Piloting The Bailout: Pirates At The Wheel

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has spent his initial allotment of $350 million in bailout funds, and it doesn’t seem as if there has been any impact on the economy.  Banks are still not making loans, businesses large and small have seen revenues decline, Detroit is about to implode, American workers are being layed off, left and right, and everyone is girding for a lean holiday season.

During his testimony before the House Committee on Financial Services yesterday, Secretary Paulson stated:

Recently I’ve been asked two questions. First, Congress gave you the authorities you requested, and the economy has only gotten worse. What went wrong and why won’t you use this authority for other industries? Second, if housing and mortgages are at the root of our economic difficulties, why aren’t you addressing this?

The answer to the first is that the purpose of the financial rescue legislation was to stabilize our financial system and to strengthen it. It is not a panacea for all our economic difficulties. The crisis in our financial system had already spilled over into our economy and hurt it. It will take a while to get lending going and repair our financial system, which is essential to an economic recovery. This won’t happen as fast as any of us would like, but it will happen much, much faster than it would have had we not used the TARP to stabilize our system. Put differently, if Congress had not given us the authority for TARP and the Capital Purchase Program and our financial system had continued to shut down, our economic situation would be far worse today.

The answer to the second question is that the most important thing we can do to mitigate the housing correction and reduce the number of foreclosures is to increase access to lower cost mortgage lending. The actions we have taken to stabilize and strengthen Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and through them to increase the flow of mortgage credit, together with our bank capital program, are powerful actions to promote mortgage lending. We are also working actively to reduce preventable foreclosures.

…We have done what was necessary as facts and conditions in the market and economy have changed, adjusting our strategy to most effectively address the urgent crisis and preserving the flexibility of the President-elect and the new Secretary of the Treasury to address the challenges in the economy and capital markets they will face in the coming months.

According to Secretary Paulson he and his crew have stabilized the situation, they have prevented the dominoes of our financial system from all falling.   Stabilizing the situation does not make the problems in the financial houses go away, it only postpones an ultimate reckoning.  It seems that Secretary Paulson, like his boss, is going to blithely walk-away from the mess, and leave it to the Obama administration to figure out how we (ultimately the taxpayers) will prevent any further hemorrhaging and repair our flawed financial system, and apply preventive measures so there is no recurrence.   Thank you George W. Bush for your leadership as you steered our ship in to these financial shoals, have a nice retirement.

While Secretary Paulson claims the situation has been stabilized, perhaps the secretary and his boss should be required to complete a lessons learned exercise.  Never mind a root cause analysis,  we know what caused the problem, a greedy financial sector aided and abetted by an incompetent, and criminally negligent administration.  To help the secretary and the lame duck with their assignment here are a few lessons they can compile for the next administration and Congress:

1. Do not appoint a pirate to regulate the pirates.
2. Study the legacy regulations, many of which were repealed but which had protected American tax payers for generations and bring  back sensible and necessary regulations on any entity engaging in business in the financial sector.
3. When the financial sector dreams up investment “products” that sound too good to be true (e.g. credit default swaps) release the forensic accounting hounds.
4. Aggressively investigate and prosecute systemic financial fraud, holding senior corporate officers personally accountable for the abuses committed  by their institutions.

In terms of the strategy for managing the disbursement of the remaining $350 million of the bailout fund, we can only hope that the Obama administration and the new Congress exercise due dilligence, and not feel constrained to continue any of the strategies or tactics employed by the current administration.  Just as there is more than one way to “skin a cat” there is more than one way stop and repair the damage done by pirates.

Someone who has a strong opinion on all of this is former Secretary of Labor and current professor at the University of California, Berkely, Robert Reich, who thinks the remaining bailout funds should be focussed on bottom-up spending.

I am no economist, no accountant or financial genius, I am just an American tax payer and soon to be beneficiary (hopefully) of Social Security and as far as I am concerned, I expect my government to prevent piracy on Wall Street, after all there are already plenty pirates out and about, we don’t need it at home too.

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My Newest Hero: Robert Reich

In his blog yesterday the former secretary of labor called out the mainstream media and the political establishment (read McCain and Billary spinmeisters) for criticizing Barak Obama’s recent remarks about the bitterness in the heartland.

I was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, 61 years ago. My father sold $1.98 cotton blouses to blue-collar women and women whose husbands worked in factories. Years later, I was secretary of labor of the United States, and I tried the best I could – which wasn’t nearly good enough – to help reverse one of the most troublesome trends America has faced: The stagnation of middle-class wages and the expansion of povety. Male hourly wages began to drop in the early 1970s, adjusted for inflation. The average man in his 30s is earning less than his father did thirty years ago. Yet America is far richer. Where did the money go? To the top.

Are Americans who have been left behind frustrated? Of course. And their frustrations, their anger and, yes, sometimes their bitterness, have been used since then — by demagogues, by nationalists and xenophobes, by radical conservatives, by political nuts and fanatical fruitcakes – to blame immigrants and foreign traders, to blame blacks and the poor, to blame “liberal elites,” to blame anyone and anything.

Rather than counter all this, the American media have wallowed in it. Some, like Fox News and talk radio, have given the haters and blamers their very own megaphones. The rest have merely “reported on” it. Instead of focusing on how to get Americans good jobs again; instead of admitting too many of our schools are failing and our kids are falling behind their contemporaries in Europe, Japan, and even China; instead of showing why we need a more progressive tax system to finance better schools and access to health care, and green technologies that might create new manufacturing jobs, our national discussion has been mired in the old politics…

Bitter? You ain’t seen nothing yet. And as much as people like Russert, Carville, Matalin, Schrum, and Murphy want to divert our attention from what’s really happening; as much as HRC and McCain seek to make political hay out of choices of words that can be spun cynically by the mindless spinners of the old politics; as much as demagogues on the right and left continue to try to channel the cumulative frustrations of Americans into a politics of resentment – all these attempts will, I hope, prove futile. Eighty percent of Americans know the nation is on the wrong track. The old politics, and the old media that feeds it, are irrelevant now.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I sure don’t trust that McCain or Billary have the best interests of working Americans on their agenda.

It’s nice to see another former member of the Clinton administration demonstrate the character and backbone to stand up and be heard. I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop… Billary lashing out at Professor Reich like they attacked Governor Richardson, another honorable man.

Cross posted from BFD Blog!

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