What were they all thinking about do you suppose? The next song?
Summer is almost over, Labor Day is nearly upon us. It’s time I got back to work.
From the monthly archives:
August 2009
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Rep. Barney Frank answers a question about HR 1207, a piece of legislation to audit the Federal Reserve. To say this is controversial is a masterpiece of understatement.
Argh, let’s just get your intrepid correspondent well and truly riled up on a Monday ….
“The government has taken profits of about $1.4 billion on its investment in Goldman Sachs, $1.3 billion on Morgan Stanley and $414 million on American Express. The five other banks that repaid the government — Northern Trust, Bank of New York Mellon, State Street, U.S. Bancorp and BB&T — each brought in $100 million to $334 million in profit.”
Give me a f****ing break. This must be the “silly season” for news, with all the senior hacks away in the Hamptons, or up in Maine escaping the “Dog Days of August”. Really, how could the editorial staff allow crap like this to make it to press? Simple I guess…summer is slow news time, so grab anything, bang it into a “story” and print the damn thing.
But, let’s get back to it, if only to puncture the dissimulation and toadying hype which oozes out of this piece….
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With ongoing grateful thanks to the Wall Street Journal for kindly providing such a neat summary, and so – for Saturday August 29th 2009 – here’s what was hot during the past week, and what……wasn’t;
I’d cite sources for this, but there are so many it’s an exercise in futility to even try. Let’s just go with the big dogs; Wall St. Journal, Bloomberg and finally the Grey Lady.
The reappointment makes sense. It’s a safe and solid choice for the President to make, and sends the right signals to the markets as well as international partners that there will be no mid-course corrections. The national and global economies are much too fragile at this point, and playing around with an appointment of this importance would have been foolish.
I’m tempted to say that – had the president considered appointing someone else – I wouldn’t have minded who the hell it was, as long as it wasn’t Larry Summers. I breathed one big sigh of relief when the news broke on the AP wire.
The August 2009 Fat Bastard Award goes to John Prescott, the former British Deputy Prime Minister. We’re working on an appropriate award citation. Stay tuned.
Update: The beginnings of our citation kindly contributed by Nick Mailer:
“What’s the different between John Prescott (Deputy Prime Minister with special responsibility for the Regions and Transport) and Mussolini (Fascist Leader of Italy)?
One was a short, fat, pugnacious prole with a massive chip on his shoulder. And the other didn’t even make the trains run on time.”
Absolutely compelling stuff, and well worth the time you spend reading it…..
Chairman Ben S. Bernanke
At the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s Annual Economic Symposium, Jackson Hole, Wyoming
August 21, 2009
http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20090821a.htm
Reflections on a Year of Crisis
By the standards of recent decades, the economic environment at the time of this symposium one year ago was quite challenging. A year after the onset of the current crisis in August 2007, financial markets remained stressed, the economy was slowing, and inflation–driven by a global commodity boom–had risen significantly. What we could not fully appreciate when we last gathered here was that the economic and policy environment was about to become vastly more difficult. In the weeks that followed, several systemically critical financial institutions would either fail or come close to failure, activity in some key financial markets would virtually cease, and the global economy would enter a deep recession. My remarks this morning will focus on the extraordinary financial and economic events of the past year, as well as on the policy responses both in the United States and abroad.
One very clear lesson of the past year–no surprise, of course, to any student of economic history, but worth noting nonetheless–is that a full-blown financial crisis can exact an enormous toll in both human and economic terms. A second lesson–once again, familiar to economic historians–is that financial disruptions do not respect borders. The crisis has been global, with no major country having been immune.
History is full of examples in which the policy responses to financial crises have been slow and inadequate, often resulting ultimately in greater economic damage and increased fiscal costs. In this episode, by contrast, policymakers in the United States and around the globe responded with speed and force to arrest a rapidly deteriorating and dangerous situation. Looking forward, we must urgently address structural weaknesses in the financial system, in particular in the regulatory framework, to ensure that the enormous costs of the past two years will not be borne again.
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With ongoing grateful thanks to the Wall Street Journal for kindly providing such a neat summary, and so – for Saturday August 22nd 2009 – here’s what was hot during the past week, and what……wasn’t;
