This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1309893
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Case in point
" ‘Staggeringly cruel’: With 36 million newly out of work, Trump says he’s willing to let boosted unemployment benefits expire"
PolitiFact used … contending that the Wall Street fund was “not created with bailing out Wall Street as its endpoint,” but instead was meant to provide liquidity that would allow big banks to continue lending to Main Street…
Clearly, Politifact has a narrow enough perspective to qualify as bullshit:
providing national banks with liquidity to continue issuing loans with interest primarily insures their profitability, not the functioning of the larger economy.
I am sure that this arrangements benefits for the rentier was not an accident. Nor has Wall Street’s response to it been.
Maybe we should expect the House to do their actual job instead of ceding leverage by making everything be done by unanimous consent. I know handing veto power of house bills to R’s seems like the way to go, but maybe the Dems should try leading. Of course, their ‘message bill’ they knew didn’t have a prayer of passing bails out K Street so it doesn’t exactly instill confidence.
Giving banks unlimited money at zero interest has always struck me as a poor way to save people who suddenly cannot afford their mortgage payments. It only saved the big players 10 years ago and it is not going to go any differently this time.
The robbery has begun. There is a podcast called “Revealed”, and they recently re-ran a show on how players like Mnuchin and Tom Barrack (Trump’s inauguration buddy and real estate billionaire) made out like billionaire bandits in the last financial crisis. One of the chief architects of our current bailout is the guy who earned the name The Foreclosure King during our last financial crisis. It is an excellent show and I would recommend it highly with the caveat that if you have high blood pressure or anger management issues you probably shouldn’t listen.
It’s amazing how few people with actual platforms are discussing how fucked the economy actually is right now. Reopening is the worst remedy, because we’ll get a massive spread while businesses lose money since no one will be at full capacity.
It’s amazing how shit our country is. In 2008, we failed miserably to solve a simple economic problem. People didn’t have money. Everything else was the same, but suddenly all the bills were due and no one had money. The answer was obvious. Nothing had changed. Supply and Demand were the same as ever. But we decided to shoot ourselves anyway and determined that the only people entitled to free money to solve their problems were the super rich. That stabilized the market, so congrats Mission Accomplished. Ignore all the unnecessary suffering from the plebs.
This time is going to be so much worse. Things are not the same. We again have the problem of people not having money, but now just giving them some won’t solve anything either. There is going to be significantly less demand for a ridiculous swath of industries. No one has a plan for it. There is a less than 0 chance this country gets through this without massive, massive suffering. They’re already talking about no more bail outs. Lol. Markets stabilize from a sugar high and these idiots already think they’ve won. We are so fucked.
I wish I could pull this up,yesterday Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC answered a question I had been wondering
about Wall Street and how the suffering in the country for the most part Wall Street is posting gains,She broke it all down very interesting.
I’ve been railing about this for weeks now… it isn’t just the GOP shoveling money to ‘save businesses’ of any size… it’s just fucking backwards… if they actually believed in less taxes and market Capitalism they give the money back to US and let US decide which businesses succeed or fail based on OUR market choices… Government should not be picking the winners/losers by deciding which ‘businesses’ get money… and DEMOCRATS are not innocent in this because they keep acquiescing to Republican demands…
and on another note… there is no fucking way churches or ‘religious’ organizations should receive tax payer funds when the grifters don’t pay taxes themselves💀
The Covid lockdown experience along with the protests against it are bringing into sharp focus the difference in basic outlook between the right and left. The right considers that labor should be as cheap and disposable as possible. The right therefore manufactures “values” based on the “freedom” to work to support your life. According to them your work is your freedom. By extension I can see how this same outlook supported the institution of slavery for so long.
But if the Fed’s slush fund money was really intended for Main Street businesses and the states and municipalities that support them, why didn’t the Trump administration just send it directly to these groups?
Because of top-down economics. The Republican Party believes in a New World Order, in which a few individuals control corporate entities that override national borders and local laws.
Limbaugh stated it openly: only rich people know what to do with money. Money in the hands of anyone else is a waste.
“Arbeit Macht Frei” - Nazi Germany, and the GOP, apparently.
Great point.
Joe Biden? Nah…
Joe’s their best friend. He’s going to make so much money for them, they won’t believe it. They’ll say, “Stop, Joe! We don’t know what to do with all this money.” Why, Joe Biden could completely destroy the global economy and not lose a single vote.
Hey, it worked before.
I’m hoping not.
Secretary Mnuchin was intimately involved in the negotiation process. Reportedly, he spent so much time with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer that by the end, they playfully referred to each other as “Chuck and Steven.”
So they referred to each other by the names they generally use?
The Finnish term for CEOs that can fail repeatedly but still keep getting good gigs in the private sector, or worst case, a plum appointment in some non-critical public agency, is the reverse of the “glass ceiling”, i.e. the “glass floor”. Try as they might, they continue to lurk in high positions even as their incompetence is evident. I guess this is some subset of moral hazard, once you are made others pay for your messes. For a while, fickle upper management in Silicon Valley was known for moving on after short stints of 1.5 to 2 years and leaving before their messes were discovered. In many US companies, a failed CEO is sometimes retired to the board where he can be watched and kept quiet in the event of malfeasance.
If they allow Trump to rewrite history, small businesses will continue to lose out to large corporations that will claim an even larger stake in the economy.
The only thing small businesses are good for are filing “failure-to-pay” claims again real businessmen. If the SBA would organize a few rallies for the President, this situation can change.