TPS

Oh crap! If that's the criteria, then I'm going to be quarantined... Been down on the Yucatan since Wednesday. No cases reported here yet, but each day more restrictions. Working at a Uni, and they cancelled all classes as of yesterday. Today people are wearing masks. Was supposed to stay until Sunday, but will return Thursday. The colleague I have been working with has a cold, and I'm starting to get the sniffles....crap...

I know it's only the IMF and not some right-wing radio blowhard, but.... Worst recession since the great depression

You must be one of the 47% if you think what's happened over the past two years is anything like those mentioned above. In the US alone, over the past 14 months, more than $12 trillion has been used to prevent a depression. The sum of the real costs from all those things you mention doesn't even come close to that.

You are also insinuating that the crisis is/was overblown.

Do you know how much has been spent/committed from the Fed/Treasury/and fiscal stimuli, and how much of it Obama is responsible for? Uhhh...yeah, the crisis was a little exaggerated, only somewhere in the neighborhood of $12 trillion over the past 14 months...

Oh, I didn't realize that government "spending" a few trillion dollars to bailout the financial sector was part of the rules of capitalism. I feel stronger already.

A former IMF economist draws parallels from crises with emerging market economies to the US. The essential point: it doesn't matter if it's Paulson-Bush or Geithner-Obama, financial interests still win out over public interests. The financial oligarchs

This is what people find objectionable?

maybe you didn't understand my last sentence which states my position, not the government's.

The government, meaning Paulson and a few democrats and republicans crafted a plan to save their buddies; not once, but three times. "The government" decided to make all of AIG parties whole, while countless other investors have taken losses. Why? Because it's a corrupt system, but there is honor among theives. Besides, contracts are renegotiated all the time. With enough public pressure, I am sure those 73 guys at AIG financial will find it in their hearts to accept a renegotiation...

No. People are advocating not using taxpayer bailout money to pay bonuses. The auto workers were asked to renegotiate contracts, why not those who actually lost the money? Sorry, when they took the money, all bets and contracts were off. Despite that whore Dodd allowing it in the agreement. When someone takes $100,000 in contributions from a firm like AIG, he has no business being in the negotiation. It's also been nice for the likes of GSachs to get paid in full from taxpayer money too as a counterparty to AIG. There is no risk when you are connected. Nice work Hank!

How is "superior" defined? Average level of health or more specialists who can treat those who can afford to pay? I'll have to remember this argument too: one data point to make a generalization.

There is a lot of blame to pass around, and a lot of people ought to be investigated. It is important to go after those who created this mess, and who walked away from it with millions. As usual, there will be a poster boy (Madoff) who gets thrown to the media wolves. Financial manipulation and fraud will never end until some more drastic penalties are enacted. Maybe the death penalty is a bit severe, but I think it's time to end limited liability. E.g. Cassano's assets should be fair game for investors trying to recoup losses...

The stock market has increased 623 points in the past 3 days because of Obama!* * Note: this logic is based on similar logic by posters here blaming Obama for any decreases.

C'mon, he thinks he's rush limbaugh now. He's just happy people are responding.

Is this some kind of assinine reference to your hero Limbaugh? Gee, you got me there RKKKfast.

Only an ignorant A$$ would post something like this.

Sully is creaming his corduroys on this one. He's the guy who loves pushing players' buttons. He's thinking it's national spot light time for himself the first time he gets TO to rant...

I never said you didn't believe in regulation, as I recall we had a brief agreement about capital standards. Just as I am not saying that deregulation was the only cause, but there were ample opportunities for the government to prevent this from turning into the worst crisis in history--Wall Street's contributions and lobbyists ensured it did though. Maybe you can expand on the first part. Seems like a sweeping "I am right and everyone else is wrong" statement. That is, you say everything without saying anything. Capital standards were a consequence of the international debt crisis, not some kumbaya agreement by banks saying please regulate us with consistent standards. Hmmm...how does a perfect regulatory system have a flaw? That's just a dumb statement. CDSs were fine in their original context of insuring debt, but spun out of control when you no longer insured the underlying security. The market got totally abused because it was unregulated. I don't deny there were many factors. And I believe there still would've been a recession with regulation--regulations have never stopped fraud, speculation, and financial crises; but they can restrain fraud and speculation, and therefore dampen the severity of any crisis. Warnings began in 2004, but Wall Street paid to ensure the party continued.

Given that I am a "Minskyite," I understand the relationship between regulation and financial innovation. Financial innovations are often a consequence of regulation. That doesn't mean you don't junk regulation and let finance rein free, because this is the result--speculation and crisis. The more "paper" finance creates, the more profits. In essence, Minsky's explanation for why capitalism is inherently unstable is because the growth of debt outpaces the ability to pay it (income growth). And regulators face a constant game of trying to keep pace with the innovation. As the report indicates, finance paid to make sure new products didn't get regulated. This crisis is really a case of "finance gone wild." How much are we going to have to sink into AIG because of little or no capital backing the cds its unit wrote? What would you do if you were king? Do you truly believe the markets can police themselves? On a side note to our longstanding argument about tax cuts and revenues, it's now clear to me why there was the blip in revenues that you thought would eventually create a federal budget surplus (but didn't): finance accounted for 30% of all profits in 2007, generated by the fenzy of fraud and manipulation. The financial units of companies like AIG and Lehman that created and sold the slew of financial acronyms "earned" hundreds of millions in compensation. IT really was a bubble created by fraud and manipulation. Mortgage and other asset backed securities sliced and diced then fraudulently rated AAA and sold to the rest of the world (and you asked how Britain and the rest of the world got into trouble...jeesh!). Once they ran out of "crap mortgages" to back cdos they created them out of "thin air" with synthetics. Billions in profits, and therefore taxes, were generated, but it was all a mirage. This has been one of the greatest con games ever, and we suckers are fine with continuing to dump trillions into "saving" it.

9:30?!? Cocktails start much earlier; that's when I get home and back to a computer...

It's not about "depression era laws," it's about regulating the financial sector instead of letting it push bubbles to their ultimate limit. Wall Street paid to dismantle old regulations and fought any new ones. And even you have to understand how junk securities sold here infected the rest of the world, dumb enough to believe a self-regulated Wall Street and self-interested ratings agences. Care to take a guess why Canadian banks aren't in the same mess as American ones?

While the usual apologists won't agree, this article (for me) pretty much sums up how the political system works and why we are in this mess. To be clear, the process of dismantling financial regulations has gone on since 1980, so it's not a partisan issue, as the article also states. While there are a lot of other factors that have contributed, it really is the case of "finance run amok." USA Inc.

Oh christ! And the supply side miracle of Bush's tax cuts saved us from economic ruin. Gee ma, look at all that capital formation we created, and all those taxes it genereated from the speculeration, manipuleration, err...investments that all those geniuses on Wall Street made...

Does this mean you right wing nuts will stop blaming Carter for the Recession that happended AFTER Reagan got elected? !@#$ing hypocrits!