Published on Thursday, October 2, 2008 by The Huffington Post
If you are like me, the pundits, and 99.9% of the American public, you really don’t know much about economics. And despite Monday’s refreshing moment of rebellion in the Congress, in all likelihood the House and Senate will pass a modified version of the $700 billion handout this week to fat cat Wall Street financiers.
The likely result, according to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz: “The unemployment rate will still increase, growth will remain anemic, house prices will continue to fall, the number of houses in foreclosure will continue to rise, credit will be harder to get, states and localities will remain in a fiscal crisis, and there will be cutbacks in basic public services. …. Our living standards in the future will be lower than they otherwise would have been. ”
Here’s the problem: None of us really know that the hell is going on, and what the largest financial bailout in the history of our nation would actually achieve. Based on McCain and Obama’s hasty support of the bailout, it would seem they are both too far under the thumb of Wall Street to look at viable alternatives to an unprecedented handout to the same reckless bankers who got us into this mess.
And like they did in the run-up to war in Iraq and the passage of the Patriot Act, the media are compounding the problem rather than helping it. While TV devotes 24/7 coverage to pretending that mudslinging Democrats and Republicans represent the full range of debate, while right-wing radio hosts scream socialism, and while pundits like Thomas Friedman implore Congress “to give them the capital and the flexibility to put out this fire,” the American people are getting virtually no hard economic analysis about what the bailout would achieve or what the range of options are.
Why aren’t Luc Laeven and Fabian Valencia on television right now? They just submitted a comprehensive report to the International Monetary Fund after studying 42 banking crises over the past 37 years. Their conclusion: Bailouts often do not work, they often result in more bad practices, and they distort economies by transferring wealth from taxpayers to bankers and their customers.
Why hasn’t economist Dean Baker been invited onto a single television program in the past week ? He is one of the guys who actually predicted the current crisis. He wrote this week: “There is no way that the failure to do a bailout will lead to more than a very brief failure of the financial system. The worst case scenario is that we have an extremely scary day in which the markets freeze for a few hours. Then the Fed steps in and takes over the major banks. The system of payments continues to operate exactly as before, but the bank executives are out of their jobs and the bank shareholders have likely lost most of their money. In other words, the banks have a gun pointed to their heads and are threatening to pull the trigger unless we hand them $700 billion.”
Why isn’t New York University economist Nouriel Roubini all over the news right now? He says the claim that “spending $700 billion of public money is the best way to recapitalize banks has absolutely no factual basis or justification. This way of recapitalizing financial institutions is a total rip-off that will mostly benefit – at a huge expense for the U.S. taxpayer – the shareholders and even unsecured creditors of the banks. ….The pockets of reckless bankers and investors (will) have been made fatter under the fake argument that bailing out Wall Street was necessary to rescue Main Street from a severe recession.”
Roubini continues, “Instead, the restoration of the financial health of distressed financial firms could have been achieved with a cheaper and better use of public money. It is pathetic that Congress did not consult any of the many professional economists that have presented alternative plans that were more fair and efficient and less costly ways to resolve this crisis. … and it is a scandal that even Congressional Democrats have fallen for this Treasury scam that does little to resolve the debt burden of millions of distressed home owners.”
But turn on your television – the place where more than 60% of Americans get their primary news – turn on your radio, or open your local newspaper, and you’re not going to see what these top economists are saying. It’s a McCain quote, an Obama sound byte, and the same pundits who have proven their incompetence over and over. The result is an American public that is fundamentally uninformed about the issues that matter most – like economics, health care, and war – and over-informed about those that matter least: sports, celebrity, the latest campaign ad, and horserace analysis of elections.
We have no reason to believe that the press — and along with it, most politicians — will ask the tough questions, expand the range of debate, and bring the facts to the American people. But until they do, our economy – and our democracy — will continue its race to the bottom.
Peace and Justice Post 
Behind the Panic: Financial Warfare and the Future of Global Bank Power
October 15, 2008By F. William Engdahl | AxisofLogic, Oct 10, 2008, 11:28
What’s clear from the behavior of European financial markets over the past two weeks is that the dramatic stories of financial meltdown and panic are deliberately being used by certain influential factions in and outside the EU to shape the future face of global banking in the wake of the US sub-prime and Asset-Backed Security (ABS) debacle. The most interesting development in recent days has been the unified and strong position of the German Chancellor, Finance Minister, Bundesbank and coalition Government, all opposing an American-style EU Superfund bank bailout. Meanwhile Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson pursues his Crony Capitalism to the detriment of the nation and benefit of his cronies in the financial world. It’s an explosive cocktail that need not have been.
“There is serious ground to believe that [Henry Paulson] is actually moving according to a well-thought-out long-term strategy.”
Stock market falls of 7 to 10% a day make for dramatic news headlines and serve to foster a broad sense of unease bordering on panic among ordinary citizens. The events of the last two weeks among EU banks since the dramatic state rescues of Hypo Real Estate, Dexia and Fortis banks, and the announcement by UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling of a radical shift in policy in dealing with troubled UK banks, have begun to reveal the outline of a distinctly different European response to what in effect is a crisis ‘Made in USA.’
There is serious ground to believe that US Goldman Sachs ex CEO Henry Paulson, as Treasury Secretary, is not stupid. There is also serious ground to believe that he is actually moving according to a well-thought-out long-term strategy. Events as they are now unfolding in the EU tend to confirm that. As one senior European banker put it to me in private discussion, ‘There is an all-out war going on between the United States and the EU to define the future face of European banking.’
In this banker’s view, the ongoing attempt of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and France’s Nicholas Sarkosy to get an EU common ‘fund’, with perhaps upwards of $300 billion to rescue troubled banks, would de facto play directly into Paulson and the US establishment’s long-term strategy, by in effect weakening the banks and repaying US-originated Asset Backed Securities held by EU banks.
Using panic to centralize power
As I document in my forthcoming book, Power of Money: The Rise and Decline of the American Century, in every major US financial panic since at least the Panic of 1835, the titans of Wall Street—most especially until 1929, the House of JP Morgan—have deliberately triggered bank panics behind the scenes in order to consolidate their grip on US banking. The private banks used the panics to control Washington policy including the exact definition of the private ownership of the new Federal Reserve in 1913, and to consolidate their control over industry such as US Steel, Caterpillar, Westinghouse and the like. They are, in short, old hands at such financial warfare to increase their power.
Now they must do something similar on a global scale to be able to continue to dominate global finance, the heart of the power of the American Century.
That process of using panics to centralize their private power created an extremely powerful, concentration of financial and economic power in a few private hands, the same hands which created the influential US foreign policy think-tank, the New York Council on Foreign Relations in 1919 to guide the ascent of the American Century, as Time founder Henry Luce called it in a pivotal 1941 essay.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that people like Henry Paulson, who by the way was one of the most aggressive practitioners of the ABS revolution on Wall Street before becoming Treasury Secretary, are operating on motives beyond their over-proportional sense of greed. Paulson’s own background is interesting in that context. Back in the early 1970’s Paulson started his career working for a rather notorious man named John Erlichman, Nixon’s ruthless adviser who created the Plumbers’ Unit during the Watergate era to silence opponents of the President, and was left by Nixon to ‘twist in the wind’ for it in prison.
Paulson seems to have learned from his White House mentor. As co-chairman of Goldman Sachs according to a New York Times account, in 1998 he forced out his co-chairman, Jon Corzine ‘in what amounted to a coup’ according to the Times.
Continued . . .
Share this:
Tags:bailout, concentration of financial and economic power, EU banks, financial meltdown, Germany, Henery Paulson, stock markets, UK government, Wall Street
Posted in Commentary | Leave a Comment »