"A moderate recession became a major recession in summer 2008 when the [Federal Open Market Committee] ceased lowering the federal funds rate while the economy deteriorated."
8/6/12, "Fed study says Bush and the banks didn’t cause the Great Recession. The Fed did," James Pethokoukis, AEI Ideas
"The president (Obama) argues that it was the unchecked, reckless, casino capitalism of the George W. Bush years — bank deregulation, tax cuts for the rich — that lead to the nation’s worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. And if Mitt Romney is elected in November, the Republican will bring those policies right back, risking another financial collapse.
Here’s what Obama said during that same speech where he told America’s entrepreneurs that “you didn’t build that”:
But I just want to point out that we tried their theory for almost 10 years … and it culminated in a crisis because there weren’t enough regulations on Wall Street and they could make reckless bets with other people’s money that resulted in this financial crisis, and you had to foot the bill. So that’s where their theory turned out.
But a book by Robert Hetzel, a senior economist at Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, says it wasn’t Bushonomics or greedy bankers or broken markets that caused the Great Recession. In The Great Recession: Market Failure or Policy Failure, Hetzel pins the blame squarely on the Federal Reserve and Team Bernanke.
Oh, the downturn first started with “correction of an excess in the housing stock and a sharp increase in energy prices” — the housing bust and the oil shock. Indeed, those two things were enough, in Hetzel’s view, to cause a “moderate recession” beginning in December 2007.
But only a moderate one. It was the Fed’s monetary policy miscues after the downturn began that turned a run-of-the-mill downturn into a once-in-a century disaster. Hetzel:A moderate recession became a major recession in summer 2008 when the [Federal Open Market Committee] ceased lowering the federal funds rate while the economy deteriorated. The central empirical fact of the 2008-2009 recession is that the severe declines in output that in appeared in the [second quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009] … had already been locked in by summer 2008.
Not only did the Fed leave rates alone between April 2008 and October 2008 as the economy deteriorated, but the FOMC “effectively tightened monetary policy in June by pushing up the expected path of the federal funds rate through the hawkish statements of its members. In May 2008, federal funds futures had been predicting the rate to remain at 2% through November. By mid-June, that forecast had risen to 2.5%.
And it wasn’t just the U.S. central bank. Hetzel thinks all the major central banks — the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, sat on their hands as the global economy weakened. “The fact that the severe contraction in output began in all these countries in 2008:Q2 is more readily explained by a common restrictive monetary policy than by contagion from the then still-mild U.S. recession, Hetzel writes in a Fed paper that inspired the book. “Restrictive monetary policy rather than the deleveraging in financial markets that had begun in August 2007 offers a more direct explanation of the intensification of the recession that began in the summer of 2008. Irony abounds.”"...via Instapundit
-----------------------------------------------
July 5, 2012, "The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia," Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi
"How America's biggest banks took part in a nationwide bid-rigging conspiracy - until they were caught on tape."
------------------------------------------------------
"Bob Rubin "was more responsible for 2008's crash than any other single living person." Obama hired him and Rubin filled the White House with his friends. "Maybe it's our fault, for thinking Obama was different." Rolling Stone, 12/10/2009
12/10/2009, "Obama's Big Sellout," Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi (I copied the article, ed.)
"As Treasury secretary under Clinton, Rubin was the driving force behind two monstrous deregulatory actions that would be primary causes of last year's (2008) financial crisis:
- the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (passed specifically to legalize the Citigroup megamerger) and
- the deregulation of the derivatives market....
The point is that an economic team made up exclusively of callous millionaire-assholes has absolutely zero interest
- in reforming the gamed system that made them rich in the first place....
Given that derivatives were at the heart of the financial meltdown last year, the decision to gut derivatives reform sent some legislators howling with disgust.
[Democrat] Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, who estimates that as much as 90 percent of all derivatives could remain unregulated under the new rules, went so far as to say the new laws would make things worse. "Current law with its loopholes might actually be better than these loopholes," she said."...
------------------------------------------------------
If we had a functioning two party system, none of this would be news. We have a one party system guarded from the people by the media. ed.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment