We are at the beginning of a severe recession, depending on what we do as a people and what our government does, it could become another Great Depression. So far the government is not putting the brakes on the recession. In fact they are making things worse. Whether this is by accident or design, I don’t know, but I’m leaning towards the latter, especially what led up to the current situation.
I watched Kevin Phillips on BookTV this morning. He’s the author of Bad Money and this evening I just learned that the bailout oversight people have a website. I’m not sure they have offices yet. I’ll start with my rough notes on one of the oversight people, Elizabeth Warren.
Elizabeth Warren
When I heard Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor and author of the Two Income Trap, was appointed to the $700 billion oversight board I was very excited. She is quite capable of doing the job, but the real question is will she be really allowed to do her job. Elizabeth is honest enough and we’ll know whether or not she’ll be able to give real oversight with her cohorts.
Anyway, the oversight website is up, and she has a video report on Youtube. I learned she was from Tulsa when I read 2IT.
Kevin Phillips
I saw Kevin Phillips on BookTV this morning. It was very depressing. He described Bernanke doing what is equivalent to what the French did after WWI, build the Maginot Line. We saw how well that stopped WWII. He was pimping his new article the Numbers racket over at Harper’s. He did not have kind words for the Democrats nor the Clintons. They were the ones who helped pass Phil Gramm’s deregulation of the futures markets. He had harsher words for the Republicans and that they deserved to be kicked off the bus, but he had the harshest words for the Bushes. Neither father nor son should have been President and that W. had done more damage to this country in his eight years than any other President.
He also said the unemployment numbers are really higher than reported. The reported number is over 6%. The real number is over 12%. In the 90’s the gov’t switched to a what is known as U3 criteria. They used to use U6 criteria. If they counted the number of unemployed by using 70’s standards we’d know the true number. They do not count those who’ve given up looking for work. Also, inflation is much higher than reported. It’s about 7%.
I’d highly recommend paying attention to both of these people and what they have to say.