Ramona. Yes Beatrice. What do you think of the New York Times and ITS' ECONOMIST PAUL KRUGMAN?
"... Mr. Krugman ... By any normal standard, economic policy since the onset of the financial crisis has been a dismal failure. It’s true that we avoided a full replay of the Great Depression. But employment has taken more than six years to claw its way back to pre-crisis levels — years when we should have been adding millions of jobs just to keep up with a rising population. Long-term unemployment is still almost three times as high as it was in 2007; young people, often burdened by college debt, face a highly uncertain future.
Now
Timothy Geithner, who was Treasury secretary for four of those six
years, has published a book, “Stress Test,” about his experiences. And
basically, he thinks he did a heckuva job.
He’s not unique in his self-approbation. Policy makers in Europe,
where employment has barely recovered at all and a number of countries
are in fact experiencing Depression-level distress, have even less to
boast about. Yet they too are patting themselves on the back.
How
can people feel good about track records that are objectively so bad?
Partly it’s the normal human tendency to make excuses, to argue that you
did the best you could under the circumstances. And Mr. Geithner can
indeed blame much though not all of what went wrong on scorched-earth
Republican obstructionism.
But
there’s also something else going on. In both Europe and America,
economic policy has to a large extent been governed by the implicit
slogan “Save the bankers, save the world” — that is, restore confidence
in the financial system and prosperity will follow. And government
actions have indeed restored financial confidence. Unfortunately, we’re
still waiting for the promised prosperity.
Much
of Mr. Geithner’s book is devoted to a defense of the U.S. financial
bailout, which he sees as a huge success story — which it was, if
financial confidence is viewed as an end in itself. Credit markets, which seized up after Lehman fell, mostly returned to normal during Mr. Geithner’s first year in office. Stock indexes rebounded, and have hit new records. Even subprime-backed securities — the infamous “toxic waste” that was poisoning the financial system — eventually regained a significant part of their value.
Thanks
to this financial recovery, bailing out Wall Street didn’t even end up
costing a lot of taxpayer money: resurgent banks were able to repay
their loans, and the government was able to sell its equity stakes at a
profit.
But where is the rebound in the real economy? Where are the jobs? Saving Wall Street, it seems, wasn’t nearly enough. Why?
MAY 18, 2014
Paul Krugman, New York Times, Federal Reserve Criminal Fraud, and the denial is so deep in denial there is no denying the insane denial.
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