Banking

I don't know if it is that economics and financial journalists ultimately do not know what the fuck they're talking about OR if they're so immersed into their own little worlds, they don't get that most of what they write is not even academic, it's just utter jargon.

Herewith is a partial and quite short list of words I'd love to see defined more often in articles addressing the current banking crisis. I will be updating today as I find more of my favorites and will start (hopefully with your help) to define them in the coming days.

Oh, and given how many words and terms I am finding myself looking up, the list I'm compiling is in alphabetic order :

So let me get this straight : The US had 750 billion dollars to bail out Wall Street; a sector of the US economy which has been historically controlled by "white" or US Americans of European ascendancy. The US Congress found 750 billion dollars for them and their European and Asian investors. A bailout, by the way, that now said banks are pooh-poohing, lest the US Treasury and tax-payers find out the depths of their accounting infamies. Yet there's no money to pay back reparations to African Americans for the evils of slavery and Jim Crow laws?

Discuss.

[A scene from the movie Birth of a Nation (1915). Image found in Wikipedia under "Lynching in America")

The House of Representatives needed 218 votes to approve the bill. It has passed with a final tally of 263 votes.

See my liveblogging at Liveblogging hearing of H. R. 1424 Revised Financial Markets Bill.

You have to read Bob Herbert's "When madmen reign" in today's New York Times :

I have to reblog this because last night I saw one of the best quick comments about this bailout travesty : On the eve of a black man coming into the White House, they hustle all the money out of the Treasury. (H/T Ruby and Professor Kim)

Michael Moore sees it more broadly : this is the way the wealthy stage a coup before they're taxed in the coming administration.

My (imaginary) boyfriend has a few things to say about the craziness on Wall Street :

Steal from the poor and give to the rich: this is the policy that we have in recent days seen the U.S. Government unhesitatingly and irresponsibly sanction by bailing out the big gamblers and law-breakers with tax-payer money. At least now this short-sighted and destructive approach to governance is undeniably out in the open.

We saw this happen in the 1980s with the savings and loan scandal and bail-outs, and we are seeing now, as we saw then, people like John McCain, Phil Gramm and the usual assortment of corporate pirates get off scot-free and continue on their paths of self-advancement and cronyism. The mismanagement and plundering of our nation's wealth and the cavalier drive to burden future generations of its citizens with crushing debt have been hallmarks of U.S. government practice for quite some time, but never to the unprecedented degree that we have experienced during the eight years that the Bush Administration has plundered the treasury for the benefit of a tiny, very wealthy minority.

Hopefully voters will keep this in mind when deciding whether they wish to continue in the same vein with McCain, or give change a chance to happen with an Obama administration.

Perhaps, too, the mainstream media outlets, in response to the now undeniable financial and moral crises we face, will get back to allowing issues more pressing and significant than the personal and ethical foibles of Ms Palin to take precedence in their daily election "coverage".

I have my doubts about their willingness to do so, but there is always hope.

It's so HAWT when he pokes his nose in my b'ness and does that weird pseudo-blogging thing he does at this publishing company's site.

Le sigh.

He's given me the perfect reason to post about McCain's involvement in the Savings & Loan crisis of the 1980s. I give you John McCain's Keating Five Problem In 97 Seconds :

"To fix prices at a higher level than they should be is going to compound our problem."

Ron Paul's assessment of the current crisis is very simple : The government wants to fix prices; to keep the prices of housing, of securities and of the banks at their pre-crisis levels. This obviously goes against the "natural" flow of the markets and it's what historically brought us the much invoked "Great Depression". You can keep prices artificially for so long.

In other words, this bail out will accelerate us into another Great Depression. The bail out is not going to get us out of it.

(H/T The Mess That Greenspan Made)

I don't believe we're right now in a downward spiraling financial fiasco. We've been in a downward spiraling financial fiasco for 3 years but most intensely for about 10 months now.

It's not just the oil crisis.

It's not just the credit crisis.

It's not just the foreclosure orgy.

It's not just the financial burden of the Iraq War.

It really wasn't 9/11 either.

Yes, all of these have accelerated the crisis. Yet the crisis was here all along.

It is called Trickle Down Economics: