Talk:William H. Donaldson

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This man has led quite an amazing life.

Biography assessment rating comment
The article may be improved by following the WikiProject Biography 11 easy steps to producing at least a B article.-- Jreferee 23:23, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Donaldson and the financial crisis
The section "Donaldson and capital requirements" (which used to be called "Influence of tenure on the credit markets crisis of 2007-08") is heavily unbalanced toward a certain viewpoint. The author is suggesting that Donaldson indirectly caused the financial meltdown of 2007-2008. That simply isn't true. Take this analogy: Harlem is a neighborhood with a high murder rate. But, over the years, the rate has gone down. Consequently, the police commissioner decreases the number of police units assigned to the area. Two years after this decrease, there is a horrible shooting in the neighborhood that kills six people. Is the commissioner responsible for those shootings? Of course not. Yes, if s/he hadn't decreased the number of units in the neighborhood, perhaps the shooting wouldn't have happened. But, still, no one knows for sure that the shootings wouldn't have happened. Maybe they would have happened anyway. And, regardless, the commissioner's actions are a far cry from having caused the shooting. Anyone who would say otherwise would be propogating a distortion. This is exactly what has happened with this section. It propagates the distortion that Donaldson caused (directly or indirectly) the meltdown. That just isn't true. ask123 (talk) 14:58, 12 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Furthermore, the section basically refers to only one source: an article from The New York Times. The author has included other sources but merely to back up general knowledge. S/he references a page from the SEC that documents the meeting that is being referred to. But, essentially, the opinion of the author comes from this Times article.
 * I'll give editors a few days to clean the section up. After that, I'm changing it, or, more likely, just deleting it. ask123 (talk) 15:06, 12 October 2009 (UTC)