Leading Economist: We Need a Trust-Buster Like Teddy Roosevelt So We Can Get Rid of the Herbert Hoover-Like Status Quo → Washingtons Blog
Leading Economist: We Need a Trust-Buster Like Teddy Roosevelt So We Can Get Rid of the Herbert Hoover-Like Status Quo - Washingtons Blog

Friday, June 19, 2009

Leading Economist: We Need a Trust-Buster Like Teddy Roosevelt So We Can Get Rid of the Herbert Hoover-Like Status Quo


Former chief IMF economist Simon Johnson has another great post today:

Writing in the New York Times today, Joe Nocera sums up, “If Mr. Obama hopes to create a regulatory environment that stands for another six decades, he is going to have to do what Roosevelt did once upon a time. He is going to have make some bankers mad.”

Good point – but Nocera is thinking about the wrong Roosevelt (FDR). In order to get to the point where you can reform like FDR, you first have to break the political power of the big banks, and that requires substantially reducing their economic power - the moment calls more for Teddy Roosevelt-type trustbusting, and it appears that is exactly what we will not get.

For background, see this and this.

4 comments:

  1. You probably have to be more careful about the financial regulators who concocted the current system and of those that where silent while the "too big to fail" seemed "too big to fail"

    The whole system of minimum capital requirements based on risk seems created by an evil mind that is out there laughing at us. For another version I invite you to visit http://www.theaaa-bomb.blogspot.com/

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  2. Those in power are "too crooked to regulate" and "too crooked to remain in power". Deriviatives should have been outlawed from the beginning - and treated as criminal fraud not legitimate financial products. It's a black hole ponzi scheme destroying our economy and currency. Our government is launching "economic warfare" against the American citizens by allowing these banks to continue and by feeding the black hole our economy. Perhaps only the criminals will have money when this is done.

    I think they've overplayed their hands. This nation will split in two: suckers and realists.

    The suckers who believe these con men - are going to lose everything including, probably, their lives. The realists are going to regain freedom, imo. But these criminals will not talk all Americans into staying on the ship they've sunk in their plan to drown the people on board.

    I say, "To hell with them". To me, their plans were hatched in hell - they're raising hell - they want to put us through hell - and they can go to hell. No. We don't have to accept their suicide mission of staying on board with them as they turn to destroy this nation willfully in high treason against the American people.

    That's my view. Somebody prove to me that deriviatives are a really good idea and ignoring them and funding them with bailouts is going to "stop the downward cycle". These people conmen looking for suckers who believe their play acts before the cameras - and don't see what they are really up to. I repeat, they can go to hell. :)

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  3. Wow Laura Lee...Now that's a post....Agreed Agreed! I encourage people to read Brown's Web of Debt and her brilliant expose of the coverup of utitilizing public banks and public intstitutions to provide the role of credit maker in our society. Why should all we Americans cow down and give the role of "credit dispenser" to almight JP Morgan or Citigroup? Who says so? The solution is for the state of Calif. and others to get off their duffs and create their own state banks, with super high standards and reserves, incl no toxic derivatives (duh!) and they become lenders and profit from handling THEIR OWN MONEY!! Wipe the soot out of your eyes, America, you can grant yourselves the power to lend to yourselves just as "intelligently or as foolishly as the current pigs in the Fed and our Private Banking Masters, who in turn bow down to the almighty Bank of International Settlements. I say let them all play with monopoly money and we Americans and other nationalities go create our own credit systems. Let these crooks fail, but without waiting one minute, we need to collectively begin our own state, city, even university banks, strictly following much tougher and exacting reserve requirements, than their private counter-parts.

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  4. See also, Kevin Phillips book "Bad Money". Also _beyond economics, see "Collapse" by Jared Diamond. Take a breath, relax - private property, ego, and what "The Federalists Papers" refered to as 'personality" are all over-rated. Hyper-Capitolism is crashing into itself, and Civilization, and the planetary Eco-system. The smaller you can make your plans, the more inclusive of civic virtues your habits, the more the survivors will remember you kindly. You can turn off your computer now.

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