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BS.Dos.
Joined: 29 Mar 2007
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 Posted: Sat Nov 08, 2008 5:00 am Post subject: |
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| Ya-ta Boy wrote: |
| If Bush hadn't been Bush we might have gotten a headstart on this next one |
I'm not so sure. I think Bush's presidential tenure was, to a large extend, determined by the events of 9/11. Had 9/11 not happened, do you still think things would've unfolded in the same way? |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sat Nov 08, 2008 10:28 am Post subject: |
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| Ya-ta Boy wrote: |
| Gopher of course thinks I'm too busy pointing fingers at the failure of his party to do its job, but then its [sic] his party that is guilty of not doing its job and he is naturally defensive about that. |
Where did I say this?
Ya-ta Boy: keep me out of your self-righteousness and tirades unless I am exchanging with you. I do not appreciate serving as your strawman. Also, you have apparently failed to appreciate which party will be under the microscope for "failing to do its job" henceforward. I wonder how you are going to like that. You also start from a foolish position: you seem to have forgotten that Congress, that is, your party's Congress since 2006, currently enjoys a dismal ten-percent approval rating. So, then. Which party is actually failing to do its job?
Meanwhile, Governor S. Palin's approval rating remains in the solid sixties in Alaska.
In any case, carry on. You were setting up targets and knocking them down for our reading pleasure... |
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fiveeagles
Joined: 19 May 2005
Location: Vancouver
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| Posted: Sat Nov 08, 2008 5:51 pm Post subject: |
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| Henry Paulson was the best! |
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Leslie Cheswyck
Joined: 31 May 2003
Location: University of Western Chile
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| Posted: Sat Nov 08, 2008 7:51 pm Post subject: |
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| Nice, but I'm more of an Andrew W. Mellon man myself. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Mon Nov 10, 2008 9:33 am Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
| mises wrote: |
| Global macroeconomic change... |
This is definitely the thing. I have looked at this from a different disciplinary perspective than you: transdisciplinary world history, especially A. Gunder Frank, I. Wallerstein, and others like them. We look at millennia and not merely Western capitalism or the post-1500s world-system any more. Gunder Frank transcended K. Marx ten years ago.
And I tell you that this thing transcends nation-states, national govts, and policy choices that any American president may or may not make at any moment in history. It starts with the Neolithic, the rise of cities, trade routes, etc.
That is why I denounce all of the superficial talk I denounce, above. Just in case I did not convey it sufficiently clear above, it is not personal against you. I respect our differences. |
Go big or go home eh?
| Ya-ta Boy wrote: |
| Mises thinks the US is on the way down. |
No, I don't.
The US and the global economy are in for a significant reshuffling of macro policy. This will impact the extent to which, and cost of, American borrowing which has been the cornerstone of recent economy growth. |
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dmbfan
Joined: 09 Mar 2006
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| Posted: Wed Nov 12, 2008 3:25 am Post subject: |
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| I don't envy Obama in this mess he has inherited from Bush & Co. |
It is interesting that people have forgotten a couple of things.
1. The problems that have surfaced were somewhat started under the Carter administration.
2. The U.S. has been run by the Democrats for about two years......which has proven to be rather bad, according to approval ratings. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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dmbfan
Joined: 09 Mar 2006
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| Posted: Fri Nov 14, 2008 7:34 pm Post subject: |
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| 2. The U.S. has been run by the Democrats for about two years......which has proven to be rather bad, according to approval ratings |
Correction............I meant ........U.S. Congress.
With a Congress run by Democrats (with Nancy Pelosi in the background) whose only real ojective is to make Bush look bad...........it does have consequences.
All this hogwash about Bush's and the Replicans 8 year economic policies and disasters are rubbish. It was the last two years, when the Dem's gained control of Congress............which, again I will point out........had the worst approval ratings seen in a looooooong time, if ever.
dmbfan |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2008 9:55 am Post subject: |
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http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=996177
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Obama names old hand Volcker to new financial panel
WASHINGTON -- President-elect Barack Obama on Wednesday named former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker to lead a new financial panel to advise him on ways to help steer the United States out of a recession upon taking office.
Volcker, who chaired the Fed during the Carter and Reagan administrations, will head the newly created President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, a outside group of experts who will provide "fresh perspective" on Obama's efforts to jumpstart the ailing U.S. economy.
"The reality is that sometimes policy-making in Washington can become a little bit too ingrown, a little too insular," Obama told reporters at a news conference in Chicago, his third in as many days. "You start to engage in group think."
The incoming president also named University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee to serve as the board's staff director and join his Council of Economic Advisers.
Goolsbee, a senior economic adviser to Obama during the presidential campaign, was at the centre of last March's �Naftagate' imbroglio that made him a near-household name in Canadian political circles. The controversy began after the leak of a Canadian diplomatic memo in which Canada's Chicago consulate recounted a meeting with Goolsbee in which he purportedly said Ottawa should discount some of Obama's criticisms about the North American Free Trade Agreement.
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I would have preferred Volker in a stronger role but he is probably too old. Him having this advisory role is a good thing, none the less. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Mon Dec 08, 2008 10:38 am Post subject: |
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Paul Volcker is back, and he warns of tough times ahead
Volcker has been chosen by President-elect Barack Obama as a special economic advisor. His 'no pain, no gain' fiscal strategy worked in the '80s, and there's no sign he's softened that philosophy.
By Ralph Vartabedian
December 8, 2008
A generation ago, Paul A. Volcker was a household name, the Federal Reserve chief who waged a hard-nosed but successful battle against virulent inflation that clouded the nation's economic future. He did it by engineering a horrific recession, clamping on the financial brakes and sending the economy into a tailspin in 1981.
Nobody knew whether his strategy would work. It certainly caused widespread pain. But by 1986, double-digit inflation was gone and price increases had dropped to about 2% annually, setting the stage for the next two decades of economic stability.
Now Volcker is back, tapped by Barack Obama as a special economic advisor. And if the president-elect follows his advice on the current economic crisis, there could be pain again and no doubt many protests -- but also the possibility of long-term benefits.
In speeches, interviews, public policy reports and congressional testimony, Volcker, 81, has laid out a fairly clear outline of what he thinks is wrong with the present-day financial system and the government's management of the economy.
His concerns go to the very core of how America lives and how Wall Street operates. A child of the Great Depression and a man of legendary personal thrift, Volcker thinks Americans have been living above their means for too long.
"It is the United States as a whole that became addicted to spending and consuming beyond its capacity to produce," Volcker lectured the Economic Club of New York in April. "It all seemed so comfortable."
Bringing consumption back in line with income would not only crimp individuals and families, but also require major readjustments in the global economy, which has relied on the U.S. as consumer of last resort.
More oversight
Volcker has become a skeptic of modern Wall Street, worried that the nation's entire financial system has evolved to a point that the government no longer has effective control over all of its important components. And the financial industry has become beholden to complex financial engineering that clouds the picture.
"The market was being run by mathematicians who didn't know financial markets," he said this year after the crisis struck.
Clearly, he wants tough new regulations on securities markets, including oversight of hedge funds, in order to avoid the need for a bailout effort by the Fed ever again. It seems likely that he will advise Obama that the growth of U.S. consumption -- everything from government spending to household outlays -- should not be financed by selling ever larger amounts of debt to foreign interests.
But he warns people not to expect an easy ride. "It's going to be a tough period," Volcker said in a speech at the Urban Land Institute in late October. "But when we dealt with inflation, it laid the groundwork for 20 years of growth. I'd like to see that happen this time."
In pressing his case, economists and policy experts say, Volcker will have a level of experience, credibility and integrity that should carry great weight in the new administration.
"It is less about his ideas but more about his stature, wisdom and integrity," said Princeton University economist Alan Blinder. "There is not another person on the planet who can match that combination."
"Paul has a very quiet but forceful way of expressing his views," said Princeton University economist Peter B. Kenen, who began working with Volcker during the Kennedy administration. "He can say, 'I look back on 50 years of public service and I can count the times that Idea A worked and Idea B didn't work.' "
Volcker will not occupy a position in the Obama administration that gives him any direct authority, a big change from the days when he ran the Fed with an iron grip. While the Treasury, Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission and other agencies all have turf to protect, Volcker has no turf.
He also will have to work with some outsized egos and giant intellects on Obama's economic team: Lawrence H. Summers, chairman-designate of the National Economic Council; Timothy F. Geithner, nominated to be Treasury secretary; and Christina Romer, chosen to lead the Council of Economic Advisors.
The group is generally not of one mind. Major differences exist in how they view regulation, monetary control and fiscal policy. Summers, for example, was among the Clinton administration officials who helped relax federal regulation on Wall Street, recalled David R. Henderson, a conservative economist at the Hoover Institution. Romer has questioned how well fiscal policy works at all, a central tenant of Democratic economic thinking.
Further complicating the picture, Volcker has an entirely new and untested organization to head.
The day before Thanksgiving, Obama named him chairman of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, an entity seemingly created to bring Volcker, his experience, knowledge and credibility into the administration. The board is supposed to provide "fresh thinking and bold new ideas from the leading minds across America," Obama said.
Half-century career
Volcker is the chairman and Austan Goolsbee, a noted University of Chicago economist and longtime Obama advisor on economics, will be staff director.
But those who know Volcker think his influence will be clearly felt, regardless of his portfolio.
His career has spanned half a century. He began working at the New York Fed in the 1950s, and five years later went to Chase Manhattan Bank, where he became a lifelong confidant of the Rockefeller family. By the early 1960s, President Kennedy brought Volcker into the Treasury Department in his first government job at the policy-making level.
He later held top appointments under Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Carter and Reagan.
In recent years, he has led investigations into how Swiss bankers handled the accounts of Holocaust victims, the United Nations' troubled food-for-oil program and the accounting scandal surrounding the collapse of Enron Corp. He also chairs the Group of Thirty, a who's who of world economists that examines complex public policy issues. It met over the weekend to discuss an upcoming report on the overhaul of financial regulations.
Volcker grew up during the Depression, raised by a father who taught him one lesson above everything else: Integrity is a person's greatest asset, said Volcker's sister, Virginia Streitfeld. She calls Volcker, who stands 6-foot-7, her "little brother."
He is known for practicing what he preaches about the nation living within its means. He travels with one business suit and lives in the same Manhattan apartment that he bought decades ago.
When he was Fed chief, he lived in a modest Maryland apartment and did his laundry on Saturdays at his daughter's house nearby, recalled Marina v.N.Whitman, a University of Michigan economist who has known Volcker for decades.
"Paul is one of the most frugal guys on Earth," Whitman said. "The advice he gives and the way he views the world are entirely consistent with his personal ethics and lifestyle."
He is outraged by executive compensation packages, seeing them as part of a larger breakdown on Wall Street.
"Paul can't imagine anybody wanting or needing that much compensation for consumption purposes," said Whitman, a member of the Group of Thirty. "It probably offends his sense of right and proper."
As for the bigger picture, Volcker feels that tremendous changes in the financial system have eclipsed government regulators, allowing excesses to go unchecked and subjecting the economy to ever greater shocks. Over time, the U.S. has moved from a system of highly regulated banks that funded the economy to a system of highly engineered financial markets that operated outside the scope of regulators.
Complex financial instruments were created that attempted to slice and dice the risks, handing them to investors who would be most willing to accept them.
But the mathematical models that were supposed to measure those risks actually hid the true risk from the marketplace, Volcker has said: For one thing, no mathematical model can accurately predict human hysteria in a financial panic. "Simply stated, the bright new financial system . . . failed the test of the marketplace," Volcker said this year.
'Old-fashioned'
"Paul has long been skeptical about financial engineering, which is another way of saying concocting schemes on Wall Street that nobody can understand," economist Blinder said. "He has some old-fashioned ideas that banks should apply some common sense to loaning money -- like making sure borrowers can repay."
The result of such problems was that the Federal Reserve, the linchpin of U.S. economic power, was forced to "take actions to the very edge of its lawful and implied powers" that violated "time-honored central bank practices," Volcker told the Economic Club of New York.
"The only reason I sleep at night," said a longtime friend and business partner of Volcker's, speaking on background, "is that Paul Volcker will have the president's ear." |
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-volcker8-2008dec08,0,6295202,print.story
A good read. But I'd like to know specifically what Volcker is going to advise Obama to do. |
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Tiger Beer
Joined: 07 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Mon Dec 08, 2008 7:44 pm Post subject: |
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I have very low confidence in the economy. NOTHING is in place whatsoever yet. The momentum of the strong lack of all things domestic related is still going in the same direction fast.
I do feel confidence that Obama seems to be able to address the absolute essentials which will in the long-run create the synergy needed to recover. But I don't see that recovery occuring anytime in the immediate future, due to the fact there is nothing in existance yet that would push us into a recovery. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Mon Dec 08, 2008 10:09 pm Post subject: |
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The economy will turn around when the bad "assets" are purged from the system. TARP is designed to prevent this. I hope Volker et al have more sense.
Anyways, worst case is a copy of Japan's lost decade. Not the end of the world, but not good. |
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