letsgetitdone

Remember Bill Clinton lying under oath about his relations with Monica Lewinsky?

Ezra Klein did a piece yesterday offering the conventional deficit dove position on deficits and debt. Here’s a commentary on it.

Today I was planning on a post about Quantitative Easing (QE) today, because it seemed to me that it would never work. However, today, Randy Wray beat me to it with another great post, this time at ND20, reviewing the whole situation in detail, placing it in political context, and explaining why it’s very unlikely that it will allow the economy to recover much more than it has already. Here are some key quotes from Randy’s piece.

The latest mortgage foreclosure mess is just another financial crisis.

It’s not a real economic crisis- no houses have been actually destroyed- no fire, hurricane, or earthquake damage, etc.

So the responses aren’t about bulldozers, hammers, concrete pouring, etc.

The question is whether this financial discovery/event spills over into the real economy.

On Friday, the Government reported its 2010 Fiscal Year results. Here are some fragments from a “news” article in WaPo by Vincent Del Giudice.

The U.S. government posted its second straight annual budget deficit in excess of $1 trillion as lingering unemployment constrained tax revenue.

The shortfall totaled $1.294 trillion in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, second only to the $1.416 trillion deficit in 2009, the Treasury Department said today in Washington. . . .

The best short characterization of the current banking/foreclosure mess that now threatens us with another episode of “shock doctrine” capitalism is Randy Wray’s. Here it is:

Chris Matthews’s Hardball featured a segment where Willie Brown, Joan Walsh, and Chris commented on the Brown/Whitman and Blumenthal/McMahon contests for the US Senate in CA and CT. After watching an exchange between the two CT candidates. Chris shook his head in wonderment and in the midst of some contemptuous chuckles said:

Mike Konczal is writing a terrific series on the foreclosure crisis. The other day I read Parts 1-3 of it at New Deal 2.0. I recommend it as providing a very clear explanation with some diagrams about what’s behind the crisis, and a discussion of some possible ways in which could represent big trouble for the broader economy. The Administration is responding to the crisis with noises about its concerns that the big banks might again be damaged and also with its hope that the banks can clear up the foreclosure paperwork problems in a fairly brief time.

Tom Hickey, a frequent and excellent commenter at Warren Mosler’s and Bill Mitchell’s blogs offered this comment to Mike:

Last Sunday, my son asked me what I thought about the WaPo article “Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner tackles five myths about TARP.” Here’s my reply.

There’s a lot of truth to the specifics, but his overall evaluation is way off because he looks at it by cherry-picking specific points, and also restricting his evaluation to the bank situation alone, and assuming that the proper goal was to save the big banks at low cost rather than to save the economy. So here are things the Administration and Geithner could have done if they had ended TARP and taken a different course.

A little while ago I did a piece on tweeting the fear card, and the attempts of certain supporters of the Democrats in this year’s elections to persuade dissatisfied and angry progressives that severe damage will be done to the country if the Republicans take over the House, the implication being that severe damage will not also be done if the Democrats retain control of the House. As the election has approached the fear card is being supplemented by the guilt card.