The danger is that politicians, who have little understanding of the financial world, may draw the wrong conclusions from Wall Street follies and make the wrong decisions as they try to revive our financial system.
Think about this. Our government has just decided that $85 billion more of our money should be used to cover the actions of (and pardon the unsophisticated language here) stupid, greedy, criminal people.
We must grow the economy by empowering the private sector. I would have hoped by now we learned that inflation doesn't solve anything.
Hyman Minsky didn't live to see how closely this year's meltdowns would follow his predicted scenario, with the Lehman failure being one of several clear Minsky moments.
By promoting the mother of all financial bail-outs, Hank Paulson has all but mocked McCain's recent anti-bailout rhetoric and heightened a growing awareness of the disastrous Republican policies on Wall Street.
The acrobatics of the Bear rescue suggest the depths of the abyss that our financial leadership has dug for us. Does anyone believe that this is the last time we will hear Fed sirens wailing in the night?
What I and other bailout opponents have been saying is that bailout backers sensationalized a real problem to create the belief that if we didn't do something unfathomably unprecedented, the world would end.
In a nutshell, the Wall Street meltdown is not only due to greed and to the lack of government regulation of a hyperactive sector.
I'm proposing a radical shift in rhetoric: Any stimulus package should focus on the poor and the unemployed, not because they spend more, but because they are most in need of help.
Detroit is a place where workers are unionized; Wall Street is not. And right-wing Republicans and conservative pundits have made it clear they want the union workers to suffer.
As a nation, we have lost our financial way. Founded in the principles of thrift, frugality, and hard work, our beloved country has morphed into a giant financial couch potato.
The policies that Paulson and Bernanke did implement at such staggering cost have only begun to do their full long-term damage, which will probably come in a round of even more serious inflation.
Just because you stop something old that is bad, doesn't mean you will automatically start something new that's good.
If credit dries up and there is no plan, more of your neighbors will lose their homes. Those homes will sit empty because potential buyers will not be able to come up with financing.
Last week a mix of water and sanitation experts gathered for World Water Week in Stockholm, Sweden to mull over the world's biggest public health crisis. The problem is that not enough people paid attention.
While I am not condoning Spitzer's use of prostitutes, what I am suggesting is that perhaps we should not be so quick to celebrate Eliot Spitzer leaving the American stage.
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These arrogant scumbags tell us drastic times call for drastic measures when they're receiving our money and re-distributing it amongst themselves, but the times are never drastic enough to give the money back to the mortgage borrowers, whose debts are the fault of these national-economy-runners who rigged the system to inflate real estate.
quote:
Despite having already created a raft of new lending programs to financial institutions and even corporate borrowers, (but not to a single citizen) Fed policy makers as well as the Fed"s staff forecasters began the meeting with sharply reduced forecasts. They all expected a severe economic contraction that was likely to last through at least the first half of 2009.
/quote
Unforgivable, Bernanke.
Well, of course the outlook is dark.
Bernanke attended the powerful Bilderberg meeting in Virginia and the "dark" script handed to him there is now going to unfold.
Here are some real nice pictures of that conference and take note of their security photo's: http://cryptome.info/bilderberg08/bilderberg08.htm .
The Federal Reserve is a privately owned bank and is illegal according to the constitution. John Kennedy likely lost his life in writing Executive Order No. 11110 on June 4, 1963 to strip The Reserve of its power to loan money to the government at interest and returned the power to issue currency to the U.S. Government.
As ugly as it sounds, a better fiscal solution is to raise taxes now (I hear you) and cease the big government spending. Propping us up will be in vain. We have bitter medicine to swallow: delaying this has a high probability of advancing our recession to a second great depression. Do we not know this in our hearts?
People make comparisons to the depression but they don't work. The depression of the 30's took a while to play out, now the effects of a depression can be felt instantaneously all over the world. The moment orders are canceled factories shut down immediately. Then people are out of work, which means they spend less, which means more orders are canceled, which means more jobs are lost. It's a vicious cycle. I'd say we've been in a depression that has been spiraling downward for some time. Obama is our FDR. God help us all if he isn't.
The current economy is based on conning us into spending money that we don't have and no one is buying that drivel now. The only way that we will have any money is to save it; and the economy be damned. Only about five percent of the population benefits from the current economy anyway. I hope every bank and hedge fund goes belly-up so people will finally see that we don't need them.
Amen. There is a lot of truth in what you said.
Except for (maybe) "no one is buying that drivel now". A sucker is born every minute. Lot's of ignorant folks out there STILL more the willing to buy/buy/buy, even if they have no money.
Exactly right. The real economy, namely technology, engineering, production, construction, infrastructure, can re-grow only if the parasitic "sectors" like banking, funds, insurance, would disappear and get replaced by straight non-profit services (e.g. from the government).
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