Quote:
Originally Posted by smooth
I think this:
is linked to this:
It seems under this is the tacit acknowledgment that human greed and normal self-interest (making profit) is abrading against the common sense belief that reasonable people would never allow their own greed outstrip their long-term interest of remaining viable.
It's like the racoon who sticks his paw through the hole and grabs the shiny object. But he can't pull his clenched fist back out from the hole without dropping the object...but can't because he's must have the shiny object. Then the hunter comes...
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I was talking not just about the credit crisis though, I was talking about the longer term removal of the only wealth-creating element of any society - those who produce something tangible - and their being decimated at the same time as the monetary system was being raped.
What the middle and lower classes could no longer use cash for, they were being pushed into crazed debts to buy. (Everyone has choices! yeah,go read a marketing book and listen to how brokers rip people off in the small and not-so-small print.)
He knew he was decimating the wealth of those who do not hold significant assets by creating massive inflation (the current 'core inflation' doesn't even include food, fuel or housing... err what's this currency supposed to be facilitating the barter and exchange of? anything important?). He knew about the massive increase in the total amount of debt in the economy up to 2000, he knew what would happen if he slashed interest rates in the early 00's - credit explosion - when really, a corrective paying down of the debt was needed in a protracted, painful recession.
He knew all of this as it was happening, because many economists were tearing out their hair over it - especially as the tax cuts were going through.
(One of them just got a Nobel prize, btw. Another has 2 Nobel prizes, btwbtw.)
He had his opportunity to 'give growth a chance' in the late nineties, and it had to be stopped. The hangover wasn't suffered, he simply went on a bigger, badder and longer bender to cure the pain.
He and his ideological ilk chose this path. He had the figures. He knew what he was doing.
It wasn't innocent.