Chicken Coop/Foxes
Mar. 24th, 2009 06:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purejuiceIt bothers me that Geithner felt that a serious part of his job was enlisting the encomia of two big investment management firms, BlackRock and Pimco. It results in a headline above the fold on the NYT this morning: Rescue Plan, With Fine Print, Dazzles Wall St. Call me an ignorant slut, but somehow my mind goes directly there: that the plan was hatched with their active participation and collusion. How else could they be persuaded to sign on?
I have had the sense all along that what Wall Street thinks, or how the stock market reacts, is completely irrelevant, and now the BSD's are coming out and saying the same thing. I've heard a senior reporter (Nocera, I think it was) and Krugman, the Nobel laureate, both say in the past 24 hours that what Wall Street thinks, and how the market reacts, simply is neither important nor relevant.
Meanwhile, Krugman is putting into words what I've always thought about the two schools of thought -- one, the Geithner/Obama/unspeakable Summers, that the banking system just needs to be slapped in the face, and two, that it needs to fail and disappear, be brought to justice, and to be replaced.
What this all means, is, it ain't rocket science. And for former campaign chair David Axelrod to go around saying people aren't sitting around their kitchen tables thinking about AIG is not only wrong, not true, and bearing no resemblance to reality, it is monumentally insulting.
Has Axelrod, whose political instincts in the Obama campaign were nearly beatified, noticed, for example, that 10 out of the perhaps 25 jokes Jay Leno tells every night in his monologue, are about AIG? Or that Cuomo and Blumenthal, the AGs respectively of New York and Connecticut, are staking their political future on identifying the boni and getting 15 out of the 20 to return the boni?
You don't need to be a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
This boring but important blog post on the discrepancy in the talking point about the importance of AIG to White House flacks and to the President himself suggests that Obama actually does get it, and goes around after Axelrod and Geithner shovelling up shit. Even if they don't get it. And he has been in this place before with these characters, and has turned his campaign around.
One final thing, the colloquy of BSDs last night on Charlie Rose (Nocera, Sorkin, Krugman) said....that the Geithner TARP plan may basically be based on the political calculation that no bailout plan proposed as legislation could pass Congress. This is worth thinking about, and may explain the stupid and cynical and spurious affect it exudes. I can easily see the Best and the Brightest, with the unspeakable Summers at the top of the list, outwitting themselves. This is just another bonus for unscrupulous speculators -- with $500 billion of our money.
I have had the sense all along that what Wall Street thinks, or how the stock market reacts, is completely irrelevant, and now the BSD's are coming out and saying the same thing. I've heard a senior reporter (Nocera, I think it was) and Krugman, the Nobel laureate, both say in the past 24 hours that what Wall Street thinks, and how the market reacts, simply is neither important nor relevant.
Meanwhile, Krugman is putting into words what I've always thought about the two schools of thought -- one, the Geithner/Obama/unspeakable Summers, that the banking system just needs to be slapped in the face, and two, that it needs to fail and disappear, be brought to justice, and to be replaced.
What this all means, is, it ain't rocket science. And for former campaign chair David Axelrod to go around saying people aren't sitting around their kitchen tables thinking about AIG is not only wrong, not true, and bearing no resemblance to reality, it is monumentally insulting.
Has Axelrod, whose political instincts in the Obama campaign were nearly beatified, noticed, for example, that 10 out of the perhaps 25 jokes Jay Leno tells every night in his monologue, are about AIG? Or that Cuomo and Blumenthal, the AGs respectively of New York and Connecticut, are staking their political future on identifying the boni and getting 15 out of the 20 to return the boni?
You don't need to be a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
This boring but important blog post on the discrepancy in the talking point about the importance of AIG to White House flacks and to the President himself suggests that Obama actually does get it, and goes around after Axelrod and Geithner shovelling up shit. Even if they don't get it. And he has been in this place before with these characters, and has turned his campaign around.
One final thing, the colloquy of BSDs last night on Charlie Rose (Nocera, Sorkin, Krugman) said....that the Geithner TARP plan may basically be based on the political calculation that no bailout plan proposed as legislation could pass Congress. This is worth thinking about, and may explain the stupid and cynical and spurious affect it exudes. I can easily see the Best and the Brightest, with the unspeakable Summers at the top of the list, outwitting themselves. This is just another bonus for unscrupulous speculators -- with $500 billion of our money.
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-25 01:21 am (UTC)I don't think there was a conspiracy to cause the crash - it was a byproduct of all the insider collusion and greed - but now that it has happened people with power are certainly working together to protect their own power and money.
Side note: I am again annoyed that Taibbi, like every other journalist, characterizes the "bad" loans as being made to cartoonishly bad debtors.
In reality the bad loans include people who became insolvent due to some financial change (like losing their job) and/or were manipulated, deceived or bullied into loans they couldn't afford.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-25 02:28 am (UTC)the bad debtor concept is so strange to me; i agree that people are crazy to have $700K houses, and $20K on the credit cards, when they make $9 an hour -- but i think to a degree that was a set up, too.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-26 05:12 am (UTC)I find the RGE Web site impenetrable, but I like the newsletters. Some of them link to unfree content, and I don't like those. But I like the ones that have actual content in them.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-26 11:43 am (UTC)