Mitt Romney has roundly laughed at across the media-scape today for claiming it was George Bush, not Barack Obama, who kept the US from collapsing into a Great Depression in late 2008. That’s not entirely wrong, but there are a few things which Mittens conveniently failed to mention.
(LA Times) — So that businesses did not spark a run on banks to ensure they had the means to continue meeting payrolls, Romney said Bush and then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson “said we’ve gotta do something to show we’re not going to let the whole system go out of business.” … “That was President George W. Bush and Hank Paulson,” he said, to applause.
It was the Bush admin who created TARP, the program which borrowed enormous sums of money to buy up toxic loans the bankstas couldn’t cover, plus gave them unfettered access to piles of cash they could “borrow” with no interest or penalty for as long as they wanted, and rammed it through a traumatized legislature. If this is Romney’s point, he’s right, it’s all true.
The points Romney accidentally on purpose forgot to mention: 1) Bush’s Big Bang Bailout violated every single last principle of the magic free market mantra espoused by conservatives for the last five decades; 2) It was Bush and the Republican Party’s policies writ large, i.e., fat tax cuts for the wealthy, an expensive war in Iraq on the nation’s credit card, and deregulation, which all combined to convert a healthy budget surplus into a massive and economic collapse in the first place; 3) Romney is running his campaign on the promise to reenact those same policies again and again and seems to genuinely expect different results.
Shouldn’t that be and deregulation of the mortgage and loan industry? I think that point should be defined as I figure it is the main reason for the crash and Bush was warned about the possible problems that could occur by Fannie and Freddie.
“promise to reenact those same policies again and again and seems to genuinely expect different results.” isn’t that the definition of something?
Oh! Oh! I got it!
Madness
In fairness, the Clinton administration helped. But it was also by deregulating (in this case, turning a blind eye to dangerous practices like Credit Default Swaps).
Unregulated capitalism generally does exceptionally well at maximizing short-term profit. Emphasis on the “short-term”.
Conservatives will both applaud and complain about this as socialism in the same breath. Regardless as to who did what when.
Nobody is doing – or has done – anything to stop a second great depression. The problem is, this time it’s not going to be a depression, it’s going to be a sinkhole collapsing the entire system. The 1930s depression will look like the Guatemalan sinkhole compared to the one that’s coming.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/06/100601-sinkhole-in-guatemala-2010-world-science/
The panic and fearmongering is getting worse. On business sites and “news” I’ve been seeing today say that the toxic debt could cause PRChina to go soon. Maybe the whole damn system will collapse and we can start from zero.