Let me back up a bit. I have really attempted to keep partisan politics out of my analysis. I hope I have succeeded but have probably not done as good a job as I would have liked. While I am a conservative Democrat (socially liberal, fiscally conservative) I really come down more in the Lewis Black mold. Towards the end his last special he stated (and I'm paraphrasing here), "In September, I'm hoping the Democrats and Republicans simply decide to not show up. I've been doing this for 30 years. I keep thinking it won't get worse, and it does." That's exactly how I feel about the last 8 years of, well, bullshit. Everybody who is even remotely involved should be kicked out and exiled to the most remote part of the planet possible. They should also be forced to listen to months straight of the worst televangelist on the planet (Robert Tilton comes to mind).
Here's the basic problem. For the last 8 years this country has become a fiscal train wreck. I say this over and over again, but it's worth repeating. According to the Bureau of Public Debt, the US has issued over $500 billion dollars of net new debt per year since 2003. During the good times -- that is, the times when the economy was expanding -- Congress acted more than recklessly with the nation's finances.
On top of that, the remarkable lack of regulatory enforcement is horrendous. How many food recalls have we had? Or toy recalls? Does anyone remember the FBI is investigating literally every major mortgage lender in the US? How about all of the mea culpa's regarding the auction rate securities market? Now everyone is acting like "it wasn't me -- it was the other guy." Bullshit. Everybody who was in Washington watching and participating in this crap is guilty. Plain and simple.
And let's not forget Alan "bubbles" Greenspan who has yet to meet an asset class he cannot inflate into the stratosphere. Mister "I had no idea 0% interest rates and lack of regulatory enforcement would lead to this" who stands as the architect of a failed Ayn Rand policy perspective that is ruining the country fast should be beheaded, his head bronzed and placed on a pike sitting outside the NYSE with a sign below it that reads, "Asset inflation does not equal real GDP growth". Anyone entering the NYSE must ponder this thought for 5 minutes each day and submit a 100 word essay each month on its meaning.
Let me quote a friend who goes by the screen name of New Deal Democrat:
And so, they have finally done it. Washington has finally bet every dollar of earnings and wealth you and I and every other taxpayer has ever made in our entire lives; every dollar that will ever be made by our children's generation; and every dollar that will ever be made by our grandchildren's generation; in an attempt -- that is by no means guaranteed to succeed -- to prop up the reckless and malign neoliberal "shadow banking system" of Wall Street.
This was a crisis that wasn't just foreseeable. It wasn't just foreseen. It was shouted about from the rooftops for almost half a decade. And yet Washington refused to hear, because the shouters were the Dirty Unwashed Hippies who live outside the zone of neoliberal economic consensus that is elective Washington, D.C.
And they will not hear now, either. Awash in their elective sinecures and their corporate campaign contributions, all that remains is the Rendering of the Bill to the suckers and the chumps. That's us.
Pray tell, exactly why did Congressional leaders sit in "stunned silence" on September 18, 2008 as it was explained to them that the collective unpayable $ TRILLIONS of debt of millions of ridiculous mortgages for houses and condos bought at unsustainable values, debt that was packaged and sold and then borrowed against at rates of 30 or 40 to 1 by a shadow banking system that they and the Administration birthed and nurtured, debt that had been booked as ficitious profits by that system, debt that in the real world represented money that was never ever going to be paid back, was in danger of bringing down the entire financial system?
This crisis was not just foreseeable, it was not just foreseen, it was shouted about from the rooftops since 2004, on blogs like Ben Jones' housing bubble blog, by Calculated Risk, by Mike Shedlock, by Russ Winter, by Barry Ritholtz, by Robert Reich, by Paul Krugman, by Joseph Stiglitz, by James Kunstler, by Stirling Newberry -- in short by just about every housing or economic blogger right, center, and left, from bonddad at Daily Kos to blackhedd on Red State, not to mention myself.
And yet two nights ago, Pelosi, Schumer, Frank, Reid, and everybody else in the Capital sat in "stunned silence" as Bernanke and Paulson spelled out the situation for them. Where were they all these years? Protected from the noise of the Dirty Unwashed Hippies beyond the beltway, by their cocktail party neoliberal free market cone of silence in Washington, that's where.
And so, panic-stricken, they will hurriedly and without reading carefully enact into law what will undoubtedly be the "Economic Patriot Act" of the Bush Administration, with all of the corruption and hidden destruction of rights that conveys, an act that has been estimated at costing up to $1,000,000,000,000 (that's $1 TRILLION) of taxpayer moneys. And still may not succeed.
Truer words about the current situation could not be spoken. This was bound to happen. But now collective Washington is now acting as though it's some kind of shock they have to do something. Folks, this has been on the horizon for years. Those of us who talked about it were called chicken littles (or worse). And no -- I take no pleasure in being right.
However, there is one way to prevent this nightmare from happening again. And it is not in bailing out stupid decision makers with yours and my money, or giving this money to Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke hoping their magnificence and true humility will help them act in the country's best interest. The way to prevent this from happening is to let the idiots who got us in this mess feel the pain from their decisions. And that means let these bastards rot.
Or -- if the government really wants to do it's job like enforce the rules that are existing and then creating a new regulatory framework that works with the current financial industry -- then please do so. But that means growing a spine and saying, "we aren't doing x unless we get y." Period.
