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People Who Know — Why Now?
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People Who Know

by Bryan

If you see anything written by or attributed to:

  • Elizabeth Warren – Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel [BS University of Houston, JD Rutgers University]
  • Sheila C. Bair – Chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), [BA, JD University of Kansas]
  • Brooksley E. Born – retired Chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), [BA, JD Stanford University]

pay attention, because these ladies saw the disaster coming, understand why it happened, and want the underlying problems fixed.

The “boys”, who keep getting treated as knowledgeable pundits on these economic matters, have been uniformly wrong. Note that Ms Born served under Bill Clinton, and Obama has recycled a lot of Bill’s economic advisors, when Goldman Sachs didn’t have a suitable candidate. This is kind of like hiring criminals to solve their crimes.

6 comments

1 hipparchia { 10.22.09 at 10:36 pm }

larry summers, knowledgeable [snort] dude, on women:

The president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, sparked an uproar at an academic conference Friday when he said that innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers. Summers also questioned how much of a role discrimination plays in the dearth of female professors in science and engineering at elite universities.”

well, ok, so maybe it’s not the discrimination, maybe it’s just the sheer impossibility of dealing with stupid, bullying males that we get tired of:

“I walk into Brooksley’s office one day; the blood has drained from her face,” says Michael Greenberger, a former top official at the CFTC who worked closely with Born. “She’s hanging up the telephone; she says to me: ‘That was [former Assistant Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers. He says, “You’re going to cause the worst financial crisis since the end of World War II.”… [He says he has] 13 bankers in his office who informed him of this. Stop, right away. No more.'”

2 Bryan { 10.22.09 at 11:06 pm }

Larry Summers has been an idiot most of his life, but people keep giving him jobs. It has always been a source of wonderment to me how certain people keep getting hired after proving they are worthless on multiple levels for years. It has to be the “good ol’ boy” network, because reality doesn’t provide any reason for this.

At this point I would be reticent to hire anyone who graduated from Harvard or Yale, either undergrad or grad courses. I have a gut feeling that the risk is just too high that they are jerks, and incompetent jerks, at that.

Summers believes in the Laffer fairy tale on taxes!! He is a disaster, who got the Harvard endowment involved in derivatives and cost them a bloody billion dollars, and he is advising the President !?

3 cookie jill { 10.23.09 at 1:09 am }

The last Frontline on PBS was MUST watch TV.
.-= last blog ..Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire =-.

4 Bryan { 10.23.09 at 11:16 am }

I am more text based than graphic, so I don’t watch TV, but I’ll take your word for it.

5 Steve Bates { 10.23.09 at 9:51 pm }

Bryan, I just watched the Frontline segment on Brooksley Born, and it spoke volumes. Whatever medium you prefer is fine, but be sure you find a source of this content. At the end of the segment, I simply buried my face in my hands; there was scarcely any other appropriate reaction to the sheer irrationality Ms. Born faced… over a decade ago… to the warnings she offered regarding the very problems we face today.

And Born says it’s not over yet, that we face a succession of market collapses until stronger regulations are put in place on some of these new pie-in-the-sky constructs (including the unregulated, privately traded instruments that apparently caused this collapse).

As all of us have observed, Obama’s appointees who affect the financial markets and everything that rests atop them are the very people who plunged us into the current catastrophe via their obsession with the creative unreality bequeathed us by Ayn Rand. How many more chances do they get, and how much must we all suffer, before they learn the folly of unregulated markets?

(Heads up! Incoming troll[s] in 4… 3… 2… 1…)
.-= last blog ..Gershwin For America =-.

6 Bryan { 10.23.09 at 10:17 pm }

While everyone concentrated on the meltdown in Orange County, California, we had a similar situation in Escambia County, Florida, with the long-time finance director loses millions in derivatives. He retired and the brokers involved were sued. It was a major mess. Of course, no one had inquired as to how he was getting the returns he reported. The higher the return, the higher the risk – that formula has never changed.

It is hard to believe that after that mess, no one actually did anything about the problem.

It’s the same with the banks. After the savings and loan mess, you would have thought that someone would have done something to prevent the same thing from happening again, but you would be wrong. The FDIC just took over its 100th bank this year, and then added three more. They are monitoring over 400 banks that are in difficulty. They are on track to beat the S&L record.

The reaction is always the same: it’s a few bad apples, the system is fine. The orchard needs to be reduced to ashes, so we can start over.

The brain-dead idiots in charge don’t understand why people are so angry about Wall Street salaries and bonuses. The masses have figured out that these are the same people who created the problem, and rather that paying them millions to do it again, they should all be making license plates or CorCraft® furniture [CorCraft is the registered trademark of the New York State prison system, which produces a complete line of office furniture].