Term of the Day for March 16th & 17th
Republicenomics : An economic system in which business executives that make good decisions and appropriate investments do well and business executives that make terrible decisions and make horrible investments get bailed out by tax payers and do extrodinarily well.
There is no downside risk to being an investment banker when Republicans are in charge. Make risky plays that workout…GREAT! Cha-ching! Make risky plays that don’t work out…GREAT! The gullible US tax payer is there with his bottomless funds. CHA-CHING!!
Seriously. Of course the goverment should not bail our Bear Stearns and the executives who did such a lousy job should be fired and the shareholders who trusted them should lose eveything. Of Course that should happen. But it aint going to happen, because that would cause everyone to stop pretending that everything is okay and the economy, as Bush and Castle put it, is “rebounding.”
The Bush Family has a long-standing history with this going back to Neil and the Silverardo Savings & Loan scandal back in the 1980’s. We’ve been helping to make them richer for some time now. Good to know that the U.S. Treasury is their personal piggy-bank.
Republicenomics at work. Government of the profit, for the profit, and by the profit.
Peace.
“cause everyone to stop pretending that everything is okay and the economy, as Bush and Castle put it, is “rebounding.”
Jason, I am not so sure it is wise to blame any one party for this problem. The sad fact is that unless the old financial aristocracy comes down or changes to adapt to the global market and as long as it continues to ask for the government to bail it out of its good old boy messes, there is no possible way for the economy to rebound in any meaningful sense. It cannot occur. For the economy to rebound it needs to correct, for it to correct the investment vehicles and government bailouts that have been propping it up need to collapse and be restructured. The longer the government props failing institutions up 1. The more it will cost the people and drain their wealth for the benefit of the few and 2. The longer and more painful the correction will be. This is of course as long as we want to pretend we have a “free” global market and operate under its laws.
Of course we could just admit that we have socialism and are now a national socialist state where the businesses and government work hand in glove; or a command style socialist economy rather than an honest free market. It is of course a predictable consequence of government working for the benefit of a minority of the financial gurus on Wall Street and not for the folks who make up the bedrock of the real economy which is productive.
These are all very basic laws in economic theory but they go a long way to explain why depressions occur and how they create a crisis in the population. It has happened before, it was worse during the late Hellenistic period when Antiochus had a terrible problem with rural depopulation as a result of his bad policies. We need to change the policies.
If you are a libertarian and favor free markets you want to promote John Nash’s Majority-ism that will diversify everything and remove as much corporate welfare as you can. If you are a democrat you are going to want to read John K. Galbraith’s good society to break Keynes’ conundrum that government intercessions are necessary only for one class at the expense of the others in a. the market, b. the military.
I just realized something, it is St. Patty’s day, and I have no beer to celebrate and I feel like an Irish Immigrant in about 1832.