{"id":2410,"date":"2008-09-19T19:06:48","date_gmt":"2008-09-20T00:06:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2008\/09\/19\/2410\/"},"modified":"2008-09-19T22:43:04","modified_gmt":"2008-09-20T03:43:04","slug":"2410","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2008\/09\/19\/2410\/","title":{"rendered":"“days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system”"},"content":{"rendered":"
Congressional Leaders Stunned by Warnings<\/strong><\/a><\/div>\n
\n

It was a room full of people who rarely hold their tongues. But as the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, laid out the potentially devastating ramifications of the financial crisis before congressional leaders on Thursday night, there was a stunned silence at first. Mr. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. had made an urgent and unusual evening visit to Capitol Hill, and they were gathered around a conference table in the offices of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.<\/p>\n

“When you listened to him describe it you gulped," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. As Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, put it Friday morning on the ABC program “Good Morning America,” the congressional leaders were told “that we’re literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system, with all the implications here at home and globally.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mr. Schumer added, “History was sort of hanging over it, like this was a moment.” When Mr. Schumer described the meeting as “somber,” Mr. Dodd cut in. “Somber doesn’t begin to justify the words,” he said. “We have never heard language like this.” “What you heard last evening,” he added, “is one of those rare moments, certainly rare in my experience here, is Democrats and Republicans deciding we need to work together quickly.”<\/p>\n

Although Mr. Schumer, Mr. Dodd and other participants declined to repeat precisely what they were told by Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson, they said the two men described the financial system as effectively bound in a knot that was being pulled tighter and tighter by the day…<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Year to Date:<\/strong> Dow Jones Industrial Average<\/sup><\/div>\n
I’m not a person who has any business talking about financial markets. I’ve never followed with much interest. Yet it’s hard not to be critical of our government for not seeing this coming. – particularly the Mortgage Market. The Bush Administration has spent money like it grows on trees while cutting taxes and decreasing revenues – seemingly indifferent to the consequences. Likewise, the financial institutions have followed suit, playing with credit and loans like it was a game of monopoly with no real consequences. Of course, the specter of deregulation since Ronald Reagan<\/strong><\/font> [the former actor] sits squarely in the center of things.<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

And as for the comments of President Bush<\/strong><\/font> and Presidential Candidate John McCain<\/strong><\/font> about our "fundamentally sound" economy being "resilient." Apparently, that’s not the case [unless things changed a lot in the last 24 hours]! But there can be little doubt that the real culprits here are Alan Greenspan <\/strong><\/font>and Wall Street<\/strong><\/font>, which, left to its own devices collectively played us into a very deep hole. So, we’re entering a period that will either be a depression, or enough like a depression to require a creative and far-reaching set of government interventions to make things right …<\/div>\n
    \n
    Step I<\/strong><\/font>   – End the Iraq War Yesterday
    <\/strong><\/font><\/div>\n
    Step II<\/strong><\/font>  – RE-regulation of financial and energy markets
    <\/strong><\/font><\/div>\n
    Step III<\/strong><\/font> – Roll back the Reagan\/Bush I\/Bush II Tax cuts
    <\/strong><\/font><\/div>\n<\/ul>\n
    … for starters. This is not a job for the current version of the Republican Party<\/strong><\/font>, to state the obvious. Herbert Hoover <\/strong><\/font>created F.D.R.<\/strong><\/font> It looks like Reagan\/BushI\/BushII<\/strong><\/font> have created a space for another version.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Congressional Leaders Stunned by Warnings It was a room full of people who rarely hold their tongues. But as the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, laid out the potentially devastating ramifications of the financial crisis before congressional leaders on Thursday night, there was a stunned silence at first. Mr. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry M. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2410\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}