Posted on 04/07/2010 5:53:20 PM PDT by dangthis
"At today’s Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission hearing, Brooksley Born, the former head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, declared Alan Greenspan’s tenure at the Federal Reserve an unmitigated failure – to his face. Greenspan accords a certain degree of respect on Capitol Hill, despite Born’s accurate take on his many failures, and so this outburst was highly unusual – and gratifying.
Born, who pushed to strictly regulate derivatives under the Clinton Administration, but lost the battle to, among other people, Alan Greenspan, told the former Federal Reserve chair that his agency “failed to prevent housing bubble, failed to prevent the predatory lending scandal, failed to prevent the activities that would bring the financial system to the verge of collapse.”
“You failed to prevent many of our banks from consolidating and growing to a size that are now too big or too interconnected to fail,” Born added. She added that Greenspan’s views on deregulation, which he took as an article of faith, contributed to the Federal Reserve’s failure in delivering on its mandate."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.firedoglake.com ...
When you agree with them, I’ll point and laugh. Sorry if that hurts your feelings.
Sarcasm was unnessary. I had originally come here looking for answers. But OK.
“OK, so the Russian economy is so divested from the world markets that crashing them would be beneficial to Russia. Perhaps pay back for the cold war was the goal?”
Putin is a wonderful and practical guy, I agree. He’s all business. Not a warlike bone in his body. I’m glad that Obama is making a nuclear deal with him. /s
I never said that Bush was “in on it”. Nice try.
“Where was the news coverage of the Russian financial attack?”
You trust the Alphabet channels that much? You need a talking head to help you listen?
“Something is fishy about this theory.”
I’ll tell you what was fishy — this entire meltdown. Fishy from the word “go”, right before the election. I agree we made ourselves vulnerable, but to think that foreign powers would not be tempted to neuter us with a leftist president? I think its quite possible that Putin is thinking long term.
This thread is not about Sputnik has a Visa Card with his face on it. "Don't leave home without it." You are off topic with your KOOK theory.
"Nutty as it sounds, Russia was behind the orchestrated meltdown that led to Obama’s rise — no joke."
Unbelievable. Having another jack ass liberal wimpBoy as the leader of the free world is just what Putin wanted? That deserves sarcasm. Just don't take it personally. Please explain how an already melting down situation, kicked by Putin, elects Obama. I really want to hear how that worked.
McCain was the GOP leader. A meltdown hurt the GOP. Economics is the largest factor in every election since the Gread Depression. So now Putin is watching us lose in power and prestige while he ascends.
I can understand your irritation about a thread appearing to shift topic to something of greater importance. But it’s getting a lot of bumps. So Paulson is also a a kook conspiracy theorist?
I guess Putin was feckless too. His great plan gave us Sarah Palin and the Tea Party rallies. So I owe it all to Putin and his leadership in knowing, down the road, that Americans would need to flush this liberal theoretical experiment with national socialism down the toilette. All this time I was sure it was just Saul Alinsky.
Lets go at this from what China had to lose:
http://worldcurrencywatch.com/2010/03/30/the-china-story-no-one-is-telling/
“Who or what really caused the global crisis? Was it Alan Greenspan? Henry Paulson? Greedy bankers? Crooked mortgage brokers? Lack of regulation?
Certainly all of them played some role in the financial meltdown. But there’s a name missing on that list: China.
For years, the symbiotic relationship between China and the U.S. worked just fine.
As an exporter economy, the Chinese bought U.S. Treasuries to keep its currency depressed and exports cheap. Meanwhile, American consumers showed an endless appetite for inexpensive Chinese products.
It looked like a win-win situation. While U.S. depended on China for financing, the Chinese economy depended on American overconsumption. Beautiful scheme!
But this relationship had very ugly unintended consequences. Unfortunately, it took a complete collapse of the global financial market to expose the major flaws of that relationship.”
So China decided to cut their own throats? Now Paulson makes sense to me. It was not an attempt to elect a dildo. It was a run on the bank. Perhaps it did happen on that day one. Go figure. People try to attribute meaning to why things happen and they often get it wrong. China was just acting in their own interest.
China was approached, but they declined, in this report:
Paulson claims Russia tried to foment Fannie-Freddie crisis
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2440456/posts
“The Chinese had declined to go along with the disruptive scheme, but the report was deeply troubling,” [former US Treasury secretary Hank Paulson] said. A senior Russian official told the Financial Times that he could not comment on the allegation.
There’s still this obvious problem with the story. It didn’t work. It didn’t get Obama elected either. What got Berry elected was hatred of George Bush, the war on terror, and the fact that George Bush was not a communist. “Yes We Can.” People had pushed all the buttons on how conservatives were wrong, capitalism was wrong, and this new Messiah was going to bring about change. So we went from Republicans spending money like drunken sailors to Democrats spending money like drunken sailors on LSD.
The point is that Democrats have the most against them for the meltdown. They stood in the way, they encouraged it the most, and they attempted to demonize the opposition the most with it.
Here is what made the meltdown the worst. The subprime loans. Anything could have kicked this over the edge. You want it to be Russians that wanted Obama elected. The market had multiple triggers all cocked and ready to fire. The Russians did it first is just another red herring.
OK, I’ll try to let you have the last word, FRiend [not that I’m in agreement].
“So we went from Republicans spending money like drunken sailors to Democrats spending money like drunken sailors on LSD.”
Hahahah! Got that right!
Getting back to your topic, guess who else is talking about this? DU.
Brooksley Born Excoriates Alan Greenspan: “You Failed” ...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8107101
Brooksley Born was silenced in 1997 for her warning. ...
OK, I was raised in a family that could make sailors blush. I can handle it. BRB ...
The DU thread of this topic:
Post 1
Brooksley Born Excoriates Alan Greenspan: “You Failed”
midnight (1000+ posts) Wed Apr-07-10 01:46 PM
Original message
Brooksley Born Excoriates Alan Greenspan: “You Failed”
Source: FDL
“You failed to prevent many of our banks from consolidating and growing to a size that are now too big or too interconnected to fail,” Born added. She added that Greenspan’s views on deregulation, which he took as an article of faith, contributed to the Federal Reserve’s failure in delivering on its mandate.
Looking as angry as he could at his advanced age, Greenspan replied, “The flaw in the system I acknowledged was an ability to fully understand the state of potential risks that were fully untested… That means we were under-capitalizing the banking system for 40 or 50 years.”
He then pivoted to a defense of his work, using an innocent bystander argument. “I don’t have the discretion to use my own ideology to affect my judgments on what Congress did. If somebody asked my view on a particular subject, I would give it to them. But I ran my office as required by law… I fundamenally disagree with your perspective.”
This is frankly ridiculous. Alan Greenspan was known during his days at the Fed as “The Oracle.” Every word of his moved the markets and moved politicians. His viewpoints absolutely contributed to the deregulation of the financial sector. He also had lots of broad discretion while at the Fed to deal with the housing bubble. Instead he hyped it.
If anyone was watching this but me and the WSJ, they would have seen a cornered rat. Born nailed Greenspan – although, given the relative lack of interest in the FCIC, the benefit to that will be merely psychic in nature.
[continuing]
More from the Democrat Underground. Not my words — just quotes ....
6. Legal fraud. They were all advocates of legalized fraud. That’s what they wanted and that’s what they got, with regard to deregulation.
16. You have to read about that dope head b*** [Ayn Rand] to really see what an non event her life and writings really were. Conservatives have her, Reagan (f—ing r-word idiot), “w” (what more needs to be said about him) and that’s about it. I mean you have the conservative “intellectuals” like George (I love baseball) Will and Newt (do as I say, not as I do) Gingrich and I think that’s about all.
15. F— Ayn Rand, stupid, sexually perverted, f—ing speed freak b—.
3. Honestly, does Greenspan even care? I don’t believe he was stupid, but he did gamble. But not with his money, schmuck.
5. I think your right on about him not caring.
26. he got his golden parachute. nt
7. Brooksley Born was a hero, she certainly can speak about this as she tried to stop them, Greenspan included, and Obama’s current team of deregulators, from doing what they were doing. For her trouble, they aligned themselves against her and had her removed ~ we owe the Clinton administration another thank you for that.
I don’t buy that Greenspan didn’t know what he was doing. He was working for Wall St. I remember I used to wonder who or what this guy was with the briefcase, who never seemed to go away no matter who was president. And why so many people seemed to think that what he had to say was important.
The media never interviews people like Brooksley Born who is a financial genius and she knew what they were up to.
There is a PBS or Frontline video of her story online, it explains everything about how they destroyed this country’s economy and how she tried to stop them.
9. Actually it is the opposite. His Randian personal ideology is what got the country into trouble, not the legal regulations.
30. because her ideology was anti-regulation.
10. greenie, who wailed that the surplus was going to completely pay off the entire national debt. so we needed to hurry, hurry, and cut taxes for the rich A LOT before the government has SO MUCH MONEY THEY CAN’T FIGURE OUT WHAT TO DO WITH IT ALL! so of course they cut taxes before we barely make a dent in the debt, and unsurprisingly, the debt is now far bigger than ever.
the ultimate irony is that the scenario greenie so much wanted to avoid was the government holding equity in private companies because there was no other place to park all that extra loot. so when the financial sector crumbled, what did the fed do?
why, buy up equity in private companies, of course.
11. Truth to Power and yet look what happened to her career when she spoke up... No good deed goes unpunished I guess.
12. ‘The Warning’ Anyone who hasn’t seen this video from Frontline should watch it. Greenspan, Rubin and Summers played a direct role in the collapse of the economy. Brooksley Born tried to stop them but she was driven out of her job and viewed as causing trouble.
Born’s battle behind closed doors was epic, Kirk finds. The members of the President’s Working Group vehemently opposed regulation — especially when proposed by a Washington outsider like Born.
“I walk into Brooksley’s office one day; the blood has drained from her face,” says Michael Greenberger, a former top official at the CFTC who worked closely with Born. “She’s hanging up the telephone; she says to me: ‘That was Larry Summers. He says, “You’re going to cause the worst financial crisis since the end of World War II.”... 13 bankers in his office who informed him of this. Stop, right away. No more.’”
Greenspan, Rubin and Summers ultimately prevailed on Congress to stop Born and limit future regulation of derivatives. “Born faced a formidable struggle pushing for regulation at a time when the stock market was booming,” Kirk says. “Alan Greenspan was the maestro, and both parties in Washington were united in a belief that the markets would take care of themselves.”
Now, with many of the same men who shut down Born in key positions in the Obama administration, The Warning reveals the complicated politics that led to this crisis and what it may say about current attempts to prevent the next one.
“It’ll happen again if we don’t take the appropriate steps,” Born warns. “There will be significant financial downturns and disasters attributed to this regulatory gap over and over until we learn from experience.”
They cover for each other. Greenspan is pretending that he was just mistaken. But this video shows how unwilling any of them were to even to listen to a voice of reason as all of them believed in an unregulated market. Born should have been considered an asset to any administration that really cared about the country’s best interests. Instead, she was driven out of her job, and there was no one else who could stop them.
She was right then, and if she is right now, and there’s no reason not to believe she is considering we have the same people in charge of it all again, we will face more disaster.
[It goes on, but that’s where I left off.]
Oh boy! More idiots who don't know what they're talking about. Why should I care?
“It’ll happen again if we don’t take the appropriate steps,” Born warns. “There will be significant financial downturns and disasters attributed to this regulatory gap over and over until we learn from experience.” I was waiting for one person here to view the Frontline show. Born warns why you should care.
"On Wednesday she tried in vain to get Greenspan to acknowledge that deregulating the markets in 2000 allowed for an explosion of complex insurance-like products called credit-default swaps, which helped spark the collapse and rescue of insurer American International Group. Greenspan said those products weren't an issue at the time of deregulation, but Born reminded him that they became one of the principal causes of the financial meltdown in September 2008. "Are you aware that the collapse of AIG was caused by its commitments under credit-default swaps that it had issued? The taxpayer has had to bail out AIG because of its exposure to credit-default swaps to the tune of more than $180 billion," she told Greenspan. At the end of the bitter exchange, Greenspan told Born, "I really fundamentally disagree with your point of view."
“It’ll happen again if we don’t take the appropriate steps,”
Didn't we take the appropriate steps when Clinton limited executive pay? When Sarbanes-Oxley was passed? What could ever go wrong once Congress fixed things?
“There will be significant financial downturns and disasters attributed to this regulatory gap over and over until we learn from experience.”
All we need is a few more regulations. Nothing will ever go wrong again.
I thought the principal cause was the drop in housing prices?
Did you watch the Frontline show?
"I thought the principal cause was the drop in housing prices?"
The principle cause was subprime mortgages, that led to foreclosures, that then led to triggering action to those that provided the credit default swaps.
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