustworthy but not able to deliver, then he's going to turn into the next Jimmy Carter. And I think we can all agree that would be bad, right?

NOTE Via George Washington.