Enforcing the Rules -- Too Little, Too Late 02-27-09 mpg Bill Moyers Interviews Robert Johnson Video - A quote...."Bill Moyers talks with economist Robert Johnson, who decodes this week's news on the bank bailout, with a hard look at the international ramifications of the plan and a discussion of why nationalization has become a flash point." -- || Transcript || Podcast Mp3 || Economist James Galbraith: Stimulus not enough Video - MarketWatch - A quote...."Economist James Galbraith, who's scheduled to testify in Washington Thursday, talks to MarketWatch's Ruth Mantell about the future of the U.S. banking system and what the Federal Reserve can, and can't, do help shore up the economy." Obama’s open-ended bailout of the banks Obama™ Update -- Must Read - A quote...."It is increasingly clear that the policy of the Obama administration is to pump as much taxpayer money as possible into the banks to avert a new wave of failures, in the hope that the economy will somehow begin to recover in 2010. Then Wall Street will be free to resume the speculative practices that enriched the financial aristocracy while precipitating the greatest global economic crisis since the 1930s." Editor's Note: This is the key folks. There has been NO ATTEMPT by the Obama administration to re-impose the equivalent of the The Glass-Steagall Act and revoke the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. -- To quote.... "The repeal [of Glass-Steagall]
enabled commercial lenders such as
Citigroup, which was in 1999 then the largest U.S. bank by assets, to
underwrite and trade instruments such as mortgage-backed securities and
collateralized debt obligations and establish so-called structured
investment vehicles, or SIVs, that bought those securities. [14] It is
therefore seen by some that the repeal of this act contributed to the
Global financial crisis of 2008–2009[15]. However, such SIVs existed
before the repeal of Glass-Steagall[16] -- The year before the repeal,
sub-prime loans were just 5% of all mortgage lending. By the time the
credit crisis peaked in 2008, they were approaching 30%." -- *Wikipedia*
There has been no effort on their part to reign in or regulate "structured finance" or the "derivatives market", or punish the executives involved for causing this fiasco, or forcing the banks made insolvent by all this activity to re-organize (as in any normal bankruptcy proceeding) or "mark to market" (if possible) all the synthetic investment vehicles on their books or even find out if these financial instruments represent any real assets or actual value. More importantly they have not banned the marketing of un-ratable or incorrectly rated (much of which was done deliberately) "securiterized" debt, specifically mortgage debt. Even if they correct everything else but leave just this one avenue of unrestrained and unrestricted monetary expansion available to the banks nothing else they do will prevent the current financial problems from getting worse, or prevent the same problems from reoccurring in the future. It will just be a license for the banks, brokerage firms and hedge funds engaged in these sorts of practices to print money and create uncollateralized debt at will....basically a license to steal. What they have done so far is to simply create a bunch of band-aid solutions in the vain hope that this current crisis will blow over and the wealthiest among us, the owners and controllers of the financial industry, the ones who caused all of these problems in the first place, can regain their footing by using the prodigious amounts of taxpayer dollars provided to them (by a candidate whose campaign they generously financed) so they can promptly proceed to go back to doing business as usual. The Obama administration is wasting precious tax-payer dollars by trying to placate and please these mavens of mendacity while also trying to bail-out what can only be described as an overbearing, parasitic, and non-productive sector of this nation’s economy. More importantly the Obama administration is wasting something much more valuable than dollars by rewarding these purveyors of shady financial instruments for the disservice they've done to their community….they're wasting precious time, of which they have very little left. The deepest concern is the fact that ongoing economic statistics for the US economy appear to be modeling almost exactly those that preceded the Great Depression, the trajectory of all the economic indicators seems to suggest we'll have a three to six month pause (at best) in any extremely severe or extraordinary amounts of economic deterioration, followed by a catastrophic final plunge lasting one to two more years. Everyone should also understand that this is not just a credit crisis, or a liquidity crisis, or even a debt/insolvency crisis (which is what’s causing the bulk of the economic problems), it's also the standard contraction of the US-NRE’s ten year business/war – currency expansion/contraction cycle, which is taking place around the world due the predominant use of the US-NRE’s currency as a world reserve currency and is therefore affecting all the producers of manufactured goods worldwide, just as any normal drop in demand caused by the end of the US-NRE’s ten year economic cycle would effect manufacturers in this country (hardly a factor anymore). And of course the fact that all four economic crisis’s are happening simultaneously means there will be highly negative, self-reinforcing, synergistic, deflationary forces that will most likely overwhelm ANY and ALL government attempts to counteract this current downward spiral of economic contraction. Also bare in mind the US-NRE is currently expending huge sums on various unnecessary military operations and self-inflicted Imperial "adventures" worldwide, is spending more on its vast, bloated, military establishment per year than the rest of the entire world combined, is deeply in debt along with its entire population, a population which has increased their debt load per capita, inflation adjusted, every ten year cycle for the past sixty years, is a population that has reduced its savings rate recently to the point where it became negative, is a nation that has a substantially diminished manufacturing base and finally, is a nation now undergoing a large unavoidable demographic shift as tens of millions of baby-boomers retire from the workforce. NONE of these additional burdens existed during the Great Depression. This does not bode well for the next two years, or for that matter the next two decades in offering any support for a positive outlook regarding the future of this nation’s economy. - mpg ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ========== ====== For more on this sort of issue see articles shown below.... The Financial Barbarians at the Gate - posted 04-26-09 Jack Bauer can't stop 'The Goldman Conspiracy' 10 reasons why Wall Street has absolute power.. - posted 04-24-09 Bill Moyers Interviews Simon Johnson & Ferdinand Pecora || Transcript || Podcast Mp3 || video - posted 04-24-09 The Housing Bust Takes Center-stage - posted 04-21-09 PJB: Should We Kill the Fed? - posted 04-07-09 Economics Professors: Global Crash Worse Than During First Year of Great Depression - posted 04-06-09 Resist or Become Serfs - posted 04-06-09 Militarism & Financial Excess: Two Sides of the Same Coin - posted 04-05-09 VIDEO: More IMF "Economic Medicine" Is Not the Solution - G-20 Proposals - Alt - video - posted 04-05-09 Wall St. ticks off the world - posted 04-05-09 Bill Moyers Interviews William K Black || Transcript || Podcast Mp3 || - must view video - posted 04-03-09 South Park - Stan Marsh takes us through the mortgage crisis - video cartoon satire - posted 04-02-09 The Quiet Coup - posted 04-01-09 Letter to Bank of America - satire - posted 04-01-09 Geithner's Hog-wallow: the US Treasury's Cash Giveaway Bonanza - posted on 03-28-09 Why Tax Cuts and Ruinous War Make this Crisis Worse Than the 'Great Depression' - posted on 03-23-09 Credit Bubble Bulletin -- Mistakes Beget Greater Mistakes - posted 03-14-09 The Crisis and the Consolidation of Class Power - Is This Really the End of Neoliberalism? - posted 03-13-09 Previewing the Superpower Summit - video - posted 03-13-09 Obama Deception -- Director Alex Jones Reaches Out to Obama Supporters - video - posted 03-12-09 Haircut Time For Bondholders - posted 03-12-09 Debt Relief and Regulation - posted 03-09-09 Part Two: The Lazy Man’s Guide to the Economic Crisis - posted 03-09-09 The U.S. Financial System Is Effectively Insolvent - posted 03-07-09 When Securitization Blew Up; So Did the Economy - posted 03-04-09 CORRUPTION-US: How Wall Street Paid For Its Own Funeral - posted 03-04-09 Wall Street's Best Investment: Paying for Policy in Washington - posted 03-04-09 Kiss the Banks Goodbye and Refocus on Rebuilding the American People - posted 03-04-09 Systemic Failure: Capitalism “Lays An Egg” By Stephen Lendman - posted 03-03-09 When Greed Comes Home to Roost - The Lazy Man's Guide to the Economic Crisis - posted 03-03-09 Third Leg Falling In Crash Of 2009 / Derivatives - posted 03-03-09 [Part One:] When Greed Comes Home to Roost - The Lazy Man's Guide to the Economic Crisis - posted 03-03-09 America's Fiscal Collapse - posted 03-02-09 Try Predatory Lenders - It Fits Better - 02-21-09 - mpg The Dollar's Spike - 10-06-08 - mpg 1.3 Quadrillion and Counting - 09-18-08 - mpg Debt Doesn't Matter When the Rubes Pay - 02-29-08 - mpg The Green Light - 01-16-08 - mpg |