Joe Nocera in his op-ed piece stressed the issues of quantitative easing, which is simply a mechanism the Fed can use to create inflation so that they will not have to repay the money they have borrowed in today's value but say they depreciate the American peso 50% of its current value, they save the mega banks a ton dough. In the meantime the already impoverished jobless American Citizen, who through their representatives in Washington DC, voted to bale out these scoundrels who caused the problem in the first place and placed the burden of Fanny and Freddie on the back of unborn generations of Americans. The Fed is directly responsible for the present situation. They create money (hundred of billions in fact trillions) out of thin air and spend it around world with investments in China and pumping up Wall Street but its all hat and no cattle. In this process the dollar has become the world's reserve currency but it remains our problem.
No Extra Credit - NYTimes.com
By JOE NOCERA
Published: September 19, 2011 .
What if everything that is happening in Washington right now is just meaningless noise?
What if the Obama jobs plan, the coming deliberations of the supercommittee, the debate over taxing millionaires — what if none of it is likely to make a whit of positive difference for the economy? What if the only thing that matters is something Congress and the president rarely mention, and can do nothing about?
I’ve come to believe this is the case. What is killing the economy is lack of credit. In the aftermath of an asset bubble, invariably the result of too-loose credit, banks don’t just tighten their standards; they practically shut down.
This was true during the Great Depression, and it’s been true during the Great Recession. And until normal credit standards return, economic growth will continue to be stunted. “Overreaction to the credit bubble is now the knee on the throat of the economy,” says my friend Lou Barnes, a mortgage banker at Premier Mortgage Group in Colorado.
Not long ago, Lou sent me a powerful new piece of evidence, a presentation put together by Paul Kasriel, chief economist for Northern Trust. Titled “If Some Dare Call It Treason, Was Milton Friedman a Traitor?” (the title will become clear shortly), it has the force of revelation.
He then documents “a post-WW II record” credit contraction, before moving on to a surprising solution: more quantitative easing from the Federal Reserve, which is essentially the buying of bonds from investors by the Fed, using money it prints, as Kasriel freely admits, “out of thin air.
Hey Joe, can we talk? Did you happen to read Maureen's piece on Jackie, (when we knew her as Kennedy before the O), beautiful. Love the way she describes her voice as breathy, and so it was and that was the way we were. Hard to believe looking back what we have come to. The present situation at hand... One looks and have to wonder if all you editorial op-ed guys are living on a different planet.
Its clear that the big banks and international corporation people have done a fantastic job of squeezing the last cent out of Joe six pack at a cost of near 0% interest all now find themselves sitting on a heap of cash. More money in historical terms than they've even seen since the beginning of time... So I can understand your enthusiasm for a mechanism (Quantitative easing) for your big bank buddies to make even more money. Its the American way NOW days isn't it.
But it has not always been that way has it? Up until fairly recently 1999 when Phil Gramm Jim Leach were finally able to repeal Glass-Steagall Act this landmark legislation from the Great Depression. It served this nation well for nearly 60 years and provided this nation with the highest living standards on the planet.
In comparison the monstrosity of Dodd-Frank in its thousands of pages which few have even read by legislators and even fewer of which have actually been enacted into law, is actually a twisted conundrum of over 200 proposals written by various federal agencies as part of the implementation of the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. Combine this fact with the dislocation of the dollar from the gold standard back in 1971 under the Nixon Administration (Another Proud Dick Cheney Production). Into the mix add a liberal amount of illicit campaign contributions and salted with Senators looking for seasons from the most corrupt cabinets... Mix in all together with the New World Order... Stage an attack on the World Trade Center disguised by the international banking syndicate to look like an Arab terrorist group... Get a couple of completely useless wars stirred up to keep the war machine well oiled, send thugs out to all the airports to make sure the civilian population is properly supervised and intimidated, while holding every working persons pension and 401k hostage. Suspend constitutional rights under the guise of the ginned up “Patriot Act”.
Well “Tell me it ain't so Joe” but we end up with The End of Sound Money and The Triumph of Crony Capitalism that The Forgotten Cause of Sound Money - Mises Media David Stockman so eloquently describes as TARP-The single greatest economic policy abomination since the 1930s perhaps ever.
