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The Economics of Greed, Collusion, Incompetence and Ignorance.
10/5/08
How often have you heard that our economic problems are so complex that no one person can understand the entire breadth of the issues? I don’t know about you, but for me, all those deep and complex issues are pretty simple. While I would not point to any single issue as a foundation that our economic woes are built upon, the fact is, our economic times are more like the gathering of events that lead to a perfect storm.
Make no mistake here, there is not one single reason for any member of our Congress to claim they did not see this coming. From the Global Europe Anticipation Report of 2007,
A large number of events - whose importance began to appear clearly at the end of 2006 - is about to thrust the world's financial sector into a process of deep crisis: depreciation of US dollar-denominated assets, monetisation of US debt, fast degradation of US banks' and of some EU banks' balance-sheets, low level of banks' reserves, fast depreciation of housing loans (2) and recession of the US economy.
From Last Christmas, Gerald Celente, of Trends Research Institute, was warning of economic disaster including Bank Failures.
And from MSNBC in March
Q: Is this going to happen to other investment banks?
A: Nobody knows for sure, but it could. Until proven otherwise, the market will probably act as if there are more near-collapses to come
Not to mention, the whole idea of the stimulus checks that we used to pay bills instead of buying flat screen TV’s as Bush had hoped. Hell, read my archives, I even saw our economic troubles coming from as far away as a year ago, so why didn’t our politicians start addressing the problem sooner? So, it’s not like no one saw this storm coming!
I find it interesting that we now hear clarion calls for regulation when we’ve been deregulating since Reagan, and before,
Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman has pointed to the number of pages added to the Federal Register each year as evidence of Reagan's anti-regulation presidency (the Register records the rules and regulations that federal agencies issue per year).
When in truth, it is our Congress that is completely deregulated and held unaccountable. Despite a majority of citizens opposed to the trillion dollar bailout, our Congress passed a pork ridden bill to help us all out of the mess, not even knowing if it would work.
It might work, but there's no guarantee.
So Washington will borrow $700 billion to bail out Wall Street, and for good measure borrow roughly another $100 billion for pork and tax cuts. That's a strange way for a government already wallowing in debt and deficits to respond to a crisis ignited by an excess of bad debt.
One may just as well try to predict the weather three years from Tuesday
"Everyone is looking at what's going on on Wall Street as if the problem with foreclosures is behind us," he says. "It is not."
A trillion dollars, a 100 billion for pork, for something that no one knows will work!
So why didn’t Congress listen a year ago, why didn’t they start addressing the problems at least way back in March when Bear Stearns needed help. What happened to that 15 billion in Tax Breaks last April to tackle the housing problem?
I can’t help but believe most of the answers lie significantly in the fact that the players in Washington’s political world and the players in the Wall Street Corporate world are often one and the same. The fact that influential politicians find a lucrative second career setting on Corporate boards that are often interlocked make me question where their loyalties lie. This fact also makes me question the validity of the bailout bill. Whose income and interests are they protecting, mine or theirs?
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