As I have previously documented, Larry Summers is a big fat idiot.
Unfortunately, idiocy is not limited to the White House economic team.
Barney Frank - the congress member taking the laboring oar in "solving" the economic crisis - is also a big fat idiot.
Frank is calling for credit default swaps to be limited to the giant "market makers".
Given that it was the giants trading in cds which brought down the economy (see this and this), Frank's proposal would be like saying that only convicted arsonists can work on the fire department's fire suppression team.
In May, I posted the following quote in arguing that the big banks had already killed meaningful regulatory reform:
“The banks appear to wish to maintain the intra-dealer market and raise barriers to new entrants to keep the OTC business [i.e. over-the-counter credit default swaps] as compartmentalized as possible and to protect their profitable market conditions,” said Brad Hintz, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York. “The Street’s lobbyists appear to be asking for a ‘club’ structure in OTC trading.”...Frank wants to hand the banks the cozy little club structure they've been lobbying for.
I am not a weightist: Tim Geithner is a skinny little idiot, and Ben Bernanke is a medium sized bearded idiot.
Why doesn't anyone hold the smelly one accountable?
ReplyDeletehttp://federalism.typepad.com/crime_federalism/2009/07/barack-obama-expands-goldman-sachs-power.html
George, "idiot" has an etymology that applies to those Americans not yet engaged in policy improvement, not to people like Barney, Tim, and Ben. The word comes from Greek and was used to describe people who chose privacy rather than public participation. Barney, Tim and Ben are the consequence of our collective idiocy, our naive trust to allow them to take trillions from us while not demanding objective cost-benefit analyses, our indolence, our herd behavior, our sheepleness.
ReplyDeleteBarney, Tim and Ben are fascists acting for the oligarchic self-declared "master race." Their actions are to transfer trillions of dollars from us to their small group of perhaps 10,000 people. They are evil.
But perhaps I am too harsh. Perhaps they believe the population must be reduced on the planet and these steps are within a plan to do so. Perhaps they are just ignorant that the historic way of reducing population is ending poverty. Yes, ending poverty has reduced population growth rates in every historical case. For the documentation, click on my name and read, "The Economics of Ending Poverty." Perhaps these gentlemen will choose to have a "Scrooge conversion" if given the opportunity.