According to CBS News,Washington - Vice presidential candidate Joe Biden says today's leaders should take a lesson from the history books and follow fellow Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to a financial crisis.I would have thought the bloggers would be all over this. Have I been reading the wrong blogs?
"When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened,'" Barack Obama's running mate recently told the "CBS Evening News."
Except, Republican Herbert Hoover was in office when the stock market crashed in October 1929. There also was no television at the time; TV wasn't introduced to the public until a decade later, at the 1939 World's Fair.
Lately I've been wondering what happened to Joe Biden. You don't see much about him on television. Now I know why. Maybe he and Sarah should take a very long trip to Afghanistan and let the big boys run for President.
Biden's gaffes have been overshadowed by other events.
ReplyDeleteHe also made one about Obama not supporting "clean coal", which he does.
Had McCain not been such an inept bumbler and hadn't chosen a complete moron as a running mate, maybe this would have made news.
Right now, in the US, the bar for VP is very, very low.
There's no story here. He misspoke and said "television" when he meant "radio." Innocuous enough, just make sure it doesn't happen again, Joe.
ReplyDeleteMind you, he didn't say "President" Roosevelt. FDR was governor of New York at the time, I'm sure he had something to say about the stock market crash.
Jon Stewart let him have it over this the other night.
ReplyDeleteI agree that this is a "no story" but in a different campaign, this "no story" would have made the news.
ReplyDeleteThere are plenty of differences between Biden's gaffes and Palin's complete lack of content. McCain's age makes his VP choice especially relevant. Obama is even younger than me. Biden has plenty of experience and a track record as a senator, Palin only has her looks. Should the president die and the VP have to take over, the differences in policy positions between Obama and Biden are not so wide. Palin is a hard-right theocrat, and McCain used to be more of a pragmatic centrist, although he has been drifting right for several years, presumably for electability purposes.
ReplyDeleteThe "problem" with Joe is that he has the habit of speaking to reporters as if they are real people and without all the pre-prepared canned palaver most politicians regurgitate for the press.
ReplyDeleteThis example is nothing more than a bit of free association that is basically correct (about FDR's approach to the Depression) that Biden did not have a slew of fact checkers work over until all meaning was removed.
Having a politician who is not always guarded in what he says may not be all bad. A world leader with that trait might be another thing.
Bailout Fails, Markets Go Up
ReplyDeleteFor more details, see the "Markets" page: http://mises.org/markets.asp
The market has been working for the last three years to correct for the housing bubble caused by the Federal Reserve. Government intervention over the last year has been an impediment to the correction process. In the absence of these interventions and the promise of even more, the correction process would be much further along and more resources would have been reallocated and the recovery process would already be well underway.
ReplyDeleteHome builder stocks began their correction in late July of 2005 signaling the end of the housing bubble. I knew one local home builder who sold off his inventory of homes and left the industry at this time. By this time I was receiving calls and emails from prospective home buyers asking if they should still buy given what they had read on www.Mises.org
Off course the mortgage broker firms that were hawking all sorts of mortgage "products" were forced out of business long ago. They exited without much fan fair. It was a market correction to a problem brought about by the Federal Reserve. Right before they started their exit the then Vice Chairman of the Fed, Ben Bernanke, said that regulators had looked into the mortgage market and that everything was fine.
More recently, home builders continue to downsize, bad banks are failing, and the financial retrenchment has reached Wall Street. Hedge funds now see their glory days in the past, and once prominent Investment banks that were extremely leveraged have seen their risky schemes come undone. Efforts to bailout and save these firms have only delayed the recovery.
The government schemes known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have also been revealed as irrational. Public-private partnership like this are extremely dangerous and they became the conduit to hiding the risks of the housing bubble. It would have been far better for the government to force them into bankruptcy rather than "conservatorship" which puts the taxpayers at risk and perpetuates their danger to the economy.
Finally, the derivatives markets is coming undone. Once touted as a way to eliminate risk, these "financial products" have been revealed as a dangerous illusion. Hedging strategies are fine and good, but Wall Street used these new methods to take on ever increasing levels of risk, not to mitigate existing risk.
The rush to bailout Wall Street must cease and be reversed or they will bailout American into the next great depression.