Various bloggers and commentators on both the left and the right have basically blasted the Obama administration for having so many financial industry people on its staff working to resolve the problems of the financial industry. I have come to the conclusion that these people are right, we shouldn't have people who understand the banking industry from the inside out working to resolve the problems of the banking industry. Instead, we should have Joe The Plumber, Rush Limbaugh, Noam Chomskey, and Keith Olberman working to resolve the problem, because the skills of a plumber, a right wing gasbag, a linguist, and a left wing gasbag are far more relevant to solving the problems of the banking industry. Thank you, bloggers and commentators, for letting us know this. We would have never come to such a conclusion without your help!
In other news, I also have a solution to the problem of high costs of heart transplant surgery. Rather than having highly trained and expert heart surgeons do it, we can get Joe The Plumber, Rush Limbaugh, Noam Chomskey, and Keith Olberman to do it for much less! Because the skills of a plumber, a right wing gasbag, a linguist, and a left wing gasbag are far more relevant to open heart surgery than, like, the skills of someone who has spent years learning open heart surgery. Thank you, bloggers and commentators, for letting us know this. We would have never come to such a conclusion without your help!
-- Badtux the Snarkalicious Penguin
Tux, I'm sorry to read such a shallow piece of analysis from you. Were you tired when you wrote this?
ReplyDeleteI'm a left-wing blog ranter who's critical of Obama for the way he's dealing with the economic mess. Not that it matters, because all of us who prattle on on teh Internets tubez are just pissing into the wind tunnel in a forest where no one can hear us scream. Or something like that. I don't know why I bother to comment on blogs, except for the fact that at least two or three different people will read what I have to say. Mrs. Bukko and my mates at work have heard it all already.
But seriously, Tux, have you heard anyone on the Left say that Olbermann or Chomsky should be in charge of resolving the economy? The reichies might want Limpballs et. al. to propose the solution, but the lefties, and some of the right/Misean people I pay attention to are more sensible.
Here's what I don't like about the way Geithner/Obama is doing it -- they're trying to do the same things that failed, only better. They want to re-inflate the bubble, create more fictitious debtmoney out of thin air and shovel into insolvent banks. They've hired the same scammers who built the bilking.
It's like a bankruptcy administrator trying to resolve the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme and hiring Bernie Madoff as the forensic accountant. Which I would not be surprised to see happening. "Who knows better than Bernie Madoff where Bernie Madoff hid the money? We'll hire him on a cost-plus basis, with a performance bonus of 10% of any money he recovers, and defer his prison sentence until the unwinding is completed."
There are plenty of Left people out there with solutions that go against Obama/Geithner, but do not involve gasbags or faux plumbers. Krugman, Roubini, any number of folks have ideas like breaking up the banks so they're small enough to fail; making bondholders take a loss -- they invested, after all, and no one ever said "investment" meant "sure thing" -- and having ENFORCED regulations of financial fartistry like "mezzanine credit default swaps."
I don't want plumbers doing surgery. But I also don't want bank robbers doing bank security. That's what Obama has given us, though.
If you are going to solve a problem, you're going to need an expert in the subject. And unfortunately, if the problem is bugs in the financial system, the experts will either be former or current participants in the finance industry, just as if you're looking for an expert on computer software bugs, the experts will be either former or current participants in the software industry.
ReplyDeleteI have not seen the conspiracies that the conspiracy-monger neo-merchantists and Marxists of the right and left see, what I see is a conservative President taking sane, conservative steps to preserve a system that, while not working anywhere near like what it should be working, is still working far better than in the dismal month of January 1933, when 50% of the banks were closed, 40% of mortgages were in default, when Wall Street was essentially out of business, when the Dow stood at its appalling lows, when unemployment was about 25 percent. As someone who is basically conservative I appreciate the fact that my President is not some radical pitchfork-waving revolutionary who is going to just blow up the whole friggin' economy and start over again just because the vehicle that is the economy has a flat tire. While you are correct that industry insiders need oversight, I have seen no indication that President Obama and his executioner, Rhambo, are going to let folks in his administration get away with the sort of nonsense that Darth Cheney regularly got away with of steering things according to his own financial interests. Bush II did not believe in oversight. Obama does. That's the difference.
To solve this problem we're going to need people who know where the skeletons are buried. If some of these people are the same people who buried the skeletons in the first place... well. Sometimes it takes a thief to catch a thief, eh? And sometimes the best cops are the cops who were the worst roustabouts as teenagers, the rough and ready types always ready to kick ass and party hard. It's a dirty business we're about, and the only people with clean hands are people who don't know enough about how things actually work (as vs. book knowledge of how things are supposed to work) to be useful.
- Badtux the Practical Conservative Penguin
Ah yes, a link to the economic data for 1933 (or, rather, an economist who wrote a book on the subject and briefly mentions the stats in passing on his own blog).
ReplyDeleteMore wealth disappeared from the economy over the past two years due to the housing crash than disappeared in the stock market crash of 1929, yet we're still far, far better off than then. Bush II and Obama get a bum rap, methinks, for their efforts to maintain at least some semblance of a functional financial system while solutions sought for its problems. While the current recession is unpleasant, it is a long way from the disaster that was 1932, when the banking system -- and the economy as a whole -- basically ceased to exist.
I agree that we should have the best and qualified people sorting out the mess in the financial industry. However, I think it is fair to question their motivations if something seems fishy. A crook in an Armani suit does not instantly become a boy scout when you give him a government job.
ReplyDeletewe shouldn't have people who understand the banking industry from the inside out working to resolve the problems of the banking industry.No one understands all that crap.
ReplyDeleteNo one.
Definitely better to have knowledgeable people working on a complex problem like our truly perverse financial system. Still, I see a lot of the usual suspects who seem to want to rehabilitate the system that created this mess. I would recommend someone like Joseph Stiglitz. Definitely not Joseph Plummer.
ReplyDeleteI would not recommend Stiglitz to perform surgery, though.