Charles Lane Quotes

In the Great Recession thousands of bank executives of the banks that received government bailouts committed fraud and perjury providing false information under oath and foreclosing on mortgages illegally. There were so many bank felons that the Justice Department decided not to prosecute any of them and let the Banks pay relatively small fines instead. Then the banks paid the crooked employees bonuses. Paul was one of the few members of Congress who favored prosecution of all the guilty bankers regardless of the number.

The Grammar Curmudgeon

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.

The Banks and Wall Street were much to blame of the Great Depression which began in 1929. Many called for reform and heavy regulation of the finance industry. However President Hoover was very passive and the Depression became worse. Hoover also opposed ANY regulation of banking or Wall Street. Hence the names in this quotation. The Priest was the right wing demagogic radio host of his day. Virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Black, he was threatened with excommunication by the Catholic Church, which finally ordered him to cease us weekly radio show and stop the political hate.

This was a very important quotation because Cox was a strong advocate of deregulation and voluntary regulation, and that is why he was appointed to head the SEC by George W. Bush. He was the leading Republican expert on Regulation of the Stock Markets and sale of public securities. However when the Meltdown of 2008 hit, it was clear to all but the extreme ideologues that some Federal regulation was necessary. Nonetheless, it took several years to reform the regulations for the financial industry with the Banks and Wall Street fighting it all the way and by that time the Republican Party had been so dominated by ideological conservatives that the views of Cox and others no longer had much influence. They fought the Dodd-Frank reforms to go preserve self regulation to a great extent.

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.

Justifying his support of the Hyde Amendment prohibiting Federal funds to be used to perform abortions. Carter was normally a staunch defender of equal opportunity for the poor, but the Hyde Amendment de facto prohibited poor women from exercising their rights to have abortions while middle class and wealthy women could exercise that right.. The hypocrisy was difficult for him to explain.

Arguably, for most of American History, most of the “smartest” people contributed to manufacturing, construction, research and development—activities that produce things that are wanted and/or needed. However, Wall Street began attracting and paying for some of the smartest people in the society, who when they engaged in finance—not only contributed less to manufacturing, but began to create highly complex financial instruments and procedures that few people could understand and with which regulators have difficulty understanding. These and the other schemes of financing have been major factors in the economic problems that have beset the economy including the meltdown of 2008 and the subsequent Great Rescission.

Volker was trying to reform the excesses of the banking industry in the aftermath of the Great Recession where the banks had to be bailed out by the American taxpayers.

Under the Republican George W. Bush administration, the economic meltdown of 2008 triggered the Great Recession where the middle class bore the economic and emotional brunt. In 2012, the Republicans were in the midst of their primary elections for their Presidential nominee. There were 4 candidates in a vicious campaign where they trashed and attacked each other trying to pander to the right wing of the Party who tended to control the primaries. So all of the candidates were opposed to all the laws that Congress had made to prevent another economic disaster and in addition to repealing those, would roll back most of the executive orders and regulations to prevent another Banking debacle.