US = Albania
Wall Street woes prompt a yukfest for those Euros who don’t have their hands out yet. Albania comparisons and nostalgia for plummeting bankers. Econ roundup starts with LA Times:
The finance minister of Italy’s conservative and pro-U.S. government warned of nothing less than a systemic breakdown. Giulio Tremonti excoriated the “voracious selfishness” of speculators and “stupid sluggishness” of regulators. And he singled out Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, with startling scorn.
“Greenspan was considered a master,” Tremonti declared. “Now we must ask ourselves whether he is not, after [Osama] bin Laden, the man who hurt America the most. . . . It is clear that what is happening is a disease. It is not the failure of a bank, but the failure of a system. Until a few days ago, very few were willing to realize the intensity and the dramatic nature of the crisis.”
In an interview Thursday in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, Tremonti drew a comparison to corruption-ridden Albania in 1997, when a nationwide pyramid scheme cost hundreds of thousands of people their savings and ignited anarchic civil conflict.
“The system is collapsing, exactly like the Albanian pyramids collapsed,” Tremonti said.
On the other end of the political spectrum, among leftists who have long predicted calamity for what they call the “savage neoliberal capitalism” of Wall Street, there were gleeful allusions to the stock market crash of 1929.
“Between the dread of a world in the midst of collapsing and the shiver of pleasure that finally something serious is happening to the kingdom of liberalism, how to orient oneself?” Eric Aeschimann wrote Thursday in the newspaper Liberation, a voice of French intellectuals whose disdain for capitalism persists in the 21st century.
Expressing nostalgia for “the good old days when bankers jumped out of windows,” Aeschimann condemned as “extortion” the rescue of U.S. corporate giants by the very state that free-marketeers resent.
Well, too bad about that, but here’s something the leaping-banker-deprived Euros. CNN: Wall Street disaster could bail out for the flagging Obama campaign.
… more Americans think Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, would do a better job handling an economic crisis than McCain, the Republican presidential nominee. Forty-nine percent of those questioned say Obama would display good judgment in an economic crisis, 6 points higher than the number who said the same about McCain. And Obama has a 10 point lead over McCain on the question of who would better handle the economy overall.
But he’s still suffering stagflation among likely voters.
The poll also expands to include third party candidates. When included in the results, Obama has the backing of 48 percent of likely voters, three points ahead of McCain at 45 percent. Independent Ralph Nader has the support of 4 percent of those polled, with Libertarian candidate Bob Barr and Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney each at one percent.
Hitchens cruelly mocks Obama’s failure to croak McCain after the week from hell. Is Obama another Dukakis?
Last week really ought to have been the end of the McCain campaign. With the whole country feeling (and its financial class acting) as if we lived in a sweltering, bankrupt banana republic, and with this misery added to the generally Belarusian atmosphere that surrounds any American trying to board a train, catch a plane, fill a prescription, or get a public servant or private practitioner on the phone, it was surely the moment for the supposedly reform candidate to assume a commanding position. And the Republican nominee virtually volunteered to assist that outcome by making an idiot of himself several times over, moving from bovine and Panglossian serenity about the state of the many, many crippled markets to sudden bursts of pointless hyperactivity such as the irrelevant demand to sack the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
And yet, and unless I am about to miss some delayed “groundswell” or mood shift, none of this has translated into any measurable advantage for the Democrat.
…
Why is Obama so vapid and hesitant and gutless?
Another quarter heard from.
Dodd plan via Bloomberg:
The legislation requires Treasury to take an equity stake equal to the purchase price of the assets being bought. If the company isn’t publicly traded, the government would take senior debt instead, placing it in the front of the line of debt holders for repayment in the event of a bankruptcy.
Dodd’s proposal also would create a five-member oversight board to supervise the Treasury secretary’s purchase and sale of distressed mortgage debt.
…
Dodd is proposing to penalize executives who take “inappropriate or excessive” risks. The executive compensation and severance packages could be reduced if that is “in the public interest,” the proposal says. It would also force executives to give back profits they earned that were based on company accounting measures that are later found to be inaccurate.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who has supported giving shareholders a bigger say in executive compensation in the past, said today that taxpayers shouldn’t foot the bill for “golden parachutes” for officers of companies that have crumbled in upheaval on Wall Street.
“The senior executives of any firm that is bailed out by Treasury should not be making more than the highest paid government official,” McCain said at a campaign event in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
The president is the highest paid federal official, with a salary of $400,000 a year.
ABC’s blogging ex-Bush strategist Matthew Dowd: That better be one heck of a debate Friday. Or someone’s in trouble.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:47 pm on Monday, September 22, 2008
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