David Stockman was director of the Office of Management and Budget during Ronald Reagan's first term. He wrote a sharp criticism of current Republican thinking in "Paul Ryan's Fairy-Tale Budget Plan", New York Times, 2012-08-13.
Among other things Stockman points out that for all the budget cutting in "entitlements", Ryan wants to fund the "warfare state" with a budget twice what Eisenhower thought was sufficient to contain the Soviet threat, adjusted for inflation. Stockman writes that we have no real credible threat from any "advanced industrial state" and that Iran is benighted but irrelevant.
You might not agree with everything Stockman wrote, but you'll find his thinking is more in tune with reality than what currently passes for conservatism, that is, conserve the entitlements of large corporations and their "right" to raid the Treasury and the pockets of savers.
Showing posts with label Glass-Steagall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Glass-Steagall. Show all posts
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Beginning of the end of finance as we've come to hate it?
Today, Greg Smith is resigning as Executive Director of Goldman Sachs. He wrote "Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs" for the New York Times.
The Coffee Party Facebook page provided a link to this. I'm sorry that I can't give you a URL for it. What struck me about many of the comments was that many seemed to equate finance and capitalism; they are not the same. Finance is a tool of capitalism, but to mix metaphors, it has become the tail wagging the dog. See my blog entry "Finance is not capitalism", 2012-12-07.
The repeal of Glass-Steagall put a lot of muscle into the tail, and at the time only a few saw this coming. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) warned about this in a Senate speech in 1999. See "Byron Dorgan's Prophetic Words", Moyers & Company, Lauren Feeney, 2012-01-27. I recommend watching the full show: "How Big Banks are Rewriting the Rules of our Economy".
For more of the gory details of the collapse of finance, see "All the Devils are Here", by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera. See also my quote from the book about the plea from Wall St. for more regulation!
The Coffee Party Facebook page provided a link to this. I'm sorry that I can't give you a URL for it. What struck me about many of the comments was that many seemed to equate finance and capitalism; they are not the same. Finance is a tool of capitalism, but to mix metaphors, it has become the tail wagging the dog. See my blog entry "Finance is not capitalism", 2012-12-07.
The repeal of Glass-Steagall put a lot of muscle into the tail, and at the time only a few saw this coming. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) warned about this in a Senate speech in 1999. See "Byron Dorgan's Prophetic Words", Moyers & Company, Lauren Feeney, 2012-01-27. I recommend watching the full show: "How Big Banks are Rewriting the Rules of our Economy".
For more of the gory details of the collapse of finance, see "All the Devils are Here", by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera. See also my quote from the book about the plea from Wall St. for more regulation!
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