Subscribe to Dollars & Sense magazine. Recent articles related to the financial crisis. Obama's Junk Economics (Michael Hudson)From Counterpunch:Obama's Junk Economics Democrats Say "Bye" to Populist Option In a dress rehearsal for this November’s mid-term election, Democrats and Republicans vied last week for who could denounce the banks and blame the other party the most for the giveaways to Wall Street that have swollen the public debt since September 2008, pushing the federal budget into deficit and the economy into a slump. The Republicans are winning the populist war. On the weekend before his State of the Union address on Wednesday, Obama strong-armed Democratic senators to re-appoint Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve Chairman. His Wednesday speech did not mention this act (happily applauded by Wall Street). The President sought to defuse voter opposition by acknowledging that nobody likes the banks. But he claimed that unemployment would be much higher if they hadn’t been bailed out. So the giveaway of public funds was all for the workers. The $13 trillion that has created a new power elite was just an incidental byproduct. Unpleasant, perhaps, as American democracy slips into oligarchy. But the least bad option. People might not like it, but Main Street simply cannot prosper without creating hundreds of Wall Street billionaires—without enabling them to increase their bonuses and capital gains as bank stock prices quadruple. It’s all to get credit flowing again (at 30 percent for credit card users, to be sure.) So the rest of us must wait for wealth to trickle down. The cover story is that, like it or not, this is how the world works. At least this is the argument of the lobbyists who are drafting and censoring laws and signing off on just who is acceptable to run the Federal Reserve, Treasury and other public-subsidy agencies. The working assumption is that the economy cannot recover without enriching Wall Street. In fact what the economy needs is to recover from the Bush-Obama supposed cure, i.e., from the mushrooming debt overhead. It needs to recover from the enrichment of Wall Street. It doesn’t need more credit, but a write-down for the unpayably high debts that the banks have imposed on American families, businesses, states and localities, real estate, and the federal government itself. Instead of helping debtors, Obama has moved to heal the creditors, at public expense. If debtors cannot pay, the Treasury and Fed will take their IOUs and bad casino gambles onto the public sector’s balance sheet. The financial winners must come first—and it seems second and third, too. The rationale is that unless the government gives the large financial institutions what they want and saves them from taking a loss, their “incentive” to protect the economy from devastation will be gone. Read the rest of the article. Labels: bailout, Barack Obama, Counterpunch, debtors, Michael Hudson, populism Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). |
