Monday, July 12, 2010

Filing This

A Pony Gusher. Thanks for your future work, Google!

7 comments:

El Snacktator said...

Love it!

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

Has this been passed on to Atrios?

He might O.D.
~

mikey said...

Hey! You got your goddam ponies all up in my fishing grounds!

Substance McGravitas said...

Has this been passed on to Atrios?

He actually linked to it at The Poor Man. The archive there is gone so I took this outta the Internet Archive. What I should actually be doing is animating ponies flying out of the derrick, which shouldn't be that hard.

What I was thinking of was this:

If Congress had circumvented the private banking industry with its own bank, and had thrown a massive $1-$2 trillion stimulus at the non-financial-industry-economy, there is every reason to believe that it would have taken deliberate action to help all the other nations of the world that had been victimized by banksters.

That is, that the US government should have let all the banks fail and established its own bank to ensure the adequate availability of credit, and it would have happily bailed out foreigners who lost their money or, you know, their economies as a result.

In short, I think that at the time keeping those shitty institutions afloat was really really important to the whole world (while now not so much) and believing that you can reorganize the fire department before the town is in ashes seems like a stretch, no matter how much I can get behind a safe and stable nationalized bank and also behind the now-easier flaying of the assholes who caused the crisis.

Substance McGravitas said...

What should be added to that is that my opinions on economics and political practicalities are somewhere in the continuum of worthless to dangerous.

mikey said...

But the larger point is both obvious to the unwashed, as well as being REALLY important going forward.

And that, simply put, is American economic policy is locked into a particularly narrow ideologically defined set of options, most of which are mathematically discredited (Laffer curve, anyone?) and the rest of which are premised on a set of macroeconomic assumptions ordinarily defined humorously as "first assume a can opener".

It is infuriating (at best, tragic otherwise) to watch the US government, led by a democratic president, stand by and allow monetary policy to be determined in a vacuum by a central bank led, not just by republicans, but by republicans appointed to their role by the most profligate and economically illiterate executive in history. That Obama did not have the political wherewithal to be comfortable in defining his own choice for central banker is going to cost us more that we can, at this point, calculate. Good luck, one and all. I'm going to go stand under the pony gusher...

Substance McGravitas said...

Oh sure, and you still have a buncha gigantic institutions that each need to be chopped into little pieces.

But in a certain sense, not dealing with that problem means everyone's thinking about American power...