It pays to look at where we’ve been if we’re to understand where we’re going. The U.S. stock market bottomed in the first week of March 2009, beginning a vigorous bounce in the month’s second week. By late March a breeching of the midterm downtrend line suggested significant changes in store. Nevertheless, most members of the general public thought the March rally was nothing more than a dead cat bounce.
President Obama’s national health care agenda is big, bad, and bold. It is also better in various important respects than what we have currently. However, it is fatally flawed. The seriousness of the flaws outweighs the plan’s efficacies and virtues. As a result, the U.S. Congress should reject this legislation and address the fact that the nation consumes too much expensive but ineffectual health care.
A massive amount of quantitative easing (money supply inflation) is underway in the U.S. and around the world. The Bank of England, for example, has committed 75 billion pounds ($111 billion U.S.) to purchase government bonds and corporate paper.
All right, not everything in today’s Farrell commentary is erudite or even proportional. Nevertheless, he does make some valuable points. It is apparent that America is setting up various disgruntled interests in the world to make war with us. The U.S. decision to monetize debts in the face of a deepening recession is problematic. Quantitative easing (as it is called) will expose our international friends, competitors and enemies to economic complications as our U.S.
The U.S. Congress ought to blush about the AIG situation as should Fed Chair Bernanke. The amount of money spent defending AIG’s bad bets is incredible. But there is something else at stake here. At issue is the question of whether the government knows what it is doing. People need evidence that the Fed and U.S. Treasury are operating a “best practices” recovery plan.
The goal of sustainable ecology means little without a commitment to sustainable economics. In economics the biggest issue of sustainability ought to be the right-sizing of an economy. An unsustainable economy is one that booms through the provision of debt additions, the health of the capital markets themselves becoming conditioned on the speculative idea of growth. Our unsustainable economy will in a few years produce unsustainable environmental policies, both coalescing to put us in worse circumstances than we find ourselves now.
If the economy is weakening should we do everything in our power to get it moving again? As explained in Rex Nutting’s Feb. 22 article, “No end in sight for recession” an unprecedented amount of fiscal and monetary stimulus is being injected. What is not explained is how this beckons unprecedented inflation, heavier taxation and further weakening of the U.S. dollar.
Who, if anyone, is surprised that Mr. Stanford’s chapter unfolds in Madoff-ite fashion, politics and all? Who, if anyone, does not expect bailouts and partisan subsidies to continue, with justice thrown to the wind as evidenced in the expanding mortgage subsidy affair?
Now we know why no one but the tax-flawed Timothy Geithner would do as the new Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. Ronald Orol’s report contains clues supportive of some observers’ contention that Mr. Geithner is under the influence of power hungry elites. Mr. Geithner’s proposal comes with the same directive as Paulson’s 2008 TARP proposal: We have to act without delay or be sucked into a black hole of collapsing banks and unemployment.
One war is over. Another one begins. The war to save America from plutocracy was lost this week as the federal government capitulated to financial sector demands for fresh capital and more bailout guarantees. Naturally, the Bush and Obama administrations don’t see themselves as losing the financial war. But they’re two of a kind when it comes to Wall Street. Just consider Obama’s willingness to work the phones to U.S. Senators to secure more money for financial elites.