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To: mishedlo who wrote (107100)	1/22/2010 4:07:41 PM
From: roguedolphin	1 Recommendation Respond to of 116555

Bernanke: Pound Your Senators NOW! by Karl Denninger Posted at 12:14 Friday, January 22. 2010 NOW IS YOUR OPPORTUNITY. GET ON THE PHONE NOW and call your Senators. Tell them: VOTE NO ON BERNANKE OR YOU'RE FIRED; INSTEAD, BRING BACK PAUL VOLCKER! This is Janet Tavakoli's take: What has the financial crisis taught us? Among other things, we should show Bernanke and Geithner, enablers from the previous administration, the door. Paul Volcker is right to ask for a return to Glass-Steagall. It worked until it was eroded over several decades by bank lobbying. Banking and speculative trading activities--even when done for "customers"--don't mix. "Financial innovation" must be limited, since much of it in recent years was the financial equivalent of card cheating. Banks should not be allowed to sponsor hedge funds and private equity funds, and furthermore, they should not be allowed to lend to them through prime brokerage units or other means. Financial institutions must be allowed to fail. Hedge funds require regulation. Malfeasance should be investigated and prosecuted. Credit derivatives should be traded and cleared through exchanges and made transparent. Compensation and financial incentives at banks must change. Bank employees cannot continue to reap huge rewards at no personal risk while shoving risk into the global financial system. President Obama promised us change, and he should seize this opportunity to demand sweeping financial reform. tinyurl.com Support is literally crumbling across the board - and it should. This is not about whether Bernanke "saved the system" - I argue that he did not, in point of fact, in that everything he said wouldn't happen, including the market crash from fall 2008 to spring of 2009, happened anyway even though Congress gave him everything he demanded and more! Further, the only "success" Bernanke's policy has shown is that he blew another asset bubble - this time in stocks where a huge number of issues in the S&P 500 are trading with P/Es over 60 - in clear bubble territory having no relationship of any sort to fundamental value or forward earnings potential. Employment is still in the tank, spending ex-government has not recovered and real-time indicators of forward demand continue to be extremely weak - two years after Bernanke said "he could and would save us." No, the real reason he cannot be reconfirmed is that he has continued to refuse responsibility for anything related to the mess in the first place, and yet Ben Bernanke has the lion's share of individual responsibility for what has happened. He has refused to regulate the banks. He has refused to protect consumers against predatory acts. He has intentionally grown credit aggregates at a rate dramatically faster than GDP over the space of his entire term and in fact influenced Greenspan doing the same, which is the root cause of the last two bubbles and market crashes. He has dogmatically stuck to his doctoral thesis even after it has been proved wrong by the passage of time and the market. He has intentionally concealed the terms of bailouts and handouts that were funneled through the banks on his watch, including but not limited to AIG's bailout that was funneled to Goldman Sachs among others. He has not supported the market - he in fact became the market for Fannie and Freddie securities, putting himself into a box from which he has failed to explain how he will exit (likely because he now realizes he can't!) He has been dead wrong in virtually every public pronouncement related to the economy over the last five years, including his repeated claims that there was no housing bubble, that subprime would be contained, that the economy would avoid a recession and that his monetary policies were "supportive" of sustainable growth in the economy. Not one of those claims from 2003-2007 was in fact true. For all these reasons and more Bernanke cannot be reconfirmed. We need an adult in the room. While there are others who could do the job, Paul Volcker is the obvious choice. He has proved his willingness and ability to take steps unpopular with the banking cartel when it is necessary, despite the heat that reflects back upon him. He understands the need for separation between the subsidized and protected lending function and speculative activity by financial institutions. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, he understands the difference between sound lending and fraudulent asset stripping and value destruction. market-ticker.org!.html ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Show Bernanke and Geithner the Door Janet Tavakoli President, Tavakoli Structured Finance, Inc January 22, 2009 huffingtonpost.com

To: mishedlo who wrote (107100)	1/22/2010 4:35:09 PM
From: John McCarthy	Respond to of 116555

Life is good!

To: mishedlo who wrote (107100)	1/22/2010 9:23:19 PM
From: riversides	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116555

Do the Right Thing,Ladies and gentlemen, the nation is waiting. Stop whining, and do what needs to be done. By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: January 21, 2010 nytimes.com A message to House Democrats: This is your moment of truth. You can do the right thing and pass the Senate health care bill. Or you can look for an easy way out, make excuses and fail the test of history. Tuesday’s Republican victory in the Massachusetts special election means that Democrats can’t send a modified health care bill back to the Senate. That’s a shame because the bill that would have emerged from House-Senate negotiations would have been better than the bill the Senate has already passed. But the Senate bill is much, much better than nothing. And all that has to happen to make it law is for the House to pass the same bill, and send it to President Obama’s desk. Right now, Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, says that she doesn’t have the votes to pass the Senate bill. But there is no good alternative. Some are urging Democrats to scale back their proposals in the hope of gaining Republican support. But anyone who thinks that would work must have spent the past year living on another planet. The fact is that the Senate bill is a centrist document, which moderate Republicans should find entirely acceptable. In fact, it’s very similar to the plan Mitt Romney introduced in Massachusetts just a few years ago. Yet it has faced lock-step opposition from the G.O.P., which is determined to prevent Democrats from achieving any successes. Why would this change now that Republicans think they’re on a roll? Alternatively, some call for breaking the health care plan into pieces so that the Senate can vote the popular pieces into law. But anyone who thinks that would work hasn’t paid attention to the actual policy issues. Think of health care reform as being like a three-legged stool. You would, rightly, ridicule anyone who proposed saving money by leaving off one or two of the legs. Well, those who propose doing only the popular pieces of health care reform deserve the same kind of ridicule. Reform won’t work unless all the essential pieces are in place. Suppose, for example, that Congress took the advice of those who want to ban insurance discrimination on the basis of medical history, and stopped there. What would happen next? The answer, as any health care economist will tell you, is that if Congress didn’t simultaneously require that healthy people buy insurance, there would be a “death spiral”: healthier Americans would choose not to buy insurance, leading to high premiums for those who remain, driving out more people, and so on. And if Congress tried to avoid the death spiral by requiring that healthy Americans buy insurance, it would have to offer financial aid to lower-income families to make that insurance affordable — aid at least as generous as that in the Senate bill. There just isn’t any way to do reform on a smaller scale. So reaching out to Republicans won’t work, and neither will trying to pass only the crowd-pleasing pieces of reform. What about the suggestion that Democrats use reconciliation — the Senate procedure for finalizing budget legislation, which bypasses the filibuster — to enact health reform? That’s a real option, which may become necessary (and could be used to improve the Senate bill after the fact). But reconciliation, which is basically limited to matters of taxing and spending, probably can’t be used to enact many important aspects of reform. In fact, it’s not even clear if it could be used to ban discrimination based on medical history. Finally, some Democrats want to just give up on the whole thing. That would be an act of utter political folly. It wouldn’t protect Democrats from charges that they voted for “socialist” health care — remember, both houses of Congress have already passed reform. All it would do is solidify the public perception of Democrats as hapless and ineffectual. And anyway, politics is supposed to be about achieving something more than your own re-election. America desperately needs health care reform; it would be a betrayal of trust if Democrats fold simply because they hope (wrongly) that this would slightly reduce their losses in the midterm elections. Now, part of Democrats’ problem since Tuesday’s special election has been that they have been waiting in vain for leadership from the White House, where Mr. Obama has conspicuously failed to rise to the occasion. But members of Congress, who were sent to Washington to serve the public, don’t have the right to hide behind the president’s passivity. Bear in mind that the horrors of health insurance — outrageous premiums, coverage denied to those who need it most and dropped when you actually get sick — will get only worse if reform fails, and insurance companies know that they’re off the hook. And voters will blame politicians who, when they had a chance to do something, made excuses instead. Ladies and gentlemen, the nation is waiting. Stop whining, and do what needs to be done.

To: mishedlo who wrote (107100)	1/22/2010 10:46:04 PM
From: ecrire	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116555

And whom would you like to replace him and what Fed policies would you care to change? Raise interest rates? Volcker perhaps for a second go around? Refrain from any further financial intervention?Prolong economic misery indefinitely? This latest Bernanke flap is nothing more than a new found populist theme with senators clambering aboard, not out of conviction, but to be reelected. We need a new form of government. This one doesn't work.