17 Replies to ““Fed study says Bush and the banks didn’t cause the Great Recession. The Fed did””

1. Squid says:

   August 7, 2012 at 9:20 am

   …and the closest your average American will come to learning about this would be if Matt Lauer invited Bug-Eyes Cramer on the Today Show to do some breathless handwaving.

2. The Monster says:

   August 7, 2012 at 9:24 am

   Once again what’s left of the free market is blamed for something government did, the solution to which is… more government.

   Lather, rinse, repeat.

3. dicentra says:

   August 7, 2012 at 9:37 am

   Here we go: Government as Deviant Subculture.

   Just so.

   First thing that needs to go are the unions and anything else that prevents people from being accountable to voters or other forces of gravity.

4. JHoward says:

   August 7, 2012 at 9:44 am

   Bride of here we go: Jenga!

   Second thing to go is anything that makes the System accountable to voters or other forces of gravity.

5. Squid says:

   August 7, 2012 at 10:06 am

   First thing that needs to go are the unions and anything else that prevents people from being accountable to voters or other forces of gravity.

   I respectfully disagree. The first thing that needs to go is the Department of Homeland Security, followed by the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Education, Energy, Transportation, HUD, HHS, and Labor. Then we can get busy pruning the remaining cabinet departments down to those functions that are Constitutionally justifiable. Then we can start working on what to do with all the empty buildings in the District.

6. Roddy Boyd says:

   August 7, 2012 at 10:25 am

   I respectfully dissent.

   Odd how money center banks collapsing as prices spiraled massively lower for their real estate “asset” clogged balance sheets is not terribly crucial–“A correction of an excess of surplus in the housing market,” is how he put it, I believe–but (surprise!) Fed policy decisions are central to the drama.

   The British, in their quest to make intellectual sense of the horrific losses of WWI, called these bloodless assessments “Staff Histories.”

   It was not a complement.

7. Roddy Boyd says:

   August 7, 2012 at 10:30 am

   It strikes me as a sad feature of contemporary life (one I call “fanboy nation”) that the wonderfully symmetric, bi-partisan nature of the series of fuckups that led to the “Credit Crisis”–it wasn’t exactly one “crisis” but a series of inter-locking market collapses–is ignored in favor of cheap slogans that are absurdly flawed.

8. Crawford says:

   August 7, 2012 at 10:41 am

   Cheap slogans are easier to explain to those with journalism degrees. You now, like describing the whole of contemporary society as “fanboy nation”.

9. Crawford says:

   August 7, 2012 at 10:42 am

   (And, naturally, a typo: “now” -> “know”)

10. cranky-d says:

    August 7, 2012 at 10:55 am

    The comment gods are capricious.

11. JHoward says:

    August 7, 2012 at 11:02 am

    Reminder to self: Cease even considering painting contemporary society as the whole of contemporary society. Because there are always at least two kinds of people, for example those who breathe and those who do not.

12. Roddy Boyd says:

    August 7, 2012 at 11:29 am

    Or Crawford and everybody else? Point taken.

    Good thing it’s not true though, right? I mean the point was a throwaway, a humorous aside, since we all know one would ever reduces a series of complex–if ultimately comprehensible–distinct actions (and actors) and their web of connections into a slogan at once facile and completely wrong.

    Given the broad affinity I have for the ideas here, it was an inside joke, like how Doonesbury was a reference drawn up for certain late 60s boarding school-elite college kids, full of archetypes and inside jokes that “the squares” who ran Yale and DC never got.

    Because people like Crawford–a programmer who never, ever reduces variables to immutable constants–undestand that the world reflected in the (fictitious) above wouldn’t be true or fair.

    If I had a journalism degree, however, or was the kind of person Crawford chastises, I could fall for something like that.

13. JHoward says:

    August 7, 2012 at 11:54 am

    Heh.

14. JHoward says:

    August 7, 2012 at 11:57 am

    I hope you’ll write a book on the Fed, Roddy. Easy to ask; insanely hard to pull off, I know.

15. Roddy Boyd says:

    August 7, 2012 at 1:31 pm

    JH,
    Thanks. I swear I have given it a lot of thought. A fair investigation of how they work and the machinations.

    I should fill you in sometime on my dealings with them for my AIG book.

16. motionview says:

    August 7, 2012 at 7:55 pm

    A key component was Abdullah’s abandonment of the Reagan-Fahd oil price agreement.

17. motionview says:

    August 7, 2012 at 8:27 pm

    Sorry that was an accidental post.

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