Dear Reader,
It seems to me that that we have paid off the corrupt cronies of the government, and low and behold, it didn’t fix the economy. The Banks, still, are not lending. Now we hear that consumer credit is drying up. I hear the genius that is spending our money claims he is doing a bang up job.
The problem is still the reticence of banks to loan money when they don’t know the ground on which they stand has stopped moving. Unless they are lending someone else’s money. Had the treasury been given the money to buy new loans the credit lines wouldn’t have been locked up. Banks would have been happy to lend our money back to us. (Lend government money to the people and businesses).
As yet the government of the USA has done nothing but destabilize the markets. First with regulation now with telegraphed punches. The government should not be buying banks. That is a way certain to stifle economic growth.
Government is nothing but bureaucracy, in banking, it would reach it’s culmination. Imagine the friction to the economy if the people in charge of the money supply were paid hourly, with his paper clips counted but with no accountability to the public. What should take hours or minuets will stretch to days or months. Our economy would grind to a halt. Or the market would find a way around the bottleneck. Regardless the friction would lower the lot of generations.
I have finally heard someone else call for an investigation into the government’s involvement in the financial mess. I called for a special prosecutor to look into the governments duplicity in the way of; regulation that led to this outcome, the role of the oversight committee in failing to recognize the situation and take effective action to stem the problem before it exploded in our faces, Investigate the Executives role in policing the markets, Investigate links to and from the regulators to those that are regulated and investigate why didn’t Freddy Mac and Fannie May and the department that oversees them come clean sooner and with a plan to fix the problem? Hopefully more people will start calling for an impartial look into the role of the government in this fiasco.
Once again, the government should stop propping up unstable institutions (although it is too late), stop “bailing out” companies, and start buying newly originated loans (presumably, to those companies that claim to need a “bail out”). Buying newly originated loans at the market rate in competition with the market would stimulate the market to compete for the business. Instead of focusing inward and destroying their nerve it would strengthen the industry and invigorate it to beat the government.
Unfortunately money that should be used to keep the “general glut” from becoming a depression is being given to the corrupt people who visited this mess on us in the first place.