Highlights This Month
My Goat Ate the Economy
The Bear Stearns bailout and the foreclosure fiasco are the foreordained outcome of the Republican ideology which holds that regulation of corporate financial behavior is the domestic equivalent of Islamofascism.
Marty Kaplan, Huffington Post
If George W. Bush had read The Pet Goat to his Economic Club of New York audience on Friday (March 14), his speech would have been no less infantile. If the first 9/11 was caused by a massive failure of intelligence about terrorism, the second 9/11 -- the slow-motion collapse of the American, and maybe the global, economy -- has been caused by a catastrophic failure of intelligence about Wall Street rapacity. If the now five-year-old Iraq war was the inevitable, tragic consequence of the neoconservatives' Project for the New American Century, then the subprime mortgage quagmire, the Bear Stearns bailout, and the foreclosure fiasco are the foreordained outcome of the Republican ideology which holds that regulation of corporate financial behavior is the domestic equivalent of Islamofascism.
The economic meltdown is the new 9/11, and it's George W. Bush's fault -- his, and the fundamentalist free-marketeers who have been living high on the hog, feeding at the public trough, intimidating Democrats, and getting away with capitalist murder ever since Ronald Reagan made "government" a dirty word.
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Khalil Bendib: Economic Stimulus
Here come the bailouts
Feds are worried that bank failures could end up pulling the entire economy into ruin.
Paul Krugman, StarTribune/MN
O.K., here it comes: The unthinkable is about to become the inevitable.
Last week, Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary, and John Lipsky, a top official at the International Monetary Fund, both suggested that public funds might be needed to rescue the U.S. financial system. Lipsky insisted that he wasn't talking about a bailout. But he was.
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A New New Deal
Reshaping the U.S. economy so that it actually benefits Americans won't be easy. But it must be done.
Harold Meyerson, American Prospect
Putting together everything we've learned over the past 10 days (March 11-21) about high finance in Manhattan, one thing is clear: If Eliot Spitzer had saved all the money he apparently paid "Kristen" and her co-workers at the Emperors Club, he could have bought Bear Stearns.
Manhattan's culture of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous collapse has been on display in recent days as it has not since 1929. Now, as then, an edifice of shaky credit is toppling. Now, as then, what we took to be prosperity turns out to have been a bubble.
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David Horsey: On Top of the Situation
Fed Up with Wall Street
The American economy will be better off if the Federal Reserve stops squandering taxpayers' money on bailing out failed investment banks.
Dean Baker, The Guardian Unlimited
The collapse of the housing bubble in the US continues to wreak havoc on the financial geniuses who fostered its growth. All over Wall Street, the mantra "Who could have known?" is being heard with every more frequency and greater expressions of pain.
Things got really serious last week (March 9-15), when Bear Stearns was placed on life support, and was then disposed of in a fire sale last weekend. One of the longstanding giants of Wall Street investment banking now has less value than a street corner lemonade stand, if not for the generosity of the Fed. The Fed lent money to Bear Stearns and its purchaser, JP Morgan Chase, under terms that no private lender would have agreed to. The risk that the Fed will end up with a substantial loss on its advances to Bear Stearns is quite large, with no prospect for any real return on its investment.
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