I just did an interview on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that will air on public radio’s Here and Now today a bit after noon Eastern time (or whenever your local station happens to carry it). As I prepared for it, I found myself paying less attention to this week’s hearings than to the transcripts of the 1912/1913 Pujo hearings and 1932/1933/1934 Pecora hearings that the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis is nice enough to host on its Website.

Those hearings were each characterized by sustained, focused, in some cases prosecutorial questioning of witnesses by an experienced trial lawyer hired on expressly for that purpose (Samuel Untermyer in the Pujo hearings, Ferdinand Pecora in the Pecora hearings). And while I generally liked the parts of this week’s FCIC hearings that I saw, they didn’t have anything like that kind of relentlessness to them. They were more of a dabble. Which maybe makes sense in the first few days of hearings. But FCIC Chairman Phil Angelides really needs to find a way to move away from the dabbling if his commission is going to have an impact.