Almost alone among progressives, I supported the original TARP bailout and told people that it was working in its primary purpose which was to prevent an epic depression-like collapse of the American and global economies. A lot of people made some pretty dire predictions, but they’re not talking so loudly these days. Without the bailouts, you certainly would not be seeing this:
If the economy produces jobs over the next eight months at the same pace as it did over the past four months, the nation will have created more jobs in 2010 alone than it did over the entire eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency.
The time to address the systemic risk inherent in the economy was not during the moment of greatest anxiety, but now, with calmer heads. We just needed to be patient. There is good momentum on the Wall Street reform bill, and it may be strengthened even more before passage.
However, I don’t expect anyone to like what happened with the bailout. Propping up megabanks that acted irresponsibly and cost people their jobs and life savings is not a fun thing to do. That’s why the Republicans who voted for the bailout are gun-shy about taking credit for the result. And it’s also why progressives are still in denial that the wretched thing worked.
You can give me all the “yes, but” arguments you want about how things could have been better or fairer, or tell me how much risk remains in the system, but the bottom line is that ‘yes.’ Yes, the bailout worked. The Masters of the Universe tried to destroy everything, and they did not succeed. Some Republicans will admit as much:
Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), who’s retiring at the end of the year and is therefore unencumbered by the need to defend himself from the GOP base, has nothing to run away from.
“It was extremely effective,” Gregg told me. “Not only was it effective and stabilized the financial industry, it also returned to the taxpayers almost $20 billion in interest and dividends that they would have otherwise not have.”
But, the common answer on both the left and the right came from John McCain:
“It’s not been effective because they deceived the American people,” McCain said. “They said it would go to address the housing issue instead they gave it to the financial institutions. It’s been well documented that it was sold to the American people as going to address what caused the crisis–that was the housing market–we gave $10 billion to Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs doesn’t have anything to do with the housing market…. They lied to the American people.”
The illogic in that statement tells you everything you need to know. McCain is essentially telling you that the painting is not hung on the wall because you said you were going to use a hammer to hang it but you used a screwdriver instead. Whether you misled someone or not, the painting is still on the wall. And there is the stunning dishonesty involved in saying that Goldman Sachs has nothing to do with the housing market.
In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.
Yeah, peddling $20 billion a year worth of mortgage backed securities is “nothing to do with the housing market.” Of course, it’s not surprising to see that John McCain is financially illiterate. He proved that during the crisis when he suspended his campaign to focus on the economy and had nothing to say.
The entire financial sector set up a house of cards to enrich themselves and in a just world they’d all hang by their balls. But in the real world, responsible leaders had to stop the bleeding before they could clean up the mess. Kind of like that oil geyser on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.
Not only did you ‘tell us so’,
you made sure to be quite insulting why you told us. Go back and read what you said to your commentators. You should be ashamed of that part, and not tooting your own horn.
The banks still have that ‘house of cards’. Nothing has changed at all. I believe that if we give banks billions, they should give something back besides the money. They did not.
nalbar
Why don’t you educate yourself about what it in the Wall Street reform bill before you tell me that nothing has changed. When the bill passes later this month, a whole lot will have changed. It may not go far enough for your tastes or mine, and it won’t solve every problem, but it will be the biggest financial reforms since FDR tackled these issues in 80 years ago.
We’ll see what is in the bill Obama actually signs. Second, it was the how the bailout was done. I remember Krugman advocating a different approach. And do you really believe everything is honky dory with the banks?
I keep hearing people complain about how it was done. You realize that Bush was president and Paulson was in charge of the whole thing, right? Did you think it was going to be done in a fair way? We didn’t have time to wait until late January when Obama could design the thing. The choice was to do something or do nothing. We couldn’t have much more influence than that.
Obama’s job was to work with what he had. He’s done that. And maybe he didn’t fulfill everyone’s wish list by nationalizing the banks, but he stopped the panic, stopped the job loss, and is getting ready to sign some pretty major reforms that will go a long way towards protecting consumers and limiting the risk of a repeat.
But they didn’t attach any strings whatsoever. And the costs are enormous either way, and will continue to be. Have you been wstching Japan for the past 20 years? You do know what “extend and pretend” means, right? Because instead of following what the Scandinavian countries did, we are following the Japanese route.
Sweden never put its banks in receivership, which is what the nationalization crowd wanted and argued for. It nationalized the banks by becoming the majority owner of each bank–that is, the government bought well over 50% of the banks’ equity.
well, what do you mean by “the costs were enormous”?
The costs of losing over 500,000 jobs a month are bigger than making a profit on TARP.
You can concentrate on “TARP” or you can include the total rescue. Which includes things like all the free money The Fed is giving the Big Money Boys. And how savers are getting fucked in the ass.
Krugman was advocating for nationalization, although the problem with people advocating for such a thing never differentiated what they meant by “nationalization.”
Most nationalization advocates seemed to want to place the major financial institutions (e.g., Citigroup, BofA) in an FDIC-style receivership (or conservatorship). They wanted to treat the major bank holding companies, which currently aren’t subject to the FDIC’s insolvency regime, like FDIC-insured banks.
The key is that in receivership, the receiver has the authority to impose haircuts on creditors. Outside of receivership, conservatorship, or bankruptcy, there is no legal mechanism for unilaterally imposing losses on creditors of bank holding companies. This legal authority is the key issue in the nationalization debate.
Thomas Hoenig thought he found a way around this, but as Ryan Avent documents here, he failed:
http://www.ryanavent.com/blog/?p=2005
It was more of a legal problem than a problem of political will.
That doesn’t mean it’s not possible, ever. However, developing such an authority will take years to do. That’s why in the other thread of BooMan’s I spent so much time trying to discuss how we solve TBTF correctly.
Either way, we could have designed it better, it could have had more strings, but in the end, BooMan is right. The bailout worked, despite opposition from most on the left. I supported it, half-heartedly, mostly because I wanted them to be more on the hook than just interest and paying it back. Still, it was either TARP, or nothing, and I was not settling for nothing.
What people didn’t realize is that it is enormously expensive to nationalize a bank. The assumption was that we’d never be paid back and nationalizing them would be cheaper. It would have been infinitely more expensive. But for most people advocating that, they wanted to nationalize the banks before there was a crisis. It was an ideological argument. They say the crisis as an opportunity to strike at the heart of the American system. Obviously, only a tiny minority wants to do that.
Well, the risk with the bailout was that it was a big gamble that they’d be able to profit themselves back to full health, and that we might be forced to “nationalize” them in the end anyway, adding more to the cost.
I’ve yet to see any argument for how we could actually nationalize them, though. People kept talking about it, but it was not possible even if we had the political will.
I agree, it was an ideological poutrage. Iunno why anyone would think putting the banking sector under government control would be a good idea, but hey, that’s just me. That’s why I get so annoyed when people that I know call me a socialist. I am not. I don’t believe the government can run many businesses well. Things such as health care, education, and R&D are obviously different. R&D mostly because the government can afford to take a lot of risks.
Other than that? Stay out, and regulate.
I covered this last March by looking at the price tag of the IndyMac nationalization.
If you’d like another example, take Continental Illinois. For some reason Joe Stiglitz argued that this was a great example to follow for the TBTF institutions.
Look at this crap he was spouting:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/opinion/01stiglitz.html
Talk about fudging the facts. It took the FDIC seven years to get rid of Continental Illinois. That’s his model for successful bank nationalization?
It was nationalized quickly. It took seven years to carry out the resolution process and get it back in private hands. So how much taxpayer funds were at risk during those seven years?
It appears that banks in states with strong prohibitions against branch banking are harder to resolve than those with large branch banking networks. That is because they have to be resolved as a single entity instead of being able to split off parts of the network for sale to other banks or to groups of investors who could set them up as a new bank.
Consider just the Franken amendment:
At the time, my thinking went: if the bailouts saved us from a global economic meltdown, and if that meant we would take some time to recover with 10% unemployment vs a very long time to recover with 25-30% unemployment, we were better off doing it. Even given the distaste, you can’t lose focus from the human suffering that would have caused.
As far as nationalization went as an alternative, I never heard a convincing argument that it was necessary, legal and less painful.
But I don’t believe that people that in some cases were posting multiple times a day that the whole thing was a huge ripoff and we’d never see a dime back will ever admit error. Too much rides on DFH’s always being right, because in many instances most of their critiques center on how others(the GOP, the press, pundits) are always wrong.
“Too much rides on DFH’s always being right, because in many instances most of their critiques center on how others(the GOP, the press, pundits) are always wrong.”
You are correct, that’s about what it boils down to. I would only add, there is an even more fundamental paradigm, which is this: THEY (being omnipotent and omniscient) always win, and we DFH (being victims and morally pure) always lose. With that paradigm, the most constructive thing you can do to “resist” is to organize vigils and chant “Kumbaya.” Doesn’t even matter if only 10 people show up and there’s no press — they are witnesses before the Great Universal Consciousness.
Here’s one corollary to this: If anything positive seems to happen, it can ONLY be an illusion, since we already know THEY are the masters and cannot be defeated on anything. Therefore, you are never wrong if you are totally cynical about any efforts to do anything positive. (I believe this would account for about 90% of the Left’s critique of Obama.)
And here’s another corollary: You don’t need to know anything about the actual details of the topic you’re bitching about, since it’s always the same situation: THEY are winning and WE are losing, so what difference do all these details make? It would only present us with the illusion that we need to think, and that might be confusing, since we already know the answer, we already know that we are on the side of righteousness.
It’s true that leftysphere critiques are generally way too reactive and kneejerk. Our great failure is a seeming inability to offer coherent philosophies to counter the crap that spews out of the Right and is promoted as conventional wisdom by the GOP, the Dem establishment, the press, the pundits. As a result we instead cling to a “permanent opposition” habit.
That said, though, the fact remains that THEY are always wrong. If they weren’t we wouldn’t have had the great bank robbery, the Iraq attack, the oil spill, the stolen election, and on and on and on. So is it so surprising that those who pay some attention fall into an all-encompassing cynicism? Gotta say, Obama’s bipartisan obsession and refusal to “dwell on the past” only serve to aggravate the reluctance to trust anything or anybody. It’s hard to get over PSTD when the trauma just keeps coming.
Our side has made better and earlier use of the internet for our purposes, but I’m wondering if the blog format isn’t part of the problem. It is by design a system where drive-by assertions and reactions are the default, after which they scroll into oblivion only to be replaced by more versions of the same ol’ scene with a slightly different theme and cast of characters. Since politics is numbers, it’s hard to think of a way to change that. In the meantime, for those of us who think the system is broken at its very heart, THEY are winning, and WE are losing. The real problem is, what do we do about that besides sniping and whining?
It’s nice that the bailout worked in preventing economic collapse, and I’m pleased that financial regulation will be at least nominally stronger than the previous regime.
However, there’s the basic issue of fairness and criminality here. Bernie Madoff just had the misfortune to be self employed. If he’d worked for Goldman or AIG, he wouldn’t be in jail right now. He’d be sitting in the caribbean sipping mojitos. The issue is that the entire financial system became a pyramid scheme, rife with fraud, and not only have none of the executives gone to jail, they haven’t even been fined or lost their jobs. At least executives from Enron went to jail. At the same time, these firms that nearly destroyed the economy have been reaping windfall profits from their TBTF status, largely perhaps from all the free money they get from the Fed. Their behavior was and is indefensible and yet I see no sign of any kind of criminal penalty for them. Instead they get unlimited credit with the Fed.
Dodd’s package is so typical of washington in that it talks on and on about what will or won’t happen in the future, but has nothing to say about the crimes that were committed in the past. And many of it’s provisions are laughably toothless for anyone of even moderate cynicism. It will “Discourage Excessive Growth & Complexity”. It “Gives shareholders a say on pay with the right to a non-binding vote on executive pay”. Oooh, non-binding!It ” Requires that public companies set policies to take back executive compensation if it was based on inaccurate financial statements that don’t comply with accounting standards”. I’m sure they’ll get right on that and won’t drag their feet at all.
There is a basic credibility issue here. How are we supposed to believe that these shiny, new, enlightened reforms will have any bite when the evident fraud of the past continues to go unpunished and is even lavishly rewarded? How, if no one involved in this scandal pays any price, retains all previous monies and status, are we to believe that this is not just another regulatory regime that will be inevitably undermined and flouted with revolving-door appointments, bought off senators, financial lap-dogs like Paulson, etc.? These guys are quite willing to fight for their right to rip us off every single day for ever. Where will the politicians be in a year or two? Absent real and painful criminal penalties, the answer seems clear.
Meh, call me a sucker, but I’m not one who has a hard on for criminalization and vengeance. I know that the little guy isn’t treated as fairly as Very Serious People, but I also argue that we should reform the justice system so that this isn’t the case (as much as possible, anyway).
I ask people what’s more important to them with regard to crime: preventing it from happening again, or punishment. I don’t believe that this is a false dichotomy, per se, because rarely do the two go hand in hand.
With the Bush administration and their crimes, my primal side wants their heads on silver platters whilst we sing Ding Dong the Witch is Dead. However, would that prevent torture in the future? Would that rally the public around the realization that torture is an absolute abomination under any circumstance? I don’t think so. I think it would divide this country, and because of our horrible press corps, people would see it as a witch hunt. That doesn’t mean I think Obama’s approach was any better; I think his approach was the worst. This is why for them, I argued for a Truth and Reconciliation, and a complete pardoning of anyone involved. I think that would be the best way to change the country’s attitudes in general, which is the most important thing to me here.
With your regular average Joe Schmoe criminal, I don’t think they belong in our animal cage cells that we like to call prisons. Most of them don’t belong there, and they’re far cry from what I would call humanitarian. Do they deserve to be there? Maybe. However, does putting them there lower the overall crime rate and prevent it in the future? Well, look at our crime statistics to tell you how that’s working out.
Undocumented workers. Is it just that we grant them amnesty? Probably not. I still argue for it because it’s the best solution. I’m not arguing that the banker criminals should be off the hook, per se, but I want the most workable solution. I don’t even know if anything that they did was illegal to begin with. Grossly immoral? You bet.
So in the end, is it just? No. Should they be in prison? Possibly, I don’t know the entire legal implications. But we don’t live in a just world. We live in a cruel and unjust world, and we need to make do and follow the more logical rationale.
Your talking about a lot of different situations. I think the torture regime question is separate from the financial question. And I’m not talking about putting people in cages or whatever like a law and order type. I’m talking about basic fairness and credibility. My point is that Obama or Dodd or whoever simply has no credibility on the issue of “reforming” the system when the malefactors who created the crisis are totally untouched. And an SEO lawsuit is nice, but that’s peanuts to Goldman. If no one ever even loses their pay or their job (in the industry or in regulatory government), to say nothing of going to jail or having massive criminal fines, when the system nearly destroyed the economy, the regulatory regime not only isn’t working. It can hardly be said to exist. And I think it’s safe to say that’s not divisive at all for 95% of Americans. It merely confirms for anyone watching that our government runs on the law of steal $100 and you’re a criminal, steal a million (or a billion, or a trillion) and you’re a bank executive.
Then that’s a problem with the laws. It doesn’t make what they did illegal.
That SEC lawsuit was bullocks anyway. I will hand it to the SEC, they completely outmaneuvered Goldman lol. In reality I bet Goldman would have won in court, but that’s why they didn’t settle initially anyway. The lawsuit probably looked so ridiculous that they were like “You cannot be serious…why should we settle? You have no case.” The SEC pressed forward anyway, and gave them a PR run that they’ll never forget. Kudos to the SEC on that one.
“It doesn’t make what they did illegal.”
What they did involves millions of transactions across many years. I’m quite sure some of it was illegal, and some if it wasn’t “illegal” but certainly merited a serious work-over from any self-respecting regulatory regime.
.
April 20 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission split 3-2 along party lines to approve an enforcement case against Goldman Sachs Group Inc., according to two people with knowledge of the vote.
SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro sided with Democrats Luis Aguilar and Elisse Walter to approve the case filed on April 16, said the people, who declined to be identified because the vote wasn’t public. Republican commissioners Kathleen Casey and Troy Paredes voted against suing.
Morgan Stanley: The SEC’s next target? … Wall Street Probe Widens
speculatecash in on fall of the euro’Remind me of my diary – Devastating Report on Iceland’s Financial Negligence
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."“Meh, call me a sucker, but I’m not one who has a hard on for criminalization and vengeance.”
I think others would say ‘justice’ is the goal.
Just the same, I’ve read daily rants over ‘criminal’ behavior without any evidence whatsoever. While all of this may be morally criminal, people that say this don’t present any evidence of criminal behavior. In fact, it seems to me the rules were so rigged/weak that it was pretty much a license to print money, making ‘criminal’ behavior unnecessary.
Yeah I know, but ultimately it comes down to one’s definition of justice. Is the death penalty just? Some would say it is, especially if there is 100% without a doubt proof that the perpetrator is guilty.
I would argue that it isn’t, though. It serves no greater purpose but to fulfill people’s desires for revenge.
Is it just? Did they deserve it? Maybe; in fact they probably do. However, I see no purpose if it doesn’t help our society in the future.
Would we be better off if the banker criminals were put in jail? I’d argue that it’s good politics for better reform, so in this case, yes. That’s assuming what was done was in fact illegal.
I don’t see what the fact that there are bad laws has to do with anything. Punishment is society’s way of affirming that certain behavior is beyond the pale, rightly or wrongly. You say forgeddaboutit, we live in an unjust world, but how is that fact mitigated when only one kind of criminal is ever punished? I don’t much care whether the banksters and associates go to jail. I do want them stripped of everything they own, and their businesses destroyed. Why is that privilege reserved for serf-class citizens who have a couple ounces of pot in their office, or fail to report some trivial sale on their tax returns?
There is, at the least, evidence of widespread fraud in the issuing of mortgage loans. There is also evidence of fraud or criminal negligence in the ratings many of these securitized mortgage sandwich’s were given.
Good point. Do we also go after the people that lied about their income on ‘declared income’ loans?
If there was no fraud in the packaging and marketing of those loans, then there is no such thing as fraud. There was no other reason for creating those processes except to market worthless “securities”. Arguing about whether it was “legal” is like letting a murder off the hook because the law didn’t SAY you can’t kill a person by drowning them in oatmeal. Murder is murder. Fraud is fraud. The same notions of intent and consequence applies equally to both.
You are arguing for orderly, logical outcomes, but when there is no justice there is no order and logic is cast aside in favor of pitchforks and ropes. What the banksters and brokers did is buried in a lot of bureaucratic/academic/legalist rhetoric designed to conceal the criminality that defines the US financial oligarchy. The same kind of obfuscation that is the default method for justifying everything from the divine right of kings to churchly child molesting to the Iraq invasion to privatization of the commons.
There comes a point when the crimes committed, “legally” or not, by the oligarchy grow so monstrous that the choice is reduced to either making our servitude an immutable condition or fighting to overthrow the enemy. Banking is a simple and marginally productive enterprise: you buy money low and sell it high. That’s it. Everything else, all the high math and legal flummery has no purpose other than increasing ruling-class profit and power at the expense of society as a whole. The fact is that Goldman created puzzle-box packages to hold worthless “securities” that they could use other peoples’ money to trade and make billions or trillions from. It strains credibility to the breaking point to imagine that the behavior of the rest of the princely in-betweeners was any less larcenous.
You seem to believe that law and criminality are fixed stars by which we can make fair and rational judgements. I’m sure you know better, so don’t understand why you’d attempt such an argument. By any rational measure, what Goldman and the rest of the TBTF crowd did was criminal fraud. Nattering about their specific methods is irrelevant to intent and consequences. You want to change the country’s attitudes? You won’t do it by promoting a culture of impunity for a criminal oligarchy. Prison for these swindlers is only the tip of the iceberg. All the economics writers I respect seem to agree that too big to fail is too big to exist. The essential point is to put a definitive end to the oligarchy’s power, their influence, their uncontrolled growth, and their impunity. Criminal punishment is just a way of ratifying that imperative.
If corporations are people, the chief executive must serve as the legal corpus to which criminal penalties apply. If say, an individual dumped 20 million gallons of toxic chemicals in the gulf, would not that individual spend some time in jail? I really think that lawyers should be pushing this: if corporations have the legal rights of people, do they not have the same legal responsibilities?
Corporations are legal entities that receive the privilege of limited liability for directors and officers suffering personal damages. In order to assign liability to an individual, there has to be sufficient proof that the individual acted outside of the policy direction of the board or that the actions so violated corporation law as to permit “piercing the veil” of corporate limited liability and going after the individual.
It’s been done. In the 1970s, two officers of a metals processing plant were sent to jail for denying their workers safety equipment that would have prevented their deaths from hazardous fumes in the workplace. Not only were they sent to jail but it was on charges of second degree murder.
In answer to your last question, the answer is no. They have different legal responsibilities, and individual directors and officers can play the individual vs. corporate responsibilities off against each other to pretty much do what they want. Unless something exercises the public, a prosecutor, or unless a person damaged has a good enough lawyer.
Dumping 20 million gallons of toxic chemicals in the Gulf is no more a jailable offense than dumping 5 gallons of toxic sludge in the headquarters lobby of a multinational corporation (it’s been done).
Well I think that’s a defect in our legal system!
A 175-year-old defect, as it were.
If legislatures were captives of business and so easily scared by job extortion, they could impose some regulations in return for the grant of limited liability. And they used to, until Delaware figured out it could make money as the incorporation capital of the world by having little regulation of corporations. Other states have now followed Delaware in passing a 50-state model incorporation law. That means to undo it requires fighting through every legislature, one at a time.
A jailable offense is what prosecutors and judges say it is. I suspect that your latter example would have a good chance of being a jailable offense. The former, never.
Accountability is tough when “everyone was doing it.”
It’s doubly tough when the only people with the working capital needed to buy up toxic assets or failed banks are the one’s that shorted the housing market.
Of course it’s “tough”. It’s always easier to bust the marginalized and poor and let the wealthy and powerful play their games. Where did all this “nation of laws” shit go? Aren’t we supposed to 1) discourage criminality and 2) Remove the criminals from the public domain to mitigate their harm? So how have we improved things when there is no discouragement and all the same criminals are running the show?
well, a lot of the problem was that a lot of things that should have been prohibited or illegal were not actually banned or against the law.
Last I looked, fraud was still against the law. What Goldman and the rest did was no different than selling $5000 packs of aspirin to cure cancer. Let’s not get lost in the lawyerly bullshit. Fraud is fraud.
The difficulty in discussing this is that “the bailout” means different things to different people. From allowing the collapse of Bear Stearns all the way through the bailout of GM and Chrysler.
The TARP program itself wound up working well because Democrats in Congress did exert some leverage in the lame duck days of the Bush Administration. First of all they required that it not be all released to the administration as a lump sum but as two releases, one immediately (under Bush) and one in the Obama administration. They required strong oversight–and got it. So the TARP program itself worked fairly well and was paid off, in part because of the restriction on using TARP funds for executive bonuses.
The criticism of “the bailout” is about a few things that occurred and some that should have but did not:
There were bailouts of AIG and other entities outside of TARP that allowed discriminatory payouts — some entities received 100 cents on the dollar while others received fractions. And taxpayers feel like tax money socialized those payouts to make some preferred institutions whole.
The Fed, Treasury, and MSM failed to explain what was going on in terms ordinary folks could understand. (For the MSM, it was above their capability.)
And the institutions that were bailed out paid out “performance” bonuses to folks who caused mammoth losses, which given the fungibility of money taxpayers assume were only possible because of the TARP funding.
And in resolving the crisis, the Fed and whoever else was working the case, created mergers that made too-big-to-fail institutions much bigger.
People look at their paychecks and at the bonuses and compensation of the people who caused the crisis and ask “Why weren’t they fired for incompentence?” And the trust in the correspondent bank system so failed that no money moved for months, except from one paper security to another.
And while Paulson was Secretary of Treasury, Bernanke was head of the Fed and Geithner was head of the NY Fed. And they are still around. People are worried about their interest and capability to act in the public interest instead of the vested interests of their peers on Wall Street.
Even with the bill in the Senate, which is not a done deal yet, and the repayment of TARP funds, neither the financial system nor the economy has structurally changed from what it was in 2008. Increased consumer debt is what is clawing the economy back from the pits. That and the Recovery Act.
I would not get triumphalistic over this statement:
That is a pretty low bar, considering that the last six months of the Bush administration jobs were being shed more rapidly than any time since the Great Depression.
At best, you are premature. At worst, you are mischaracterizing the criticism on the left by claiming that McCain’s argument represents that criticism.
There were and are some serious problems with “the bailout”, no matter how well TARP turned out.
For the record, I supported the final vote on TARP because I thought that the bill had gotten enough protections written in, most notably leaving half of the funds to the Obama administration.
You weren’t alone, but I supported it for reasons most bloggers or Americans for that matter won’t admit: I don’t know a damn thing about big finance and thus I had to trust the President I voted for to do the right thing. With the all of the tens of millions of folks who suddenly emerged as financial experts in the bloghespere and in living rooms across America, I couldn’t help but wonder why most Americans are 3 or less paychecks away from homelessness. With that much financial braintrust you would think we would be walking on gold paved streets and wiping our asses with $100 bills.
The reality is only a small number of people truly understand this mess and most are working for the bad guys and the remaining few Obama hired. So, I trusted my President to do the right thing. Nothing he did was pretty but it was necessary. As such, I’m more confident I’ll have a job next year; my meager savings and investments will continue to be reported to me quarterly with bright green numbers instead of little red ones; and my grandmother’s pension, which was attached to the stock market like most, didn’t fall down the sink hole with Leahman Brothers.
Rather than saying I told you so, I think it would be more appropriate to tell arm-chair, literally folks sitting on their sofas screaming at their laptops, financial experts to stop pretending to know stuff you don’t.
Folks were screaming at their laptops because they knew that the money was coming out of their hides and at that point there was no assurance that it would be paid back. And they also knew that whatever happened the bankers would not be hurt–and they would be. And that the details of how really wouldn’t matter. One doesn’t need to be a financial expert to have the sense that those opinions were grounded in experience and reality.
Folks are three paychecks away from disaster because unlike these executives they don’t get to set their compensation. And the only trickle down they have seen is the stack of managers depressing the salaries of those below them in order to “justify” a larger salary for themselves.
OK, Boo — a nice pat on the head for you. You were one of the more reasonable voices on the lefty side during the height of the bailout chaos. I reluctantly went along with the bailout because I hoped the characters urging it knew what they were talking about and that Obama would keep them a little honest. And that seems to be about how it worked out.
I think Obama and the Dems made a mistake in not doing everything they could to separate what they intended from what Bush wanted. They opted for continuity over honest assignment of responsibility, at great political cost. To me, the bailout will turn out to be a temporary fix and a sham unless it is used to buy time while the systematic oligarchy that swindled us into disaster is destroyed in the most orderly and rational manner possible. I think the ongoing cynicism on all political sides comes from people not seeing much clear movement in that direction. What it looks like at the moment is impunity with a few slaps on the wrist for the perps. Maybe the reform bill and Obama’s executive actions will change that perception. That seems like about the last shred of hope we can believe in.
Progressives tend to not even notice their victories because they come in such small portions.
Interesting roll call on the amendment.
The present financial system is insupportable, and Obama knows that as well as you do. So does practically everyone else in the universe. Practically everyone in the world wants them to die. The politics, if the President plays it right, is on his side. Everything I know bout the guy convinces me that he is a master politician. It’s taking too long? Yes, it is taking way too long. It also would have taken a long time to turn the Titanic around, if the captain had actually tried to do it.
THEY are winning in the sense the USA was winning when it became “the world’s only superpower.” Pride goeth before a fall.