Mitt Romney Quotes

In the Meltdown of 2008, the American Auto Companies were in dire straights and faced bankruptcy with no certainty that the industry could stay alive., They were running out of money and President Obama decided to make loans, take stock and control and force modernizing on the industry. As a result, and with some Toyota mismanagement, the companies returned to profitability and paid back their government loans early and as a result the bailout had not cost the taxpayers any money. Creditors however were outraged that the lost their preferred advantage had their been a bankruptcy.

He had already decided to save General Motors which was much larger and more critical to the national economy. The normal capitalistic broken down and there were no private firms that were willing to invest, control and continue the companies at any price. There were 1 million immediate jobs at stake with GM plus the collapse of the American Auto Industry including dealers and suppliers. With Chrysler, there were only 300,000 immediate jobs at stake. Ironically, one of the major reasons for trying to save both companies was the fact that Summers team had discovered that the companies were very badly managed. If the bailout could be leveraged to force radical management change and reform, the chances of success would have been much greater than if the companies had been well managed but were still losing money rapidly. The policy decision was brilliantly successful. The reformed auto companies quickly became profitable, and the taxpayer loans were paid back early with interest to and profits to the taxpayers. All those jobs and an iconic American industry not only were preserved but became very profitable and strong and in the final analysis, it did not cost the taxpayers even one dollar. Ford was in less trouble, but if the other two companies failed, the Ford suppliers would mostly fail, and Ford also would have gone down.

When the Meltdown hit America, the crisis drew attention to the fiscal solvency and stability of banks in most of the world. The Irish banks were much more overextended than those of most counties and when that came to light there was a bank panic in Ireland. Ahern and the Irish Dail (parliament) decided to bail out the Irish bank at a very great cost to the rest of the Irish economy and people. He believed if Lehman Brothers had been bailed out, as America did with other institutions, the Irish bank bubble would not have burst. It is not known whether he actually meant to use the word “testicles” or he made a gaff intending to use the word “tentacles”. Both have relevant meaning in the situation with a significant shade of difference in meaning between the two.

The Grammar Curmudgeon

The Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, creatively found alternatives that the Fed had never used before and almost all experts did not even realize that were possible. He and Treasury Secretary Paulson, almost certainly saved the American system of capitalism. But in the process, they in the early stages and Bernanke throughout the crisis took a number of steps to save the system where the very people and companies whose actions had triggered the entire crisis seemed to personally benefit while most Americans were hurt badly and none of them received any immediate personal benefits the way the large bankers did. The amount of money that Bernanke and his Federal Reserve Board associates spend was staggeringly large and that too distressed many Americans. Almost all of the money was actually returned to the taxpayers as a result of the work of the Fed and the Treasury officials, but no one could feel good about the unfair disparity that had so benefitted much of Wall Street particularly and Main Street and the rest of American only generally while so many lost their jobs, their homes, their dignity and their hopes. Only the big banks and bankers also got a personal huge windfall of taxpayer money and took no risk for that. The alternative would have ruined everyone and even have been worse for the average citizen.

Sovereign credit substitution is where the government, one way or another, assumes and guarantees the debts of private corporations. This is an elegant way of saying: “taxpayer bailouts”

He was referring to Fannie Mae, the government-created. private mortage guarantee company. It was heavily regulated, and in general it met the regulatory requirements. However, the requirements were insufficient, and in the 2008 Meltdown and the Great Recession that followed, Fannie Mae itself was in such bad financial condition, that the Federal Government had bail them out or have the entire home mortgage industry fall apart.

of the Meltdown of 2008

The Meltdown of 2008 came a year later and Citigroup, one of the largest banks in America, had massive liquidity problems and in order to stave off bankruptcy the taxpayers had to come up with $45 Billion. The bank executives, as this quotation demonstrates, knew that they were in a very risky situation and that if the subprime mortgages started to default, the “music would stop” and they and the other banks would have a massive liquidity problem. None the less, they kept on investing more and more of their bank customer’s money and making money in what they knew was a highly risky enterprise. The greed clouded their judgment and when the music stopped and many were no longer dancing, the Meltdown of 2008 almost destroyed the entire national economy and triggered the Great Recession where the overwhelming proportion of Americans had to suffer for the greed of those who could not “stop dancing” even as they knew it was very dangerous.

U. S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers called Rajan a “Luddite” for this view, but what Rajan observed and predicted was exactly what happened in the Meltdown of 2008 which led to the Great Recession. Rajan was one of the few economists to call this right. Several, invested their own money assuming a crash and made billions. Most, like Summers and the Federal Reserve Chairmen in retrospect admitted that they missed the signs and didn’t connect the dots. See {637168}, {637987}, and {620038}

Born thought that her agency was responsible for regulating the new esoteric financial products—derivatives including credit default swaps—for otherwise there would be no regulation at all of financial products that could dwarf the stock and bond market. Summers persuaded her to back off. When the Meltdown of 2008 hit, the huge derivative exposure of the large banks and some insurance companies was so great that it was one of the major causes for the meltdown of the entire banking system. Summers, normally a great economist not only called this one wrong, but later, along with most other government and private economists ignored a very explicit warning—See {637168}, {637986}, and {620038}.

This warning was a decade before the Meltdown of 2008, but was not heeded by any of the politicians. As a result a number of the companies that made all those risky decisions assumed that if something went terribly wrong the government would not let them fail. Unfortunately, they were right and the taxpayers spent billions to prevent companies from failing. After the meltdown all the politicians vowed to end the too big to fail concept, but while some improvements were made, the Congress could not come to agreement, and the markets and a number of companies think that they are still too big to fail. This is particularly true for Defense Contractors where the government has and probably will in the future, protect irresponsible companies from failure if they are the only company that makes needed weapons and other equipment.

Geithner, the Treasury Secretary immediately after the Meltdown of 2008, facing complete collapse of our financial system, among other ameliorations, advocated and implemented many subsidies to bail out the banks most of whom had been greedy, foolish and often dishonest. He even allowed banks to use taxpayer money to pay bonuses to Bank executives who had brought the bank to ruin being a cause of the crisis. However, the banks not only survived but recovered and made huge profits while many of the taxpayers whose funds were used to help the banks were still struggling to make ends meet and it was they who received little, if any, government assistant.

In the Meldown of 2008 which caused the Great Recession, he, his Republican Predecessor and Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve Chairman, I the opinion of most on ideological economists saved the American economy from a collapse that would have been as bad or worse than the Great Depression. However, to accomplish that they had to in effect bail out the banks, 2 of the 3 American Auto companies, and the largest insurance company with taxpayer money. Worse, they could not do much for the millions of Americans whose homes were “under water” as a result of the banks’ handling of home mortgages and mortgage backed securities. To help them, they would have had to force the banks to admit that their assets were much lower than the banks were claiming and the banking and financial executives had to be appeased. Meanwhile, they had few other resources and did not provide any help to Main Street, small business or even small banks. Worse, they were intimidated into allowing the subsidized and saved banks to pay huge bonuses to their executives whose performance was terrible while millions of normal Americans were unemployed and the others were getting no increase in compensation. See {639655} for Geither’s explanation of the problem.

His predecessors had lied about the status of the Greek Economy and then squandered the money with waste, fraud, and corruption. To avoid total national bankruptcy, Greece needed a large bailout which was given subject to a set of required conditions of reform and transparency. This “austerity” package created a great hardship for many of the average Greek citizens while the wealthy who had benefitted from the previous incompetence and corruption took their money out of the country. The Greek voters elected a new government without much experience but who were committed to lifting the burden of the austerity package. The problem was that the major nations of the Eurozone, whose taxpayers would have to pay for the bailout, had been burned before by Greek government lies and incompetence and did not trust the Greeks, insisting on the austerity measures if any bailout money would be forthcoming. The new Greek government was caught in a great dilemma. Agree to the same kind of Austerity package and continue the great hardships on the people or go into Bankruptcy and leave the Eurozone the consequences of which would probably be worse. The finance minister was hoping for a compromise.

Economic is often called “the dismal science” as its ability to make predictions has never been very good. The Great Depression was also missed, else it would not have come as such a shock. There have been a few economists who correctly predicted these economic downturns but they generally continuously predict recessions and depressions that never happen.