Thomas Friedman Quotes
We can either have a hard decade or a bad century.
Thomas Friedman, Foreign Affairs Columnist & Journalist, Interview, CNN Global Public Square, October 10, 2011
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Later that year the stock market crashed and the great depression ensued.
by deficit spending and borrowing.
A Written form of Constitution of the first democracy of the New World.
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.
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.
"Market mispricing" is an economic euphanism for the bankers and major investors of the nation (and abroad) bidding up the prices of the assets in order to continue to squeeze large profits even after they knew that the assets had been far overpriced. Few wanted to stop playing hoping the music would not stop in the economic game of musical chairs. When it did, there were not enough "seats" and failures casued other failures and the contagion spread.
Thomas Loren Friedman is an American political commentator and author. He is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner who is a weekly columnist for The New York Times. He has written extensively on foreign affairs, global trade, the Middle East, globalization, and environmental issues.
