Letters to the Editor
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Published Letters: 1303 Editor's Choice: 20
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Scorpio69er
[Read the article: Bernanke presses the panic button]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Greetings, Master Yoda!
Well met, my distinguished friend.
Like the pumps on the Titanic, all of this financial smoke and mirrors may buy a little extra time, but it isn't going to change the outcome.
We've seen this coming for years, you and I, and even 36363q could not argue against reality. And still people don't want to see it. The greed of the wealthy can buy public opinion on the issue, ensuring that it will get worse.
Time to write The History of the Bush Economic Collapse and hope a few people will be able to buy it.
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Scorpio69er
[Read the article: Bernanke presses the panic button]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]According to Alan Greenspan, the Fed will have to raise interest rates to double-digit levels in coming years to thwart inflation -- the very inflation they are helping to ignite!
A very dangerous tool for the short-term-politically-motivated monetary policy is. Sort of like bringing the nephew junkie into the family pharmacy business, it could pose nominal medium-term risks.
The strategy of wealthy corporatists for the last few decades has been to increase their wealth as rapidly as possible, while avoiding making the middle class more poor so quickly that they resent it. This strategy has backfired because they got greedy.
The middle class is going to resent it, although I was mostly kidding about the heads on pikes. Mostly. Our greedy smart-ass finance con artists have implemented a system of credit derivatives which presumes that middle class expenditures will always continue to increase - while avoiding the fact that middle class income has been stagnant for years. The only way the middle class could continue to increase expenditures has been to acquire debt with refinancing and other debt. And that debt has limits.
Those limits have now been reached. Middle class expenditures can now only stagnate, or fall, in real terms, with inflation. That system of debt derivatives can only fail, because 70% of the economy still has to pay for yesterday, and can't afford to fund tomorrow. And tomorrow needs more money than yesterday, not less. A lot more.
Nobody has ever been able to explain to me how the equity markets can go up 20% when the economy only goes up 3%. I think the reason for this is because they don't want to explain that, really, the equity markets should go up only 3%, like the economy, because that would cost them that ill-gotten 17%.
They can always take it out of the hides of the poor and middle class. They always do. That's what the poor and middle class are for, and besides, that's what keeps up the ranks of the poor.
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Scorpio69er
[Read the article: Bernanke presses the panic button]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You're hilarious! I can't quite remember that old line of yours about "you're so far out in left field your with the winos in the third parking lot..." Help!
It would be even more fun if we had some right-wing market fundamentalists to throttle. Those were the days. They're all in hiding now.
I still remember that extended exchange you had with q. It was really quite amazing. You had him cornered and backing up the walls, chewing his toenails, and he still wouldn't concede. I should have archived that one, and I didn't, and I'm sorry. It was the best investment against a right-winger I've seen on the net.
We could use more of that these days. But the right-wingers can't make the arguments they used to because they've finally been discredited by the facts. They're not going to be around any more for us to say 'we told you so'.
The damage is done. 'Weird ugly' is coming.
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Scorpio69er
[Read the article: Bernanke presses the panic button]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I didn't get an Editor's Star this time. I'm so disappointed. I might have to bring out my A material.
But all I really want is a right-wing supply-sider to mangle. Just one. Refute him with facts, toast him with a hot turn of phase, roast him on a spit. Eat him up, chew him up, spit him out. Make him like it.
Then I'd be happy.
Krugman has been pretty quiet about all this. Eventually he's going to come out with a column which is . . . how can we say it? . . . terminally smug.
If asked, he'd probably say that he addressed the causes of today's recession years ago, in critiques of Bush economic and regulatory policies in several articles, and doesn't need to revisit old issues. Which is true. This one's a done deal, and was for years before it got started.
Relative to previous downturns the present distortions and excesses are enormous. This one is going to hurt. A widespread recession, including the US, isn't avoidable, and the chances of avoiding a widespread depression are only about 40%. That's in the near term. In the long term it's a guaranteed 100% because of a number of factors.
The good news is that slave workers in India and China will be mostly unaffected, and may even prosper slightly because of the increasing resort to Indian and Chinese slave workers due to the severe economic pressures. This of course proves that capitalism really works.
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How to Commit Mortgage Fraud
[Read the article: Bernanke presses the panic button]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's a not-very-sophisticated series of obvious frauds, all avoided by any regulatory or law-enforcement agency. Larceny legalized.
The extremely wealthy profit enormously, so that makes it perfectly ok:
http://www.wisebread.com/how-the-banks-were-fleeced-a-primer-to-mortgage-fraud