At 23:28 02/10/2011, D and N wrote:
Not news, just some filler:
This may not be news just now but it's certainly more than a filler.
And it's more than just Bernanke and Geithner, too. They're just two
of the current players in a dance that's been going on between the US
Fed (particularly the New York Fed), the White House and a select new
species of banker-broker-derivatores hybrid (Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan,
Citigroup, UBS, etc) that started in the late '70s and early '80s as
a consequence of Nixon cutting the last link of the dollar with gold
(1971). It was a weak link but at least it exercised some restraint
on dollar-printing. Once it had gone, then it was a matter of budget
deficits every year (except in 1998 and 2001 during years of
super-exuberant stock exchange rises), the building up of massive
governmental debt (beyond any possible hope of repayment), foreign
exchange speculation taken to a new level of frenzy and, overall, the
spawning of a great cloud of dollar-money (certainly well north of
$100 trillion) that gyrates above the normal (world) economy and in
turn has spawned a couple of thousand hedge funds which dart around within it.
Now here are three "factoids" which suggest that the final denouement
(that is, catastrophe) is closer than we might think. When Summers
(Obama's chief economic advisor) suddenly resigned (without
explanation) some six months ago (immediately after returning from
negotiations in Beijing), he didn't 'automatically' go to a
high-paying job with Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan as Rubin and others
had gone before him, but back to a teaching job at Harvard ("to
resume paying for my pension" he is supposed to have said!). And then
there's Geithner. Three months ago he said he was going to resign as
US Financial Secretary. One would imagine that he, too, would have
had a job with Goldman Sachs or the like in mind. But then, a month
ago, he changed his mind! Third 'factoid'. In the last 20 years, GS
has been the most profitable financial set-up that has ever existed
(apart from Rothschilds perhaps in the 19th century) but is suddenly
making losses this quarter. It is even making hundreds of its
'partners' redundant! This firm, which did fabulously well before
the credit-crunch of 2008/9, and even made money during it, is now in
trouble with, one presumes, only its brokerage fees to sustain it.
We live in interesting times. (Mind you, I think that the final
meltdown will be initiated in the Eurozone.)
Keith
The Men Behind America's Economic Meltdown
Robert Scheer, Huffington Post - Bernanke, along with then-New York
Fed President Timothy Geithner, helped implement the Bush strategy
of saving the banks in the hope that their rising tide would lift
our little boats. That remained the strategy when President Obama
rewarded Geithner for having saved AIG and Citigroup by naming him
treasury secretary in the incoming government.
With the Geithner appointment, and the even more disturbing
selection of Lawrence Summers to be his top economic adviser, Obama
sealed his own fate as president. By turning to those disciples of
Clinton-era Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, a prime enabler of Wall
Street greed, the new president fatally betrayed his promise of hope.
If you still need confirmation of just how decisive a betrayal those
appointments were, check out Ron Suskind's new book, "Confidence
Men," a devastating insider account of the Obama White House that
clearly identifies as the source of this president's failure
"Rubin's B-Team," Summers and Geithner, "two men whose actions had
contributed to the very financial disaster they were hired to
solve." Suskind quotes then-Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., one of the
few who dared stand up to the Wall Street lobbyists, as telling
Obama, "I don't understand how you could do this; you've picked the
wrong people!"
Of course the Democrats from the Clinton era don't bear all of the
responsibility for the radical deregulation of the financial
industry that ended the sensible restraints on greed installed by
Franklin Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression. Indeed, the
inspiration came from Republicans led by Phil Gramm, the
then-senator from Texas who as head of the Banking Committee
authored the legislation that Wall Street lobbyists had long pushed
unsuccessfully.
The mayhem they wrought and the subsequent big-money rewards to
Rubin and Gramm do not seem to have shocked this president or the
leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination. Rubin
became chairman of Citigroup and was rewarded with $120 million
while he guided the bank to the edge of bankruptcy. Gramm went to a
leading position at the Swiss-based UBS, the continually troubled
institution now in the midst of its latest scandal, involving
fraudulent trading. In addition to a $45 billion direct TARP
bailout, Citigroup got $99.5 billion, and Gramm's UBS $77.2 billion
from a $1.2 trillion secret Fed loan fund.
Gramm and Rubin were partners in what should be considered the crime
of the century, speaking in moral and not legal terms since, as
regards the financial world, the bad guys get to write the laws.
Thanks to their efforts, which allowed the creation of the
"too-big-to-fail banks" and a totally unregulated derivatives market
in toxic home mortgage securities, we entered the Great Recession,
but neither of its authors has ever been held seriously accountable
for the enormous suffering he caused.
On the contrary, Gramm and Rubin's "just free Wall Street to do its
thing" ideology still dominates the economic policies of both major
political parties. Rubin's acolytes have controlled the Obama
administration's economic strategy of saving Wall Street by
betraying Main Street, and Gramm, who recently endorsed his former
student at Texas A&M, Rick Perry, for president, remains the
free-market-mayhem guru for Republicans. On Election Day, whoever
wins, we lose.
With the Geithner appointment, and the even more disturbing
selection of Lawrence Summers to be his top economic adviser, Obama
sealed his own fate as president. By turning to those disciples of
Clinton-era Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, a prime enabler of Wall
Street greed, the new president fatally betrayed his promise of hope. . .
Of course the Democrats from the Clinton era don't bear all of the
responsibility for the radical deregulation of the financial
industry that ended the sensible restraints on greed installed by
Franklin Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression. Indeed, the
inspiration came from Republicans led by Phil Gramm, the
then-senator from Texas who as head of the Banking Committee
authored the legislation that Wall Street lobbyists had long pushed
unsuccessfully.
The mayhem they wrought and the subsequent big-money rewards to
Rubin and Gramm do not seem to have shocked this president or the
leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination. Rubin
became chairman of Citigroup and was rewarded with $120 million
while he guided the bank to the edge of bankruptcy. Gramm went to a
leading position at the Swiss-based UBS, the continually troubled
institution now in the midst of its latest scandal, involving
fraudulent trading. In addition to a $45 billion direct TARP
bailout, Citigroup got $99.5 billion, and Gramm's UBS $77.2 billion
from a $1.2 trillion secret Fed loan fund. . .
Gramm and Rubin's "just free Wall Street to do its thing" ideology
still dominates the economic policies of both major political
parties. Rubin's acolytes have controlled the Obama administration's
economic strategy of saving Wall Street by betraying Main Street,
and Gramm, who recently endorsed his former student at Texas A&M,
Rick Perry, for president, remains the free-market-mayhem guru for
Republicans.
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/09/
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