Category: Society Page 39 of 69

TPM highlights this Steve Pearlstein piece on the near-complete absence of the leaders of Wall Street from the bailout process:

In putting several trillion dollars in government funds on the line, the country has now done just about everything that Wall Street could have asked to address the financial crisis. The question now, as John Kennedy might have put it, is what Wall Street is ready to do for its country. So far, the answer is not much.

After getting their closed-door briefing yesterday from Paulson on the government’s latest initiatives, Wall Street’s finest literally ran from the Treasury to their waiting limousines, bypassing a media scrum eager to convey any scrap of wisdom or insight.

[ . . . ]

Their silence and invisibility throughout this crisis attests to the moral and political bankruptcy of a financial elite that is the perfect match for the financial bankruptcy they have now visited upon their investors, their creditors and their customers.

Pretty much.  And remember, these are the same folks that the “free market” true believers will tell you ought to be left to their own devices, so (somehow) public good will result.

Following This American Life’s extraordinarily well-received Giant Pool of Money episode, comes another look at the factors involved in the recent FUBAR’ing of the financial system.  This episode focuses on:

[T]he 36-hour period, two weeks ago, when the credit markets froze. Plus, what it’s like now for businesses to get short-term loans, and how the hardship is spreading to every sector of the economy.

[ . . . ]

[On the topic of “credit default swaps”], the show talks with Michael Greenberger, a former commodities regulator, who tells the story of when it was decided not to regulate credit default swaps. And how that decision was emblematic of the way we didn’t regulate a lot of the toxic financial products we’re hearing about now.

[ . . . ]

Was the $700 billion bailout bill signed into law today a good idea or a bad one?

I haven’t heard the show myself, yet*, but it’s been very well received by a number of people that I respect. You can download it for free here.  (It’s free to listen to at the site anytime, and free to download as an MP3 until the end of this week.)

*I was driving through a part of Massachusetts when it aired. I never would have guessed that there was a a part of Massachusetts that didn’t receive NPR.

What, cutting taxes on wooden arrows and adding the Bicycle Benefits Commuting Act to the bailout bill didn’t fix everything?

Shocker.  I’m going to look for a fiddle.

I was on the phone with family in Georgia the other day, and I was asked if we were having gas shortages in DC, too.  Huh?  Apparently there’s been massive gas shortages in Georgia for a couple weeks now.   You’d think we’d hear more about that, no?