The Kroog opens up a can of whoopass...
Who knew that William Kristol was an expert on monetary policy? And who thought they’d gain credibility by adding someone who declared in 2005 that we needn’t worry about low savings, because Americans were doing fine thanks to rising home prices, then declared in 2007 that there was no reason to worry about the credit market?
And Invictus over at Barry's place levels an entire 55-gallon drum at the crowd.
Of course, one might level the same charge at another of the letter’s signers, former Bear Stearns economist David Malpass. BR has taken down Malpass here and here (to cite but two), but I don’t think Barry ever got to this one, in January 2008 (what we now know was the second month of the worst recession since the Great Depression):
Malpass’s message minimized the impact of both the ongoing U.S. housing recession and the credit crunch.To an audience of guests representing top French financial institutions like BNP Paribas, Calyon and Natixis — all of which have been singed by the subprime crisis — Malpass sided with what appears to be a majority of U.S. economists in predicting that the U.S. economy would skirt the current crisis without falling into a formal recession.
“We will have a slowdown month by month for the next six months,” Malpass said. “But we will look back and we will say there was not a material recession.”And here’s open letter co-author Kevin Hassett from the American Enterprise Institute (June 2008) in an article titled Seeing Recession When There’s None to Be Found, displaying near perfect partisan hackery, the lede of which was:
Are we in a recession? Despite what the media has led the public to believe, director of economic policy studies Kevin A. Hassett compares today’s economy to past recessions and finds that the current situation does not seem all that dire.If a Democratic-leaning press can convince everyone that the economy is in recession, then it can influence the election. [...] The politically motivated pessimism, like the computer virus, can have real consequences.I’d be remiss if I didn’t also note that Mr. Hassett was co-author of the timely (November 2000) howler Dow 36,000.
These guys got the last 4 years so incredibly wrong they shouldn't be allowed to ever handle a cash register again, and yet here they are with a group scolding of the Fed.
My niece has better macroeconomics skills. Instead they fail upward to the WSJ.
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6 comments:
The Kroog opens up a can of whoopass...
Ah, yes, Krugman. The guy who said Fannie and Freddie and the government had nothing to do with the housing bubble, despite the facts that show the complete opposite.
My niece has better macroeconomics skills.
Dead armadillos have better macroeconomic skills than Krugman. I'll bet your niece has better macroeconomic skills than someone who would say this:
Costs were reduced thanks to the credit card bill that Obama signed into law...
Enforcing regulation did. Same with Obamacare.
Speaking of nieces, someone wise recently said this to me:
Arguing with a liberal, is much like arguing with my four year old niece. They change what they are saying with every sentence, and what they do say makes so little sense, that it is exhausting to try and even understand their thought process… At least with my niece, arguing with her is cute….
But you're not disputing the dipsticks in this email are even more wrong than Krugman. And as usual, all you can do is try to start a fight.
Dow 36,000 guy? C'mon. Even you have more credibility than that joker.
But you're not disputing the dipsticks in this email are even more wrong than Krugman.
The "dipsticks in this email" are absolutely right:
In this case, we think improvements in tax, spending and regulatory policies must take precedence in a national growth program, not further monetary stimulus.
Krugman is still under the delusion that more deficit-increasing borrowed stimulus is needed, as if over $2 trillion in the last 2 1/2 years (which doesn't take into account the increasing Fannie and Freddie and QE2), and which didn't work, wasn't enough. What size stimulus would make Krugman, or any liberal for that matter, happy? $10 trillion? $100 trillion? Think I'm kidding? Here's what Krugman had to say in what you called his "whoop-ass":
According to that view, the Fed needs to do all it can to reduce the real rates unconstrained borrowers face, and could badly use help from fiscal policy, too.
By the word's very definition, Krugman's insane. Even Krugman's opening line in his piece shows it as he still believes that government can still boost demand, despite the fact that it hasn't worked.
And Invictus? All Invictus does is link to Krugman but not offer anything substantial criticizing those who wrote that letter.
There is nothing substantial from any of the critics of those who penned that letter to Bernanke.
And where you and the authors of that open letter fail miserably is by supporting the economic policies of 2001-2008 that created the financial crisis in the first place.
You don't get to lecture people on economic, fiscal, or monetary policy when you cost the country several trillion dollars from a failed bubble economy and then compound it through tens of millions of fraudulent mortgages with bad paperwork.
You lose that argument. Period.
Right. We should listen to those who advocate returning to the failed policies of Herbert Hoover and FDR that have cost the country several trillion dollars. We should listen to those who advocate returning to the failed War on Poverty policies of LBJ that have cost the country trillions of dollars without doing anything in regards to poverty. We should listen to those who say Fannie and Freddie were never a problem. We should listen to those who believe in the Fed even though the Fed is supposed to exist to keep these problems from happening and didn't in the 1930s and in the last few years. We should listen to those who say government wasn't the cause of this problem in the first place, even though the facts show otherwise (yes, I am blaming the Bush administration and Republicans who allowed it to happen, along with Democrats). And we should listen to those who advocate adding to the more than $2 trillion (now closer to $3 trillion) in deficit-increasing borrowed stimulus (along with death panels in Obamacare) even though these policies have failed miserably.
Those who wrote that letter haven't done anything worse than those who criticize them.
...then compound it through tens of millions of fraudulent mortgages with bad paperwork.
And who is at fault for that? You make the case in another post with this part of what you quoted:
The risk stems from the possibility that the rapid growth of mortgage securitization in recent years may have outpaced the ability of the legal and financial system to track mortgage loan ownership.
And who handled the bulk of these securitizations? Fannie and Freddie. Government.
Case closed. I win. Again.
You better hurry and close the comments on this post because I won the argument with my first comment, just as I did on other posts you closed comments on, and you've come back with nothing.
You didn't win anything except for "most delusional asshole stalking my blog".
Fannie and Freddie didn't handle the mortgage paperwork at MERS. MERS was created by the banks. It was run by the banks with assurances to the government and thae taxpayers that this new "efficient electronic" recordkeeping system would eliminate paperwork errors.
Instead it was used by the banks to defraud Americans by the millions with faked mortgage paperwork with no oversight.
It had nothing...nothing, mind you...to do with Fannie or Freddie. It was all the banks. The same banks that created the financial crisis and demanded that you and I bail them out.
I've made dozens of posts on this subject if you would pull your head out of your ass on you crusade to pin this on Barney Frank long enough to read something that wasn't spewed out to you by FOX or Matt Drudge.
I won this "argument" with facts and logic months ago. You on the other hand post idiotic strawmen and declare yourself the winner because apparently nobody gives a good god damn about your own blog enough to bother with arguing with you there.
You're a pointless troll.
But argue all you want with yourself. I'm done with you.
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