Obama would be far more powerful if he stood up to Wall Street. But to do that, he’d need Reich at his right hand (rather than Geithner).

Reich would be a great adviser, but Geithner has done well at Treasury. If anything I’d expect Geithner to take a vacation at the end of the year and let Volcker take over Treasury for a while — especially if we start seeing inflation occurring.

I sometimes think the structure of the group of advisers around a president isn’t quite right. Each is assigned certain areas and they become protective. If a president had a group of general purpose advisers, like a group of busy-body bloggers who touch on every topic, then there would be more heads and opinions touching each significant issue.

Data –> Information –> Decision-making ————–> Wisdom

Probably each of these is done better by larger numbers of people except that we have one person to guide the direction of it all, set goals and priorities and break ties and that’s the President.

As things stand we probably have more lawyers and economists and military people directing information gathering and assisting the president. Maybe a general purpose group with a broader range of interests and capabilities would do better. At least the current system has experts in a field to work on issues related to that topic. That’s something.

We are watching the gutting of the middle class
1) wages stagnate
2) debt rises
3) housing gets borrowed against and tanks in value
4) pension trouble, dollar drops making us globally poorer
5) Middle class is a shadow of its former self

Wages are stagnant or have dropped significantly because big companies are taking their ball overseas to play and they’re putting as little into their U.S. businesses as they can. It’s like being an absentee landlord who collects the rent and watches the buildings decay. They don’t want to put more into it because they know the profits will be bigger overseas for a very long time to come.

Debt rises because the competition pushes health care and financial services to increase profits and prices continually. Those rise faster than wages, so people gradually drift into greater debt and eventually bankruptcy.

In debt? Borrow against your home equity? It’s a logical continuation of reaching into your bank savings to pay for current bills.

And, it doesn’t help to have Republicans in charge to reshape law to benefit big businesses and to tear down unions.

We have to stabilize that hemorrhaging and begin rebuilding the financial system in a way that let’s people begin building new businesses that pay better and better wages and to let us begin competing with foreign interests more effectively. Energy competition is a big one. Healthcare reform is huge. Financial reforms is huge. Personal savings and stronger unions is part (though a big smaller). It will take quite a while to get everything fixed — probably as long or longer than it has taken Republicans to tear it down.

the bond-rating industry?

Obviously turning them into whores for creators of new products didn’t work. Maybe they should be fed by an industry-wide fee based on the previous year’s use of the agency work. Then they can do their work independent of a specific pay-off for that work product.

They need some independence or it’s all b.s.

Did you know it was coming?