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London Banker: "The market has failed, and officialdom is perpetuating that failure."

by Open-Publishing - Thursday 18 December 2008
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Trade-Exchange Rates Economy-budget Europe

London Banker: "The market has failed, and officialdom is perpetuating that failure."

By Mike Whitney

December 18, 2008 "Information Clearinghouse" --- Ever since the two Bear Stearns hedge funds defaulted 17 months ago triggering a global financial crisis, the Federal Reserve has been busy putting out one fire after another. Fed chief Ben Bernanke has slashed interest rates to .25 percent, handed out billions in emergency funding to teetering insurance companies and mortgage lenders, and provided $8.3 trillion in loan guarantees to keep the financial system from collapsing. Unfortunately, nothing the Fed has done has either stabilized the markets or stopped the contagion from spreading to the broader economy where consumer spending has fallen sharply, unemployment has skyrocketed, manufacturing has slipped to a 30 year low, and housing prices have plummeted. Bernanke, the Princeton academic who is an expert on the Great Depression, is limited in his understanding of the crisis by his "monetarist" bias. He believes that the only way to fight credit contraction is by flooding the financial system with liquidity ("quantitative easing"). But this remedy focuses more on reducing the symptoms rather than curing the disease. Christopher Wood sums it up in an article in the Wall Street Journal article "The Fed is Out of Ammunition":

Continue to read:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21486.htm

Forum posts

  • The overall financial problem isn’t just a systemic financial crisis, but rather a cultural crisis. America is fresh out of new, profound ideas. Look at Broadway. Listen to the radio. Read the flabby fiction about familial dysfunction. Hollywood is obsessed with making comic books for adults. Critics are duped into critiquing them as if they’re meaningful. Hip-hop, an innovative force that long ago ran out of vigor, still holds sway.

    Everywhere you look, everywhere you listen, everywhere you read, you see plastic and artifice. New York’s a shadow of its former self, and will, along with the paper that brought us the Iraqi war — the NY Times — fall hard. L.A. is the capital of derivative schlock. Chicago’s ruled by an egotistical, corrupt governor. And worse, the Neocon Hillary Clinton is getting ready to rule the world. Meanwhile, rural America is waiting for the End Times.

    Hey terrorists of the world, you can take off during ’09 and read a few good books, for America is doing a damn fine job of destroying itself.