Tim Geithner personifies a new phenomenon that is sweeping the financial world: intellectual retardation. This is a condition in which an individual’s thinking becomes so sophisticated and so immersed in detail that it becomes incapable of functioning in a sensible manner.
Geithner gave a dazzling display of his brilliant dumbness when he justified paying AIG one-hundred cents on the dollar when the Treasury Department bailed them out after the firm found itself drowning in the credit default swaps (CDS) it couldn’t honor.
Geithner’s justification for this largess?
The government could not unilaterally impose haircuts on creditors, and it would not have been appropriate for the government to pressure counterparties to accept haircuts by threatening to retaliate in some way through its regulatory power.
Now, if a company is “too big to fail,” and if it gets its pecker in a wringer and if my tax dollars go to bailout a bunch of financial retards, then I want some oversight. It’s a simple proposition—if a firm accepts public money then the public sets the terms and conditions.
Another government official spoke of “sophisticated financial institutions.”
It now appears that sophisticated is just another word for stupid.
The only question, now, is who is more sophisticated, finance corporatism or the government. Or, are they so joined at the hip that they are indistinguishable.
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4 comments:
Unfortunately it appears that finance corporations ARE the government. The politicians we see on TV are there just to keep us entertained.
Tony
"Business" has been co-opting government "regulators" since long before the U.S. of A. was even a mere gleam in the eye of the deed-holder. CONvince people they cannot live without money, that nothing worthwhile is even possible without the damned stuff, and it is, to all intents and purposes, "Game-over!"....except for all the "weeping and wailing and gnashing-of-teeth" mentioned earlier.
There is today no easy and painless way to escape the death-grip of the tormentors on the short-hairs of "....your huddled masses." Both hair and hide (and certainly, "There Will Be Blood"), in significant quantities, will be the "price" the domesticated peoples will have to "pay" to get free.
The thing is, as "Mr. Jones" has here remarked often, they're already paying dearly, but getting nothing but more grief and misery for their troubles. The "global" gangsters' aim is to rake-in the last of the lucre at the same moment the last of the livestock becomes permanently "redundant." There's probably a "pool" somewhere for high-rollers willing to put their gelt where there best guess is.
At least it sure looks that way to this old Savage, from deep in Indian Country.
HokaHey!
Perhaps it would be best to simply admit that we have fallen into the bottomless snakepit of Orwellian language: doublespeak, non-language, Daffy-Duck linguistsics. Every word we hear from the likes of Geithner is simply an excuse for saying nothing that matters.
Unity sucks, and the unity between state and business is the suckiest of all.
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