Rules, morals, and frames are for the peons.

hell, I’m all for free markets too, as long as I get to make all the ‘rules’.

You almost have to be schizophrenic.

You have to be a spy a traitor you have to justify lying because of the Greater Good you will accomplish. Alan now has to justify good decades built on imaginary profits and then disaster. The good decades good for Wall Street at least on paper accomplished what in the end though?
A drop in America’s economic standing in the world, a lower dollar, more debt national, personal and business from a Banker’s viewpoint Alan is a disaster.
Alan’s main focus deregulation it turns out was the main reason why we are in ruin.
When an old man’s life’s work turns to ashes at the end of his life can he ever be sane again?
Alan isn’t he admits there have been problems but he can’t admit that he is to blame. I doubt he will ever be sane.
His economic legacy and reputation are in ruins.

Greenspan, remember, always said that he was a believer in Ayn Rand, a believer in free market

what a rediculous claim from greenspan, the very concept of a monetary system is a set of regulations, the concept of ownership, the concept of “a sanctity of contracts” are all sets of regulations

the very concept “free market” was nothing more then propaganda, a marketing strategy so people like greenspan could have something to fall back on when they redistributed middle class wealth to the wealthy, when he removed the very regulations that forces industry into paying their own bills

the man is not a moron so he is simply a lying sociopath

You almost have to be schizophrenic

nope, you simply have to be a liar

Greenspan is a rich and famous guy so attack him on his pride, his intelligence and what he loves.
And that would be his Former reputation as a Great head of the Federal Reserve the Maestro Wall Street called him.
When they were not busy trying to make sense out of Greenspan speak Famous for saying nothing and being able to be interpreted by both market Bulls and Bears as whatever they wanted to hear.
Greenspan seems to share the idea with the Straussians that the rabble in this case the WallStreet Masters of the Universe must be manipulated because they can’t handle the truth.
Greenspan did the same with politicians for Generations.
However in the end when all the facts were saying one thing Greenspan instead listened to the sweet lies he told everyone else and ignored the facts before his eyes.
The facts every Lefty Econ Blogger was screaming about for over a year.
In the end Greenspan was the rabble who could not handle the facts and had to be lied to…and who better to lie to Greenspan than himself?

I watched the show. How enraging to see Ms. Born treated that way because she wanted to protect the public interest. How enraging that Greenspan is still viewed by the CW as a genius, that Rubin is still wheeling and dealing on Wall Street and Larry Summers is sitting in the White House dictating more of the same. I have to assume that the President doesn’t include Frontline on his regular viewing list- kind of left-wing, doncha know?. Perhaps if he did, we might have hope of change in the right direction. For now, I remain heartsick at the pain these men have inflicted on the people of the world- for which they have paid no price.

Greenspan you have destroyed Supply Side economics, you have destroyed the Laffer Curve and Reaganomics, the banking crisis you created is destroying Neo Hooverism as we speak.
Greenspan you are the destroyer of imaginary worlds!

The Hypothesis that these are “Surprises” is absurd…
Commentary No. 275, Feb. 15, 2010
“Chaos as an Everyday Thing”

You know you’re living in a chaotic situation when (1) the mainstream media are constantly surprised by what is happening; (2) short-term predictions by various pundits go in radically different directions and are stated with many reserves; (3) the Establishment dares to say things or use words that were previously taboo; (4) ordinary people are frightened and angry but very unsure what to do. This is a good description of the past two years throughout the world, or at least in most parts of the world.

[Mod note: To avoid any copyright issues, please do not post entire articles. Post an excerpt and a link instead. Thanks.]

Perhaps if he did, we might have hope of change in the right direction.

I am convinced he is one of them, don’t forget, his entire “stimulous program” was “trickle down economics”, he gave money to the wealthy in the hopes that more money then what he gave would make it’s way into the ecomomy

he is one of them, not the man we voted for, not the man for the job

Summers is a tough guy? With what Rep? An economist who has lost Harvard how many billions of Dollars should be eating Crow not talking tough.
Summers doesn’t suffer fools lightly really is he on a suicide watch now?

Mornin’, BT, pups

I got nothin.

I just have to note as well my anger at hearing how Ms. Born was destroyed professionally because she wouldn’t play ball with the boys. To hear the former head of the SEC admit that he didn’t listen to her warnings because he didn’t know her, and besides the boys were saying she was abrasive and stuff is maddening. This story gets repeated daily in corporate America when someone, especially a woman, tries to stand up to the powerful based on what is right and not what may add to the short-term bottom line. She’s too aggressive, too abrasive, she’s not a team player. Oh, does that also sound like the knocks Jane has been taking? Grrr!

Nice comment are you Immanuel if you don’t mind my asking? The Davos crowd thinks that we are unstable? That the world is unstable funny nobody at Davos was saying if we all cut military spending 10% and spent it on our economies would that be enough to fix the world economy?

Anybody seen a clip from Rachel and Peckerhead Beck from yesterday?

I think the Greece situation shows we can’t afford funny bank deals anymore.

No was it good? What happened?

I got plenty o’ nutting. And, nutting’s plenty for me.

I was under the impression last night that he was on her show. I was wrong apparently. She did a segment where she calls him out. Pretty ho hum. It’s on YouTube as well as her M$NBC site. Here I was all fired up. Oh, well. Forget I asked about it. Carry on.

Beck having the guts to show up on Rachel’s show impossible! But yes I would kill to see that beating:)

He might cry.

The way the news and the conversation are goin’ this morning we’re gonna hafta be happy with that. Mebbe I should set off a stink bomb in the cop shop or sumthin’.

I suggest we all email the link to this Frontline to the White House and demand regulatory repair.

And I do not buy the practice of people posting “fear card” crap.

We can bring change to this. Such postings are just words attempting to bring “action paralysis.”

Not. Going. To. Work. Here.

I suggest we do not feed.

Let’s continue to move forward with financial market reform.

No, you get caught up in things. We have core beliefs, even here at FDL, which we don’t examine and which we resist changing. I closed my share of sub prime loans. They put in decent fees for attorneys and then there was the percentage of title insurance. I didn’t think the loans were good deals, but I am not one of those lawyers who tells clients what to do. Besides if I didn’t close them someone else would.

Sub prime lenders played on the dreams of unsophisticated poor people but so did everyone else, the brokers (mortgage and real estate), sellers, bankers and yes, the lawyers, both those in the field and those who created collateralized debt obligations. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but before we get too carried away, we might ask if there is anything we can do to change things or are we merely flotsam floating in the river of time?

Meanwhile, the Chicago School boys have just mathematically proven that the economic crisis never occurred.

Glen should do a Vicks commercial.

but before we get too carried away, we might ask if there is anything we can do to change things or are we merely flotsam floating in the river of time?

Yes there is bubble and burst behavior is the same things animals from microbes to cows do they eat and reproduce until all the resources are gone then their population drops.
We are men we control our hunger wether its limits on Deer hunting in England. to encouraging holding off having kids until one was older in Japan.
Historically societies that survive restrict themselves and don’t eat all their resources explode their population to unsustainable levels then die off.

I have to change my own behaviour first before I can change anything else. When I don’t warn people of the consequences of their actions and I add to those actions by using the rationale that if I don’t do it someone else will I’ve compromised my own principles. For what? For money. Where does one draw the line in one’s morality.

We have core beliefs, even here at FDL, which we don’t examine and which we resist changing.

I think your describing Cognitive Dissonance and I am not convinced we all have it. I admit we all do bad things sometimes because we want to and sometimes because we have to.
I worked fast food I know statistically I served people food that made them sick. That does not mean I was unaware of it.
It just means I lacked the power to change things and did what I needed to to pay the bills.
However I knew what I was doing and had a gallows humor about it.

Greenspan wasn’t schizophrenic, he was a saboteur, and he did the job. (I imagine that I’m not the first to say this here.) A lot of things are impossible for us now that still would have been possible if someone else had run the Fed. He was one of the biggest players in the neoliberal conspiracy.

Few of the liberal economists resisted him, as Dean Baker keeps pointing out. And his collaborators run the Obama administration and as far as that goes, the world as a whole. He retired because he was old and he had finished his work.

Where does one draw the line in one’s morality.

Very good question but that could be a thread all by itself.

Please don’t feed.

He had intent but his goal he used to justify himself was wrong.

New post up…

He retired because he was old and he had finished his work.

His goal was to destroy the lies of the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush bubble economy for all time?

Sir Alan Greenspan’s economic cult is indestructable!

They are like zombies. You can whack em over the head with reality all you want and it doesn’t slow em down or change thier “wisdom of the market” groans.

Sub prime lenders played on the dreams of unsophisticated poor people but so did everyone else, the brokers (mortgage and real estate), sellers, bankers and yes, the lawyers, both those in the field and those who created collateralized debt obligations. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but before we get too carried away, we might ask if there is anything we can do to change things or are we merely flotsam floating in the river of time

I don’t quite agree, the brokers were victims as much as the borrowers, it was those who created the intstuments and those who deregulated causing those instruments

most brokers thought they were doing something financially sound, giving someone a home that he could afford, then to refincance when the higher rates kicked in

none of them believed real estate would crash, they were literally illiterate and blind when it came to what created the insruments they were using and what was at risk

greenspan wasn’t among those who got caught up, he even said he thought the housing market was overvalued

he could not possibly believe in “a free market”, there is no such thing and he knows it, he knew it and he lied about it

Off to swim in the great capitalist cesspool.

US KIA Irak: 4,376

US KIA Afghanistan: 991

Iraki and Afghan casualties: Estimates vary to over 1.5M

US MBS 2010: 5,828

Be good to yourselves, and all other living things.

Namaste

You are right. We all compromise for money. Aren’t you the guy who works in the great capitalist cesspool? I happen to believe the only workable system is a classless, moneyless society-yes, utopia. I’ve written a book for which I can’t get an agent, let alone publisher which proposes “collective image psychology” Our concept of human nature is the collective image.

The fact most people do not see utopia as a human possibility (we are to greedy, aggressive etc.) proves my point. I do not see utopia as happening tomorrow, but we can take steps, the first being to create a network which involves every citizen. Not every citizen may want to join, but that’s a bridge to jump off when we get to it.

Brokers I know didn’t care, perhaps because they didn’t want to. We are not inclined to look under rocks. Everyone was caught up in it and it was splendid while it lasted.

You wouldn’t happen to be a real estate broker by any chance? No broker I know was victimized.

the truth is all these people knew exactly what they were doing and because there is no penelty for their actions we will continue to get more of the same.

Yes I do but I’m not in a position, nor have I been for years, where I have to compromise my core values in the process of exchanging my labour time for money and that is by choice. I’m not gonna live long enough to see even the beginnings of a money-less, class-less world. I have to live in this one and if I don’t have the toys many desire and go into debt up to their eyeballs to have I’m just fine with that.

Greenspan is shown at the end repudiating unregulated markets, after the economy tanks.

Excellent documentary. It’s about as timely as Greenspan’s repudiation, tho, most of the shenanigans firmly in place in the final two years of the Clinton administration.

Nothing was made of the relationship noted early on between HRC and Born.

That’s what I’m saying! I’ve never bought the “missed the bubble” excuse. We’ve had a Perkinsian economic hit job run on us. Brand Obama is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Goldman Sachs and the other Wall Street Democrats represented in the Hamilton Project.

Jeff Cohen brought these issues up in his recent TRNN interview with Paul Jay. He mentions the Democratic Party’s “fake Left, go Right” schtick, and Obama’s self-identification as a Wall Street Democrat.

What’s not talked about as much is that there was a parallel movement that started in the 1980s, which was to take the other major party, the historic party of the people, the Democratic Party, and turn it more toward the corporate right. And what happened in the 1980s—and it was in fear of these same forces—labor unions, new left, antiwar, environmentalist, feminist. There was this sense that the Democratic Party was too allied with these movements, these social movements that were representing millions of people, so the Democratic Leadership Council was set up. It was set up, funded by oil companies, pharmaceutical companies, tobacco companies, some of the biggest companies in the country. It was largely a corporate front inside the Democratic Party to fight the movements in the Democratic Party and move the leadership of the party toward corporate prerogatives. Who were the leaders of it? Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman. … So now let’s move to 2006, and a new group is formed as part of this constellation of moving the Democratic Party to the corporate right, and it’s a group called the Alexander Hamilton Project of the Brookings Institution. And the director of it is Robert Rubin, who had been the Treasury Secretary for Clinton, had been at Goldman Sachs and, later, Citigroup. Roger Altman had been US Treasury Department under Clinton. And there’s an amazing thing. And this group is set up for budget deficit, international trade, taking on the teachers union, and they had their founding meeting in April 2006. And only one US senator shows up to speak at this founding meeting, and that’s a very new senator, Barack Obama from Illinois, who’s only been in Washington a little over a year. So for a lot of us who were tracking Obama in 2007, of course he got a lot of $25 and $50 donations from people that really wanted change they could believe in, but in 2007, way before he was a front-runner, he was out-fundraising all the other candidates from Wall Street. And it was something I’ve never quite been able to figure out. There were two presidential candidates from the state of New York, Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton, and Obama was out-fundraising them from Wall Street early in ’07. Now, Wall Street money and corporate money always goes to the front-runner. Obama was getting this money before he was the front-runner. So the missing piece to the puzzle is this clip where Obama is the only senator who shows up at the Alexander Hamilton Project.

[BEGIN VIDEO CLIP] SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D-IL): Thank you very much. I would love just to sit here with these folks and listen, because you’ve got on this panel and in this room some of the most innovative, thoughtful policymakers. I want to thank Bob and Roger and Peter for inviting me to be here today. I wish I could be here longer.

COHEN: By the way, Alexander Hamilton in American history was, you know, leader of the Federalist Party, was seen as the elitist party. And the Democratic Party of Thomas Jefferson was founded as a party of the people that would challenge the elitism of Alexander Hamilton. And here you have all these Wall Street Democrats setting up this group, had Obama as their first speaker from the US Senate, and in the clip Obama says that he wants to thank Bob, Roger, and Peter. Bob is Robert Rubin. Roger is Roger Altman. These are Clinton Wall Street Democrats. And who’s Peter? It’s Peter Orszag, the first founding director of the Hamilton Project, who then becomes, later, Obama’s head of Office of Management and Budget. So what you’ve had is the Democratic Party since the ’80s, big corporate money going in there, trying to elevate these candidates, giving them money, giving them a lot of media protection. This is a Democrat who can get elected, who can appeal to those swing voters. And so we’ve had Clinton, Gore, Lieberman, and now Obama that are part of this. Now, Obama was never close to the Democratic Leadership Council, but it’s interesting that a newer incarnation of Wall Street Democratic think tank, he’s there at their founding meeting. [Emphasis and link added.]

Obama was getting the Wall Street money before he was a front-runner. IOW, no one should expect him to do anything his overlords wouldn’t like. Posturing, yes (how’d that filibuster over telecom immunity work out? or releasing the Abu Ghraib photos? or banning torture by the CIA, but not JSOC? etc.), but no substantive help for us serfs.

So the beatings will continue whether morale improves or not. Screwing us royally, and calling it “good governance,” is their idea of The Good Life.

Thanks for posting this. Interesting.

I won’t ask what you do in the capitalist cesspool and keep clean at the same time. Perhaps you assist the real villains at a far enough remove so as to see yourself as not responsible. It’s nice work if you can get it. As for utopia, when you see the problem as psychological, the change can be immediate, like an addict who cleans him or herself up. We have been driven crazy by inferiority, fear of death, lack of discernible meaning. We can let all that crap go in the time it takes to change our minds. Changing minds has never been easy, but the internet makes it easier. Who knows? The choice is to try or to despair. I agree with Churchill. Never give up.

yw, alank, glad you liked it.

It wasn’t just Greenspan’s fault. The concerted neglect by our own Congress to rock any money laden boats is how citizens are still getting screwed while Wall Street still reaps enormous profits to this day. Nothing there has changed either

Which begs another question of Obama -why isn’t/wasn’t whistle-blower Brooksley Born part of his team instead of Summers or Geithner??
Probably for the same reason he didn’t add Governor Dean.
We can add this story to the growing pile of dead bodies and policies buried in the fake green gardens of Democrats.

From Titanic (1997) to Avatar (2009)

Frontline’s The Warning soberly presents Brooksley Born’s principled belief in capital markets and their relationship to the real economy. She was unwilling to look the other way while Rubin, Greenspan, Summers, Graham & their cronies in the private sector sacrificed the real economy to Wall Street’s opaque, derivative speculation.

Regardless of the MSM drumbeat, a financialized economy, completely disassociated from the real fundamentals of its underlying economy, is simply unsustainable.

The stock market has soared because the financial terrorists who perpetrated and continue to perpetrate this fraud know that they’ll never be regulated in any meaningful way or held accountable for their crimes.

Elizabeth Warren is today’s Brooksley Born. Larry Summers is running Rubinomics 2.0 with Rahm Emmanuel from inside Obama’s White House.

With hundreds of trillions in disappeared imaginary derivative wealth, the ship has been lying broken at the bottom of the North Atlantic for more than a decade, and now we can immerse ourselves in a 3-D alien world called Pandora where mountains float like islands in defiance of gravity.

Footnote: Titanic & Avatar are two of Rupert Murdoch’s biggest money makers.

He does not give a shit.

He took a dump on the corpse drown in the bathtub.

He has mad loot and someone else has to smell the shit, and if possible clean it up.

Dick is more likely to dace music than the “maestro”, and that is not going to happen.

People kill over fancy new sneakers, they sure as hell kill over a trillion. What do you suppose they will do with the trillions they stole – perhaps use it for the next problem. Only peons go to jail, the vampires just keep drinking.

What a waste of talent in leaving such an unstinting devoted public servant as Ms. Born without a post. If Obama had 1/2 the balls of this woman we would not be saddled with the same miscreant crew of culprits that created the financial mess that holds the reins of government.

A strong case can be made that by retaining Bernanke, Geithner and Summers Obama is complicit in perpetuating the dysfunctional financial markets and firms that are the root cause of the poor economy. An economy which has to be suported by public expenditures. This fool is running around in circles spending the public’s wealth on the one hand and letting it run out to Wall Street on the other.

I did not know that. Interesting.

I would assume he became friends with them before this meeting.

Apparently (see 44) – Obama is the lead political actor of this crew, so its not about his mouse sized balls (I guess he actually has big balls – just for all the wrong reasons/people).

I was not 100% for Obama in the primary as a lifelong dem (went Edwards…ooops, then Obama, then Clinton). I sure as hell got over my issues and was happy to vote for him in the general – though at first I was not sure I would (FISA, nuke talk, look forward not back, etc). I planned to continue to follow carefully how the “post-Bush” era would go with the D’s in massive control – its been a rapid painful obvious slide.

I do not think the other bums would do any different, and McCain would have been perhaps 10% worse (and 20% more honest).

Well, good luck to them selling this shit now that the box has been unwrapped – not that it matters (4 years of “service”, or 8 – same results: money for nothing and a new bum ready to take your place).

What happens if everyone sells out?

It should also be noted that Maddow likes/liked Orzag since he is geeky and talks math.

Why do we fall for people that we want to have a beer with or whatever (good talker, geek, white/black, good looking, etc).

Public finance of elections, with strict standards of debate, and if I can lets go for the trifect and have an honest media.

PS – Maddow is great, but if you miss a beat you can really get things very wrong. It appears she typically gets things very right, but I hope she keeps digging.

I also find it interesting looking at how more liberal outlets frame the new debates, etc. Its great to study after studying what they did as “opposition”, and the same goes for study of Fox pre- & post- Bush/Obama.