Hood, "He inherited the most screwed up mess imaginable."
But he's making it worse. Every time he announces some new plan, it is not well received by the markets. He's going in the wrong directions as Wall Street is telling us.
Look, you can't stimulate the real estate market by repealing the mortgage interest deduction. You can't stimulate small business, the greatest employer in the land, by raising their income taxes. And you can't stimulate Wall Street by increasing social spending, and capital gains taxes.
Beyond all of that, what's preventing us from going back to "mark to value" accounting? After all, it was "mark to market" that created the S&L crisis of the 80's, and it is "mark to market" accounting that is killing the banks now. There really is no larger direct cause to this crisis than mark to market, although banks and securities firms were certainly reckless (and their behavior might have generated the same result at some point anyway).
BTW, there is a theory that this crisis is the unintended result of the Fed and Treasury colluding with big banks to short sell gold, oil, gas and a couple of other commodities to drive down energy prices last summer. According to the theory, this is what set off this crisis by causing hedge funds to sell anything and everything to meeting margin calls as commodities crashed.
O.k., I've rambled enough. |
