Sunday, February 23, 2014

WHAT'S WRONG WITH AMERICA'S ECONOMY? WE CAN START HERE . . .

The comic strip Pearls Before Swine pretty much nails it when it comes to understanding what's happening to our nation and our economy because of our bailed out and unrepentant financial sector ...


- Mark

COMMENT (on the Comment): I don't usually do this but after reading the remarks from "anonymous" I just had to set the record straight, again. Mr. Anonymous writes that the U.S. government is essentially to blame for the market collapse of 2008. Let's be clear here. This is the same Fox News tripe that political trolls from the right have been echoing and posting for years now. Not only did former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke make it clear that government programs (like the CRA) had nothing to do with the market meltdown, but so did the magazine Inside Mortgage Finance (the publication that "the mortgage market reads").

In fact, the Republican members on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) were so concerned that the facts would get out once the official 662-page FCIC report was released that they issued their own nine-page "primer" report on the causes behind the market meltdown weeks before the official FCIC was released. The Republicans biased report was a joke from the beginning. Apart from containing just 9 pages it deliberately omitted the words "Wall Street", "deregulation", "shadow banking", and "interconnection" from their review (Can you imagine writing report on welfare fraud and omitting the words "welfare" and "fraud" from the report?) I discuss all of this in an op-ed I wrote for our local paper - the Bakersfield Californian - which you can find by clicking here.

Finally, the fact that I have to explain any of this contributes to the larger picture of what's wrong with America's economy. The right-wing trolls out there are economic illiterates who would rather believe in Economic Unicorns than try to understand the world as it is.

- Mark

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

But what about the Community Reinvestment Act? What about the actions of the U.S. Federal Government in forcing banks to lower lending standards and issue mortgages to people who should never have been approved? This crisis was started and catalyzed by the U.S. Government meddling (aka "social engineering" to promote "fairness"). You pass yourself off to be so informed and yet you spread assertions based on partisan nonsense. Get a grip and stop spreading false information.