A simple question: Why did President Obama hire Ben Bernanke to run the Federal Reserve? Bernanke was appointed by Bush Jr. to run the Fed. It seems that Obama would want to break with this and hire someone new. There's a lot of people out there equally as qualified. Or is there? Was it that Bernanke had the right experence or was it that he has the right connections? I prefer to think that a job like running the Federal Reserve would be independent of who you're mates with over at GoldmanSucks. But now I'm not so sure. Which begs the question: Do we really want a Federal Reserve? Are they really serving a purpose that is needed? I'm not so sure. Anyway. I don't really know the system. So, what do you guys think? Why keep Blundering Bernanke? Why not hire in some new people so come at this from a different perspective? You can't really "Change" Washington when you keep the same people in Washington. Something to think about next time you go to the ballot box.
The Board members of the Fed are appointed to serve a 14-year term and can't be fired by the President or Congress. The system was put in place to prevent the Fed from being subject to political influences, since their goal is long term monetary policy, not short-term political policy. By statute, the appointments must yield a "fair representation of the financial, agricultural, industrial, and commercial interests and geographical divisions of the country." The President can ask Bernanke to step down, but can't force him unless Congress passes a new statute saying that he can.
Stupid or corrupt or cowardly? Can her be any other choices? Obama is obviously not stupid in the traditional sense of the word but what is it that allows smart people to be stupid? How can a husband and wife who love each other fight over their different beliefs about what they said to each other a few hours earlier? People believe what hey want to believe. Smart people believe what their friends believe even when the evidence if looked objectively does not support those beliefs. The friends of Obama's friends are Wall Street executives. I think that Wall street convinced itself that bailing out Wall Street was good for America even if the American people had to be deceived. The Wall street executives also truly believe that they deserve their big salaries even when they lose their firms money and have to request that the government rescue their firms. Obama reminds me of the kid who would say and believe anything that would get the kids in the popular clique to like him. In government circles the Wall Street executives are considered to be the cool kids. I don't think Obama knows that he hired people from a bad crowd that created America's mess in the first place. It is not just Bernanke. But how can Obama not know? I guess it is just inconvenient for Obama to know. It is not stupidity or corruption or cowardice it is something in between those three things that has become integrated into his personality and has warped Obama's perceptions at an unconscious level and made him incapable of knowing wisdom from well disguised foolishness and incapable of knowing right from a well disguised wrong. The disguises are not even all that good. We all whether on the left or right can see that Bernanke is a poor choice but Obama can not see this because he does not want to understand reality. This is not exactly stupidity or cowardice or corruption; it is something else that does not have a name yet but needs to be understood and named if Democracy is ever to reach it's potential. "Rationalizing" is a good word. Obama's team have probably done a lot of rationalizing to keep themselves from understanding what hey are doing. In my opinion the Psychological meaning for the word "Denial" comes closer than any other word for describing how Obama does not know what the hell he is doing when he does wrong despite being neither stupid nor corrupt. But I can't exactly say he is not stupid and corrupt and cowardly when he behaves as he has.
The reason Obama and Wall Street want Bernanke as governor of the Fed is because the man has done an outstanding job of handling the financial crisis. Bernanke was slow to recognize the problem, but once he recognized it he played it well. You could not have had anyone better in the Fed. And here is the deal, we are still not out of the woods. We need the continuity, knowledge, and skill provided by Bernanke. That is the bottom line.
Even if I ignore the probably criminal way Bernanke handled AIG, I see nothing special in Bernanke's performance.
Care to explain? The rescue of AIG was one of Bernanke's finest moments. AIG is an insurance company who created and sold a bunch of Credit Default Swaps (insurance policies) on bad securities with no reserves. What AIG did in my book was criminal. What Bernanke did was heroic. He saved the global financial system. If AIG was allowed to fail it would have taken down the global financial system. Bernanke had the creativity and the balls to develop a mechanism to loan AIG the money it needed in order to keep the global banking system alive and functioning. Because the US government insures US banks, it would have cost the US government far more if it let AIG fail. Bernanke had the clarity of thought to understand the risk. And he had the guts to take extrodinary measures when extrodinary measures were required. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_International_Group#Federal_Reserve_bailout
I am not sure what specifically you mean about burried bodies. But there should be a criminal probe of AIG.
All made legal by the Democrats with their insistence on Housing loans to those who didn't have the income to pay their mortgages. This all started with Your Democrats: Jimmy "The Peanut" Carter when the and the United States Congress passed and Carter signed the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. This was exacerbated by Bill "Slick Willy" Clintons insistence on expand mortgage loans to low and moderate income borrowers by increasing the ratios of their loan portfolios in distressed inner city areas designated in the CRA of 1977. And then we have the rear guard action of Barney Frank, and His statements; And the blocking of any reform of Fannie and Freddie, by the Democrats, and business as usual continued on till the whole thing blew up. So why blame only AIG? Because it suites Your Liberal Democrat Orthodoxy, and blame the Republican at all cost.
You are just plain wrong. And anybody with any knowledge of the issues knows same. The Community Reinvestment act worked just fine for more than 30 years. And despite Republican rhetoric, it did not force banks to make bad loans. The problems that caused this crisis were threefold. First the repeal of Glass-Steagal that allowed banks to get into non bank business ventures and investments. Two, the packaging, misrepresenation, and selling of bundled mortgages coupled with the selling of unfunded insurance policies on those bundled mortgages; that is what caused the current finanical crisis. And the problem was exacerbated by the SEC's refusal to enforce existing securities law which prevented finanical insitutions from gaining access to capital markets. It was a classic one two punch. So get real and get off the Republican Party koolaid.
Oops, I confused Bernanke with Geithner. I also did not realize until today that the 2005 bankruptcy law moved derivatives to in front of the line at Bankruptcy. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/1/22/204/30437 My beef with all of the US government and the Feds bailout was that the government took weaker positions in the bankruptcy line than it needed to. Another of my complaints is that it gave money to the wrong institutions if it wanted to get credit flowing to "main street". It also made the "to big to fail" situation worse. It also allowed some Wall street firms that should have suffered from their reckless behavior to escape the consequences of their actions which will thereby encourage future recklessness. Executive pay is not one of my issues. Whether failed Wall Street executives get ridiculously generous pay is an issue for the stockholders to worry about because even if the money is coming indirectly from the taxpayers it is the stockholders money. I do have problems keeping the distinction between the Treasury's role and the Fed's role in the Bail out's clear in my head. I don't like what Giethner did as head of the New York Fed during the AIG bail out. What AIG does with the taxpayers money is the Taxpayers business and should not be hidden. Bernanke did not do anything to impress me. Bernanke's supposed expertise in the Great Depression did not help Bernanke to see what was coming. At least Bernanke is not another Goldman Sachs guy but I see no evidence that Bernanke does not place the interests of Goldman above the interests of the American people. I also see no evidence that he served America well enough to deserve another term. I would have preferred for the Fed to loan all of AIG's counter parties the money AIG owed them rather than giving them money by bailing out AIG. Derivatives were 29 times global GDP and $190,000 per every person on the planet and now I learn that The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 places them in front of everybody else during bankruptcies.
You have knowledge of the issues? you haven't proved it so far. As far as the Kool Aid, well joe, I know Kool Aid, and yours is the worst.
Indeed I do have knowledge of those issues and shown it repeatedly. There is an old idiom, "there is none so blind as he who will not see to see". Such is indeed the case with you and your ilk. You and your ilk have no need or desire for the truth. You guys brought us a massive doubling of the national debt. You guys brought about huge unfunded increases in structural federal spending. That means you commmitted the federal government to spending hugh sums now and in the future under different administrations. You guys almost destroyed the global financial system. And you will not be happy until you have done so.
