Hillary Romney
I’m not sure this is a winning position for a Democrat running against Donald Trump in November. Or for a Democrat, period.
As the last sentence of the article I linked to points out.
Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.
If one is a liberal there is only one choice and that’s Burnie. With Burnie we might finally get a AG that will actually prosecute criminal behavior on Wall Street. Not fine them 5% of profits of the criminal behavior. Does any on this blog think Hillary who received six hundred thousand in speaking fees addressing the elite of Wall Street will actually do anything for main street.
If you like what’s going on elect a real republican.
Hillary is for the two great evils:
Wall St and War Mongering.
On to Tehran………… Wall St needs the skim.
“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing – for the sheer fun and joy of it – to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.” – I.F. Stone
It’s better to fail at doing the right thing than succeed at doing the wrong thing.
Thomas Frank offers this instructive example from Harper’s:
https://harpers.org/blog/2016/02/nor-a-lender-be/
Romney as a running mate confirms everything Sanders says she is…and isn’t.
Anyone got more of that speech with the admittedly stupid comment?
Yes, Hillary went too far with her “free everything” remark. But, as she so often does, Beverly has gone too far with her comparing Hillary with Romney on this matter. The big difference is that while Obama in 2012 offered nothing “for free,” so Romney was totally lying, in fact Bernie is offering at least one big item for free, namely tuition at state colleges, although single payer is not a “for free” solution. So, Hillary is only partly lying as opposed to Romney totally lying.
Regarding their respective Wall Street proposals, it is very far from a slam dunk that Bernie’s are superior. I shall attempt to provide two links below. The first is to a Jan. 11 WaPo fact check that gives Hillary two pinocchios for claiming that all experts say her plan is tougher than Bernie’s. What that shows is a pretty serious split among “experts,” with many pretty progressive types supporting hers, but plenty supporting his. The second is a more recent link to a site of hers making her latest proposals and claims. I am not going to get into critiquing of judging either of their proposals beyond noting that hers is not just clearly off the wall weaker and out of bounds, wiht the main critique of her on this issue being the view that she will not follow through because she has taken so much money from Wall Street, which may be true (although it may also not be true, that is, that she will not follow through; there is a long history of people cleaning things up that they benefited from going back at least to that scion of the spoils system, Chester A Arthur cleaning it up by creating the federal civil service system).
Oh, forgot to provide those links, which probably will not work. here is my attempt at them:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checking/wp/2016/01/11/clintons-exaggerated-claim-about-endorsements-for-her-wall-street-plan
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing/fact-checks/2016/02/11/clinton-has-the-toughest-plan-to-take-on-wall-street-and-the-financial-industry
If you want to complain that I have not linked to recent Sanders statements on this, I note that in the first link one can see the pro-Bernie/anti-Hillary arguments made in the reporting on the views of such critics as Dean Baker and the statement signed by Jamie Galbraith and 170 economists supporting Bernie on this issue against Hillary. But probably neither link will work, oh well.
When I just tried the links, second one worked. First one claimed it did not work, but the top alternative offered does work. So readers here shojuld be able to access both of these.
Barkley, back about three weeks ago or so I read a really detailed article that ran through both Clinton’s and Sanders’ finance-industry-reform proposals. The article and that Clinton and Sanders each are partly right about the issue of the extent to which the major banks—or regular banks at all—as opposed to investment banks, hedge funds, and mortgage companies like Countrywide played a role in the financial services collapse in 2008-09. I’ve tried to find the article but haven’t been able to.
But what I remember about it is that it challenged the accuracy of claims by Krugman, among others (although he wasn’t mentioned by name) that among the large banks only Citibank played a significant role. The article listed substantial proprietary investments by several others in mortgage-backed securities.
Krugman’s claim that the regular banks played only a small role in the collapse always struck me as not accurate, because I certainly know of a few—Wachovia, National City, to name two—that other large banks acquired at the urging of the Treasury Dept. in order to stave off the collapse of these banks.
Do you know specifically about this?
On your point that Clinton is only part Romney, not the whole Romney, a point also made in the article I linked to, I agree with that. But I absolutely think that Democrats really need to start accepting that the Republican nominee likely will be Trump, not Rubio (who is an awful hybrid of Grover Norquist and Rick Santorum: “All the answers are in the Bible”, presumably including the answer to the question of whether we should end the capital gains tax and the estate tax).
Rubio, or for that matter Cruz, could be beaten by a monkey. Trump, not so much. See this post of mine: http://angrybearblog.strategydemo.com/2016/02/hillary-clintons-not-very-good-at-math-a-problem-that-a-comfortable-majority-of-nevada-democratic-latino-voters-apparently-recognize.html
In which I linked to this Politico Magazine article from late last week: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/too-big-to-fail-hillary-clinton-213650
You are right that the increase in the size of our largeszt banks was partly aggravated by their taking over failing smaller banks. That said, I am frankly not all that impressed with either of the fin reform proposals put forward by either Clinton or Sanders. They either do not amount to much or they are are misguided and aiming wrong.
In that regard let me remind that the crash came about ultimately due to the crash of the housing bubble. Do either of them address taht? I do not think so. And the really big save by the Fed occurred on the weekend of Sept. 18, 2008, when the Fed bailed out the ECB by swapping to get $600 billion in eurojunk coming from some Europe’s biggest banks that were in danger of failing due to the AIG problem, with their action halting the slide of the euro, with the Fed quietly unloading that stuff within six months replacing it with MBSs (see Neil Irwin’s The Alchemists for an account of this little known but very important fact). I do not see either of them addressing this stuff very much either beyond what is in Dodd-Frank.
Which brings us to the hard reality that unless Bernie really brings a big political revolution, the super-gerrymandered House will remain in GOP hands. This will mean that nearly zero of either of their plans weill be enacted, whether about health care or about financial reform, and they will find themselves like Obama fending off GOP proposals to simply revoke both ACA and Dodd-Frank.
And finally, why are you lecturing me about Trump’s prospects for being the GOP nominee? I have made no forecasts on that and certainly have never said he could not get it, much less that Rubio would get it. Save this stuff for people who are much less hard bottom-lined than I am. You should know better, Beverly.
Barkley:
“And the really big save by the Fed occurred on the weekend of Sept. 18, 2008, when the Fed bailed out the ECB by swapping to get $600 billion in eurojunk coming from some Europe’s biggest banks that were in danger of failing due to the AIG problem, with their action halting the slide of the euro, with the Fed quietly unloading that stuff within six months replacing it with MBSs” Now there is a dimension of the crisis I probably read and it did not register. Amazing and numerous things happened during that slide to the precipice of the abyss.
I agree that neither candidate reaching the White House will have the power to counter the Repub controlled House. Maybe 2020 will cause the states to be redistricted in a manner representing the true politics of the citizens. I live in Michigan which is one state where the Repubs have been in control during each census. The result was obvious.
I missed the lecture. Can you point me to it?
Yeah, that just makes my head swim, run. Including the part about replacing eurojunk with MBS’s. Replacing eurojunk with dollar junk?
Bev:
Some MBSs were not junk.
Run,
Not many people have seen the lecture. A good account is Chapter 11, “A Wall of Money” in Neil Irwin’s The Alchemists. At the time it was decided not to publicize what was done at the request of Trichet at the ECB out of fear that people hearing that the Fed was bailing out the ECB would intensify the crisis at the ECB. After it was all over, nobody bothered to emphasize what was done, although nobody was denying it. It is visible in the public record if one looks at the time pattern of the Fed balance sheet, where one can see “swaps” showing up in the Fed balance sheet, $600 billion worth in September 2008, which then gradually declined to zero over the next six months, although those charts do not spell out what those swaps were (and some were for the central banks of some other nations as well, not just the ECB).
Barkley:
Thanks!
Beverly,
Yes, the US MBSs were (and are) a lot less junky than the euro-stuff that they replaced. If you get your hands on the time pattern of the Fed balance sheet, you can see it as the swaps go down and the MBSs go up almost in tandem over the period October, 2008-April 2009.
Though this book is a fawning about the most undemocratic system in our country the NY Federal Reserve or more commonly called central bankers. As Barkley has pointed out there is some really good information in the book.
“Neil Irwin’s The Alchemists is a gripping account of the most intense exercise in economic crisis management we’ve ever seen, a poker game in which the stakes have run into the trillions of dollars. The book begins in, of all places, Stockholm, Sweden, in the seventeenth century, where central banking had its rocky birth, and then progresses through a brisk but dazzling tutorial on how the central banker came to exert such vast influence over our world, from its troubled beginnings to the Age of Greenspan, bringing the reader into the present with a marvelous handle on how these figures and institutions became what they are – the possessors of extraordinary power over our collective fate. What they chose to do with those powers is the heart of the story Irwin tells.”
The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire