"I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the Bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the Bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out and, by the Eternal, (bringing his fist down on the table) I will rout you out."
Yeah, the speculative excesses had to be wrung out of the system, and the sooner the better as Jackson points out, but if you destroy or allow the failure of the banking system in the process (that one had some of both) the result is horrible. See also: the Great Depression in the US.
That was the argument for the TARP, and we can't falsify it and never could have. Continuing the TARP sort of thing (note this reply is made without the benefit of reading the fine article), though, risks one or more Lost Decades as we've seen in Japan.
If you're lucky; we don't yet know the denouncement of what's happening over there (didn't Great Britian require a century to recover from the South Seas Bubble (due to many factors)?) and the US is in a different position than Japan was and is.
http://real-estate-and-urban.blogspot.com/2008/09/charles-ca...
People aren't rational and decision makers don't automatically have incentives that align with the organizations they control.
Which of those statements is false?
"I want to be clear here that the blame, to the degree that there was, is largely in the United States, not in Europe, not in Britain."
Because the American branch of the Illuminati run Iceland, Northern Rock, those German manufacturers who were having to finance their customers because banking disappeared, and so forth?
"And it was fundamentally because a low-interest policy created too much money. It was an easy-money policy and eventually an easy-money policy catches up with you."
Most of the bubble money supply came from leverage (massive fraud with a sprinkling of "deregulation"), not interest rates.
As for leverage/deregulation,
"So the banks are busy creating money and making a lot of money on that creation of money and the regulators were either, depending on your point of view, asleep at the wheel or did not have the tools to understand what was going on"
Which suggests to me that there was an underlying problem (e.g. too much cheap money) and real estate was just where that happened to bubble up. And it's a particularly destructive area, the dot.com (actually mostly telecom) bubble was much less worse for the nation at large, bad though it was for us.
Bottom lin: there would have been a bubble somewhere.
... Right. I would be more concerned if this remark wasn't coming from a man who is little more than the world's best-paid babysitter. I am sure he would be delivering a different line if he were talking to the New York Times.
