Speaking of hagiography, the Washington Post’s Neil Irwin gives Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner his own parting kiss.
This line sums up the gist of the piece:
Geithner is, in his bones, a crisis fighter, and his greatest legacy is for conquering the biggest one of them all.
But here are a few things you won’t hear about Geithner in this dismal whitewashing:
The first and most obvious sign that this is not a real-world appraisal, is the absence of the word “house,” or “housing” or “home” or “mortgage.” Geithner’s appalling housing policy, of a piece with his capture by Wall Street, has resulted in untold suffering for millions of homeowners who were supposed to be helped by the $700 billion TARP bailout. The Housing Affordable Mortage Program has been almost a complete failure, as ProPublica has documented. Just $4 billion of the measly $50 billion alloted to mortgage rescues has even been spent. In Geithner’s hands the housing rescue became an extend-and-pretend program for banks to pretend they were healthier than they really were, so they could “earn” their way out of insolvency.
With the economy mired in a depression, Geithner pushed Obama toward damaging austerity policies. He argue that stimulus—a policy that, before the Democrat Obama took office in a crisis, was accepted across the board as required in a depressed economy—was a “sugar” high and that the president needed to focus immediately on deficits. That’s according to… the Washington Post.
Geithner was also the key figure in retaining our absurd, potentially catastrophic system of too big to fail banks. And even while opposing breaking up the banks we just bailed out with trillions of dollars in cash and guarantees, Geithner also pushed back against the Volcker Rule aimed at preventing those banks from gambling for their own profit with taxpayers’ implicitly taking the downside, also according to the Washington Post.
He lobbied against Elizabeth Warren heading the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and reliably took the Wall Street side in the debate over what would become a weak financial reform bill. He fought, in the months before he became Treasury Secretary, to protect bankers from prosecution. Point is, Geithner is as responsible as anyone save Obama himself for preserving the status quo ante of too-powerful banks.
And don’t you think it’s worth noting, if you’re going to praise Geithner for cleaning up a crisis, that he helped create the damn mess—or at least failed to prevent it? This is a guy who, as subprime credit indices were flashing red in the spring of 2007, was pushing to lower capital requirements for banks that were already in some cases levered up 33-to-1.
Then there’s this:
It has been said that the Treasury secretary is, at the end of the day, a bond salesman, representing to global investors the credibility of U.S. Treasury bonds. By that measure, Geithner is a success; 10-year bonds yielded 1.89 percent on Thursday, near historic lows.
Ten-year bond yields at 1.89 percent are a sign of failure, not success. Bond yields are low because investors still don’t really trust the financial system and because they see years of slow growth ahead. It would be completely unfair to say Geithner could and should have solved all of this by himself, but he surely could have done much, much more.
This New York Times exit interview isn’t quite as cringeworthy as Irwin’s column, but it’s still awfully soft, filled with Great Man of History quotes and with unrebutted nonsense like this:
“Our authority on housing was very, very limited,” Mr. Geithner said. “We were able to use a significant amount of the authority in the Troubled Asset Relief Program to design a program for modifying the loans of a pretty substantial fraction of Americans facing foreclosure. But we had no legal authority to compel banks to provide mortgage relief. All we could do was find incentives.”
Worst of all, though, is this baffling sentence, up high in the second paragraph:
A regulator of Wall Street but not a creature of it, he will probably be the least likely former Treasury secretary to land there.
Say what?
Geithner was offered the position of CEO of Citigroup before becoming Treasury Secretary. He turned it down in what he called the hardest decision of his life.
He was a major enablers of Wall Street.
I have a bumper sticker on but my car and my office door that I have printed up which says, “IMPEACH GEITHNER Don’t Bailout Banksters.”
#1 Posted by Bill Du Bois, CJR on Fri 11 Jan 2013 at 05:22 PM
Ah how much sweeter would this Geithner goodbye have been had William Black penned it.
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2012/10/the-peril-of-obamas-man-crush-on-geithner-is-exposed-by-the-debate.html
" While Geithner, as President of the FRBNY, was supposed to be one of the nation’s top regulators he, by his own admission, refused to regulate... Geithner’s answer to Congressman Ron Paul’s question about his role as the chief regulator of many of the nation’s largest bank holding companies was “I was never a regulator.” So true, but you’re not supposed to admit it."
http://www.rooseveltinstitute.org/new-roosevelt/geithner-martyr-ungrateful-nation-bo-cutter-s-tragicomic-portrayal-tim-man-all-seasons
"If Bo wants to praise a real regulatory martyr — one who got the finance and regulatory issues correct early enough to prevent an economic crisis, reregulated successfully in the face of virulent, powerful opposition, and who did so despite knowing that it would destroy his career at a point where he was in financial distress the obvious candidate is Ed Gray... Gray remains unemployed and unemployable today. But he doesn’t have to avoid mirrors."
That's the send off Geithner deserves, with a pitchfork or two a prodding.
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 12 Jan 2013 at 10:45 AM
On the topic of Geithner and his replacement:
http://m.democracynow.org/stories/13383
http://m.democracynow.org/stories/13384
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, I think the legacy of Tim Geithner is simple. He’s the architect of "too big to fail." And that’s going to be, historically, his legacy. When this all blows up—and it’s going to blow up, for sure, because it can’t—things can’t continue the way they are right now—people are going to look back in history, and they’re going to say, "Who was to blame for this?" And Timothy Geithner is going to be the guy who designed this entire system.
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 12 Jan 2013 at 02:34 PM
Right... because the best thing to do when faced with a recession is for the govt to steal $700 billion more from the populace and shit it away on all the pork projects it couldn't get passed in the best of times. In fact, it was stimulus that was "accepted across the board" as the worst thing you could do in a recession, as Obama's own economists, like Romer and Summers, had written papers showing that the so-called "multiplier" would be fractional at best, ie wasted money. However, when party called, they did the bidding of the dimbulb politicos and shit the stimulus money down the drain.
What's amazing is that you can be so blatantly ignorant of the facts- or just a liar, who knows- and yet keep crowing that you and the Democrats are "reality-based," when the only reason Obama won is because there is now a voting majority that cannot accept fiscal reality. That reality is that this govt will need to be drastically pared down and while neither major party is willing to really face that reality, at least some Republicans talk about it while the Democrats keep whistling at the moon to spend more and more.
#4 Posted by Ajay, CJR on Sun 13 Jan 2013 at 12:08 AM
Oh goody, someone left the door open in the rubber room ward so Ajay could make his return.
If you're bitching about the stimulus billions, and not the banker bailout trillions, you're an idiot... and a useful one at that.
Oh what, you got another link from a Koch-sucking website that disputes my claim above? Print it out for us and put it in a restroom where it can be put to use.
And have a nice day.
#5 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sun 13 Jan 2013 at 11:31 AM
Ps. If you read the actual paper:
http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~cromer/What%20Ended%20the%20Great%20Depression.pdf
You receive evidence that you, and Timmy Caublahblah, can't read. Go to the section in the paper where she's talking about the policy in the years of 1920 and 1938. She says that the government was running surpluses at those times, which meant they were pulling more money out of the economy than they were putting in, which meant the fiscal policy of those times were negative, much like the fiscal policy under Obama's deficit hawks will be.
She does not say fiscal policy in general is negative. Please, for the love of god and reason, learn to read.
#6 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sun 13 Jan 2013 at 12:01 PM
You know what I think we should do? More of that finance stuff that's been killing the middle class for 3.9 decades now.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/sunday-review/americas-productivity-climbs-but-wages-stagnate.html
"Wages have fallen to a record low as a share of America’s gross domestic product. Until 1975, wages nearly always accounted for more than 50 percent of the nation’s G.D.P., but last year wages fell to a record low of 43.5 percent. Since 2001, when the wage share was 49 percent, there has been a steep slide.
“We went almost a century where the labor share was pretty stable and we shared prosperity,” says Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard. “What we’re seeing now is very disquieting.” For the great bulk of workers, labor’s shrinking share is even worse than the statistics show, when one considers that a sizable — and growing — chunk of overall wages goes to the top 1 percent: senior corporate executives, Wall Street professionals, Hollywood stars, pop singers and professional athletes. The share of wages going to the top 1 percent climbed to 12.9 percent in 2010, from 7.3 percent in 1979."
And we should keep that policy which says 'the only untouchable government spending is military spending."
http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/07/everything-chuck-hagel-needs-to-know-about-the-defense-budget-in-charts/
Because, as Ajay says, "the so-called "multiplier" is fractional at best".
The conservatives have really proven how wonderful life is when they get to run the country and their ideas have no real opposition. Look at all the prosperity! In China! Wow!
#7 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sun 13 Jan 2013 at 11:09 PM
The only wackjob I see here is thimbo, with his constant spamming of unrelated links on every post. "Banker bailout trillions," lol, who's the useful idiot repeating lies here? As for Romer's paper, while she uses surpluses as the variable in her equation, she's trying to tease out how changes in fiscal policy, surplus or not, affect the economy and comes to the following conclusion: "Fiscal policy, in contrast, contributed almost nothing to the recovery before 1942." I see, so we should have FDR create a new federal program every month and his disciple Obama shit a trillion down the drain every year, so that all that govt spending can contribute "almost nothing to the recovery?" Sounds like a great plan, thimbo, great to see you right behind Romer.
Haha, "finance stuff that's been killing the middle class for 3.9 decades now?" :D That is truly hilarious, I didn't know the bankers were out there slaughtering strolling burghers and pocketing their wallets, news to me. First off, all GDP is ultimately wages for someone, as even when you buy oil from Saudi Arabia, that money goes to wages for some sweaty driller or investment returns for his air-conditioned sheik. There's no money going to oil or wheat or other inanimate objects, the cash all ends up in the hands of the people extracting those objects somewhere. You are just artificially making a distinction between wage labor in the US and everyone else getting paid.
#8 Posted by Ajay, CJR on Mon 14 Jan 2013 at 09:46 AM
Second, of course, in the age of globalization, those with rare skills, like world-class entertainers, executives, and investors, are going to gain a lot more from a global audience, while those who do work you could hand to any third-world peasant are going to have their wages go down. That is simply supply and demand, a straightforward concept that lefties like you somehow have trouble grasping. However, globalization and the internet are forces for decentralization more than anything else, and what's coming next is the bankers losing their jobs to p2p investor pools like Kickstarter and one Katie Couric losing her job to thousands of podcasters. Like all lefties, you merely look backwards and are blind to the massive change on the horizon, so you rail against supposed inequality that is temporary at best. Fantasies about how raising the minimum wage or empowering unions are going to do anything but send more jobs overseas just show the ignorance, economic and otherwise, of you lefties.
Not sure how you brought military spending into this discussion, but I'd be fine with cutting the Department of War, as it used to be called until shortly after WWII, to a third of what it is now. After that, we could starve the beast some more. :) This would be combined with getting rid of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the big expenses from that last link of yours, taking an axe to all of the federal budget. Of course, no "conservative" would get behind this, because as I said before, they only talk about cuts, while wanting to spend just a little less than that spendthrift Obama, ie a lot more than today. That's why this country is fucked: one party lives in lala land and would just borrow and spend until default, the other would happily borrow and spend just 3% less and act like it's any better.
#9 Posted by Ajay, CJR on Mon 14 Jan 2013 at 09:57 AM
"The only wackjob I see here is thimbo, with his constant spamming of unrelated links on every post. "Banker bailout trillions," lol, who's the useful idiot repeating lies here?"
I'll leave this here, for when you learn to read:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-20130104
and are willing to realize that depression recovery through the traditional Friedmanite channels has been tried, and then some, by Freidmanite devotee Ben Bernake and Timmy Geithner.
And that model has failed. Why? This is the problem:
http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/so_thats_why_the_press_wont_co_1.php
"DAVIDSON: The American families are not — These issues of crucial, the essential need for credit intermediation are as close to accepted principles among every serious thinker on this topic. The view that the American family, that you hold very powerfully, is fully under assault and that there is — and we can get into that — that is not accepted broad wisdom. I talk to a lot a lot a lot of left, right, center, neutral economists [and] you are the only person I’ve talked to in a year of covering this crisis who has a view that we have two equally acute crises: a financial crisis and a household debt crisis that is equally acute in the same kind of way. I literally don’t know who else I can talk to support that view. I literally don’t know anyone other than you who has that view, and you are the person [snicker] who went to Congress to oversee it and you are presenting a very, very narrow view to the American people.
ELIZABETH WARREN: I’m sorry. That is not a narrow view. What you are saying is that it is the broad view to think only about trying to save the banks [Davidson sputters] and say “Hey! the American economy will recover at some point and we’ll worry about the families [Davidson talking over].” I think that is the narrow view and I think I have the broad view. The broad view is that these two things are connected to each other. And the notion that you can save the banking system while the American economy goes down the tubes is just foolish."
Which, to bring us back to Geithner, is a pretty apt description of his approach during his tenure. Warren, no doubt would have been another excellent candidate to write a send off to Obama's little 'Wormtongue'. If only he were the only one.
#10 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 14 Jan 2013 at 11:05 AM
Time for some housecleaning.
"Fiscal policy, in contrast, contributed almost nothing to the recovery before 1942."
Full quote:
"Monetary developments were a crucial source of the recovery of the U.S. economy from the Great Depression. Fiscal policy, in contrast, contributed almost nothing to the recovery before 1942. The very rapid growth of the money supply beginning in 1933 appears to have lowered real interest rates and stimulated investment spending just as a conventional model of the transmission mechanism would predict."
Standard old Friedmanite thinking from a pre-Japan crash view. (Which, it appears, Americans are too stupid to understand according to major newspapers)
So what was the recovery like before 1942 which was achieved mainly through monetary policy and smaller-than-required efforts at fiscal policy? According to Romer's paper:
"My concern in this article with finding the source of the high rates of real growth during the recovery from the Great Depression may seem strange to those accustomed to thinking of that recovery as slow. The conventional wisdom is that the U.S. economy remained depressed for all of the 1930s and only returned to full employment following the outbreak of World War II."
"The behavior of unemployment during the recovery from the Great Depression is roughly consistent with the behavior of real GNP. Although many scholars have rightly emphasized that the unemployment rate was still nearly 10 percent as late as 1941, it had fallen quite rapidly from its high of 25 percent in 1933. It declined, for example, by more than three percentage points in both 1934 and 1936. That full employment was not reached again until 1942 is consistent with the fact that real output remained significantly below trend until that year."
Look at the figure by that quote. Then look at the what happened in 1941... the gearing up for WW2.
"But WW2 didn't cause the recovery," you say, since WW2 was a HUGE stimulative government spending program and that just won't do.
Well, what does the paper say?
"That monetary developments were very important, whereas fiscal policy was of little consequence even as late as 1942, suggests an interesting twist on the usual view that World War II caused, or at least accelerated, the recovery from the Great Depression. Since the economy was essentially back to its trend level before the fiscal stimulus started in earnest, it would be difficult to argue that the changes in government spending caused by the war were a major factor in the recovery. However, Bloomfield's and Friedman and Schwartz's analyses suggested that the U.S. money supply rose dramatically after war was declared in Europe because capital flight from countries involved in the conflict swelled the U.S. gold inflow. In this way, the war may have aided the recovery after 1938 by causing the U.S. money supply to grow rapidly. Thus, World War II may indeed have helped to end the Great Depression in the United States, but its expansionary benefits worked initially through monetary developments rather than through fiscal policy."
So yeah, you can recover from a depression using monetary policy alone IF there's a WORLD WAR going on in your nation neighbors AND they consider your nation a safe haven for assets. Yeah, a global migration of money caused by mass capital flight can make the economy grow, as will having markets for all the bang bang toys you can make to beat off the fascists. In THOSE circumstances, I guess fiscal policy doesn't matter as much, but what does that have to do with today?
#11 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 14 Jan 2013 at 05:09 PM
On a back topic, you said "Derp.. der multiplier of fiscal policy is dur.. fractional at best. Derrrp."
I've talked about the multiplier of fiscal policy in the past. Guess what? When talking about the multipliers of policy, you kinda need to be specific about the policy. It's like talking about the health of "food". Is food healthy? How do you answer that without asking what food we're talking about. Some food isn't. Other food is. In order to evaluate food, we need a guide.
in the pastHere was a guide I posted to policies and their associated multipliers.
It's important to be specific.
Like here:
"the cash all ends up in the hands of the people extracting those objects somewhere. You are just artificially making a distinction between wage labor in the US and everyone else getting paid."
Dude, corporations aren't people.
To get all nitty gritty, income is not the same as wages. From the wiki:
"The US "National Income and Expenditure Accounts" divide incomes into five categories:
1. Wages, salaries, and supplementary labour income
2. Corporate profits
3. Interest and miscellaneous investment income
4. Farmers' income
5. Income from non-farm unincorporated businesses
These five income components sum to net domestic income at factor cost."
2 and 3 are eroding 1. The middle class lives on 1. This is a consequence of right wing policy choices from the 70's to now - you have dangerous inequality and economic instability because we can't earn money making products anymore. The money is made today in confidence gaming each other.
That's right wing economics. It's that simple.
#12 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 14 Jan 2013 at 06:21 PM
Wow, an array of arguments so stupid, I don't know where to start. From linking to a Taibbi article that only mentions in passing the long since debunked claim of "trillions" in loans to banks (and stupidly claims that bank CEOs were somehow ripping people off when they bought shares after the market crashed in '08, considering there was real fear that the banks would subsequently go bankrupt, Fed help or not) to quoting that dimbulb Warren's bluster- "Hey, I'm Native American, hire me!"- for no apparent reason to repeating my fiscal policy quote from Warren's paper with a section highlighted that was already in my original quote, now surrounded by sentences that only buttress my point that fiscal policy didn't help, to some nonsensical blather about monetary policy during WWII- not sure I'd be calling others stupid when I bet you have no idea how monetary policy works, just like most people- to the idiotic notion that paying people not to work, through unemployment insurance and food stamps, and shit money away on tunnels for turtles is magically good for the economy to the standard canard that corporations are magical giants that somehow aren't really composed of people running and profiting from them to the moronic notion that corporate profits are somehow squeezing out wages- not competition from abroad and from technology, as Obama himself understood with his ATMs comment- to the deeply idiotic notion that "right wing economics" are why "we can't earn money making products anymore," not because nobody really wants manufactured goods that much anymore.
You are profoundly ignorant about all of these issues and it is laughable that you think you are equipped to comment on them, let alone knowledgeable about them. XD I'd suggest you do some reading, but I suspect you are too ideologically blindered to ever learn anything, so I'll leave you to your festering ignorant rage here, having tipped the door open to the light so you could actually learn something, if you had the inclination to get out of the hole of ignorance you're currently floundering in.
#13 Posted by Ajay, CJR on Tue 15 Jan 2013 at 02:01 PM
"Wow, an array of arguments so stupid, I don't know where to start."
That's my line, but I'll let you borrow it. Your measure of what's stupid turns the word into a compliment.
"From linking to a Taibbi article that only mentions in passing the long since debunked claim of "trillions" in loans to banks (and stupidly claims that bank CEOs were somehow ripping people off when they bought shares after the market crashed in '08, considering there was real fear that the banks would subsequently go bankrupt, Fed help or not)"
Sigh. Which is it, darlin'. Had the banks gone bankrupt, the federal reserve would have been on the hook for 7.7 trillion. That's how much they committed. Either the CEOs were buying depressed shares with the knowledge that their banks could go insolvent regardless of Federal help, thus the Fed was risking 7.7 trillion on the banks, or they knew the Fed would not let them fail after Lehman, therefore there was no real risk and the Fed's expense should only be counted as what they lent out.... a measly 1.2 trillion.
http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/12/07/fed-escalates-fight-with-bloomberg-with-misleading-rebuttal/
From the Fed sources.
"The Fed also says the report that it lent or guaranteed $7.77 trillion during the financial crisis is misleading, noting that its total emergency lending outstanding never exceeded $1.5 trillion. Bloomberg arrived at the $7.77 trillion figure by counting Fed loan guarantees even when no money changed hands."
From Bloomberg:
"Bloomberg News reported that Fed lending peaked at $1.2 trillion, a figure that didn’t include any double- counting. Instead of adding all the outstanding Fed loans to get a large number, Bloomberg used peak loan amounts that were outstanding on a single day. On the day after the Nov. 28 story, the Fed published that $1.2 trillion figure, affirming Bloomberg’s calculation"
One section of a long article is what you're gripping about.
"Even worse, the $700 billion in TARP loans ended up being dwarfed by more than $7.7 trillion in secret emergency lending that the Fed awarded to Wall Street – loans that were only disclosed to the public after Congress forced an extraordinary one-time audit of the Federal Reserve. The extent of this "secret bailout" didn't come out until November 2011, when Bloomberg Markets, which went to court to win the right to publish the data, detailed how the country's biggest firms secretly received trillions in near-free money throughout the crisis."
This doesn't surprise me. If you're willing to do the war whoops to discredit Warren, it's clear the trivial is what you live and breathe.
But wait, I'm not done with the fed yet...
#14 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 15 Jan 2013 at 09:03 PM
You see, finance exists to solve chicken and egg problems. A person needs a car to work, a person needs work to buy a car. What finance is supposed to do is solve this problem for a fee in exchange for a risk. The fee is interest, the risk is default. When a borrower defaults, finance loses money and claims ownership of a devalued asset. Hopefully it can sell the asset and recover the loss.
What finance did during the Greenspan/Bush deregulatory bubble was take on a whole lot of risk. Why? Because the executives were compensated on the value of the contract on the day it was signed with no accounting for tomorrow's risk. When there was a mass default because of energy price spikes, loan rate resets, and other bs, the banks got stuck with 'the big shitpile' as Duncan Black has called it.
The investors who bought these securities lost their money, "but those guys were muppets so screw them," said everybody. Unfortunately, banks lost their money too and were forced to ask "Does anyone want to buy a piece of the shitpile?" while everyone else was dumping their pieces. These banks were highly leveraged, they needed money fast to pay their creditors, and so the Federal government gave them TARP and told their creditors that these banks were good for the money, that the US taxpayer would back stop the banks up to 7.7 trillion, "So calm down. You'll get your money." And so CDS's, demands for collateral, and credit ratings were not reassessed based on the stupidity of bank management, the bloody horror of bank balance sheets, and the
inevitabilityrisk of default. They were assessed based on the government guarantee.But the banks still owned pieces of shitpile. And they had no way to sell them. And they had all these Federal loans and TARP stuff to pay back. What's a bank to do.
Sell it to the fed of course.
And so the fed, like a little pac man, has been swallowing MBS's onto its balance sheet:
http://www.salon.com/2010/05/01/trillion_dollar_fraud/
"But since August 2008, these bank reserves held at the Fed have exploded to more than $1.2 trillion (as of March 2010), even though only $65.6 billion was required to be deposited by law."
So the fed loaned them money so they could deposit it back with the fed and pocket the spread? Joy.
"This increase in excess reserves resulted directly from the Fed’s policy of dramatically increasing the quantity (and lowering the quality threshold) of assets it bought in the marketplace. During the past 20 months, the Fed has tripled the size of its balance sheet by acquiring more than $1.5 trillion of new assets, more than $1 trillion of which are mortgage-backed securities."
So we know how these TARP loans were paid back now, right? By selling shitpile to the fed while depositing 0 interest loaned money in the fed for profit. That was 2010. What have we been doing lately.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-07/fed-exit-plan-may-be-redrawn-as-assets-near-3-trillion.html
"The Fed has already bought $2.3 trillion in U.S. government and housing-related debt it two rounds of so-called quantitative easing.
Those programs, dubbed QE1 and QE2, bought bonds closer to a pace around $100 billion per month."
You see, while some of us are bitching about a few hundred billion dollar stimulus, the government and its institutions have been using extra-ordinary powers and techniques to dump trillions into what should have been failed banks while letting them off the hook for their crimes which cost the global economy trillions.
People, working families, we don't get these bailouts. We don't recieve extraordinary measures in order to save our skins and salve our wounds. No one is talking about the
#15 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 15 Jan 2013 at 09:55 PM
People, working families, we don't get these bailouts. We don't recieve extraordinary measures in order to save our skins and salve our wounds. No one is talking about the trillions required to save us. We can't even get a trillion dollar coin out the door to prevent a federal government default - the fed will refuse to take it.
But when the poor banking sector starts to snivel? The trillion dollar money hose blasts those tears away.
And you claim I'm ignorant? While bitching about a democratic process 'stealing' "$700 billion more from the populace and shitting it away on all the pork projects"?
Lloyd Blankfein is laughing at you, you sucker.
http://blogs.reuters.com/macroscope/2012/10/17/banks-keeping-most-of-qe3-benefits-for-themselves/
Laughing.
#16 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 15 Jan 2013 at 10:19 PM
Forgot a link:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-12/treasury-fed-oppose-using-platinum-coin-to-avoid-debt-limit-1-.html
PS.
"Obama himself understood with his ATMs comment- to the deeply idiotic notion that "right wing economics" are why "we can't earn money making products anymore," not because nobody really wants manufactured goods that much anymore."
Stupid. No, I mean it. Truly unbelieveably stupid. (and yeah, evidence you can't read your own AEI supply side garbage. "Nobody wants manufactured goods?" Wow, where did that come from.)
#17 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 15 Jan 2013 at 10:40 PM
Advantage Thimbles
#18 Posted by Harry Eagar, CJR on Fri 18 Jan 2013 at 12:51 PM
"Advantage Thimbles"
Following in the footsteps of the masters.
#19 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 18 Jan 2013 at 02:29 PM
"I’m sorry. That is not a narrow view. What you are saying is that it is the broad view to think only about trying to save the banks [Davidson sputters] and say “Hey! the American economy will recover.."
Joe Stiglitz makes the same point in the times today.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/19/inequality-is-holding-back-the-recovery/
Ps. Please bring back the 'recent comments' widget. Come on, guys.
#20 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sun 20 Jan 2013 at 03:29 PM