Northwest Indiana Discussion

Still haven't figured out that congress spends the money and not the president...eh? No dumbass, it's the Energy Department.

Since-they're-ignoring-Grippo-and-Burner update: Grippo and Burner said Friday they had “never seen” a loan restructuring similar to the restructuring the Energy Department gave to Solyndra LLC’s loan this year. FromAP’s Matthew Daly:
The half-billion dollar loan to Solyndra Inc. was restructured earlier this year so that private investors moved ahead of taxpayers for repayment on part of the loan in case of a default…
The two Treasury officials stopped short of declaring the loan restructuring illegal, as some Republicans allege.
"I can't give you a legal interpretation on that, sir," Burner told Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla.
ABC's Ronnie Greene and Matthew Mosk pick up another choice nugget from Friday's testimony: Treasury staffers (who work for the president) warned Energy staffers (who also work for the president) that they were not following regulation during this summer's refi:
As it scrambled to save the flagship company of the Obama administration's green energy program, the Energy Department ignored repeated warnings from top Treasury Department officials that it was not following guidelines in refinancing Solyndra's half-billion dollar federal loan, a Congressional hearing Friday revealed.
When the DOE refinanced the government's $535 million loan to the California solar panel manufacturer in February, it agreed to let investors, including a major Obama fundraiser, stand in line before the public to recoup the first $75 million of their investment should the company fail. Solyndra declared bankruptcy six weeks ago.

Try reading this again:
In this case, it appears that traders at Barclays and possibly other banks manipulated a key interest rate between 2005 and 2009...

But starting in Sept. 2008, there was a sharp divergence. The Fed continued to cut its own rates, as the financial crisis intensified. But Libor rates skyrocketed. That indicated that banks were suddenly very nervous about getting back any money they lent out, even to other banks.

Obama was sworn in in 2009. What's your point, Dwight?... that it all happened when shitforbrains was in office?
Here ya go genius:
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-wall ... als-2012-7

But the other scandal is even worse. It involves a more general practice, starting around 2005 and continuing until – who knows? it might still be going on — to rig the Libor in whatever way necessary to assure the banks’ bets on derivatives would be profitable.

The alternative is to be unflagging and unflinching in our demand that Glass-Steagall be reinstituted and the biggest banks be broken up. The question is whether the unfolding Libor scandal will provide enough ammunition and energy to finally get the job done.

Now go ahead and tell us all how the brilliant Larry Summers who intially was on Obama's staff dismantled Glass-Steagall and never brought it back under your boy.

GOP: ‘Deregulate Wall Street!’

by Ezra Klein

In recent days, more than 900 cities have hosted protests under the Occupy Wall Street banner. But the enthusiasm for intervening in Goldman Sachs’s affairs hasn’t trickled up to the GOP presidential campaign. There, the candidates want to leave Wall Street alone. And this isn’t just a passive disinterest in the finance sector’s affairs. They want to deregulate -- actively and aggressively.

"I introduced the bill to repeal Dodd-Frank,” bragged Rep. Rep. Michele Bachmann at last week’s Bloomberg/Washington Post debate. It’s true. Her bill is H.R. 87. It repeals the law in 67 words. It says nothing about any replacement. If it passed, Wall Street would be operating inside the exact same regulatory structure it had in the run-up to the crash...
...So three years after the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the consensus in the Republican Primary is that we should deregulate Wall Street not just to where it was before the bubble burst, but to somewhere nearer to where it was before Enron crashed.

Bernie Goldberg: Media Will
Ignore Obama's Five Major
Broken Promises
Newsbusters, by Matt Vespa

The liberal media will make sure to go through the motions and occasionally hit President Obama with some critical points, but they will hold their fire when it comes to addressing five major unfulfilled campaign promises, former CBS reporter and media critic Bernie Goldberg told Fox News's Bill O'Reilly last night.

Given that the latest jobs report shows the second quarter of 2012 was the worst for job creation in two years, the media must and will criticize the president to some degree on the economy, but they will mostly resort to childishly mocking Mitt Romney's campaign gaffes and doing all they can to avoid making this November a referendum on the president's performance. Here's the relevant transcript:

BERNARD GOLDBERG: But they [liberal media] do it. They do it.

Look, can I give you another -- you like facts. Let me give you another example. There's a

piece in the current edition of The Weekly Standard by a very smart fellow named Pete Wehner, who's on FOX from time to time. I'm going to just give you five facts. Just five.

Fact No. 1, as a candidate, Barack Obama promised to create five million new energy jobs alone. Just 5 million energy jobs.

Fact No. 2, he claimed that, by the end of the first term, his healthcare plan, would quote, "bring down premiums by $2,500 for the typical family."

Fact No. 3, he guaranteed that his financial rescue plan would help stop foreclosures.

Fact No. 4, in the first year of his presidency, he pledged, quote, "to cut the deficit we inherited in the half by the end of my first term in office."

Fact No. 5, he said he would, quote, "lift two million Americans from poverty" and, quote, "jolt our economy back to life."


Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/matt-vespa ... z20LnYPK7J

Wrong again Dwight.
The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 dismantled Glass-Steagall, dumbfuk.
Summers was the director of the NEC, laws like Glass-Steagall are passed by Congress, moron.
It's your party that wants more DEREGULATION of Wall Street.

https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/10/18-5

Imbeciles like Dwight vote republican, go figure.

Further proof that conservatives are the most stupid creatures on the planet.

Advocate of Financial Deregulation
Between 1992 and 2001, Summers held various positions in the US Treasury Department, including that of Treasury Secretary from 1999 to 2001.[2] Summers has described the 1990’s as a time when “important steps” were taken to achieve “deregulation in key sectors of the economy” such as financial services. He has also said that during this period government officials and private financial interests collaborated in a spirit of cooperation “to provide the right framework for our financial industry to thrive.” [3] Summers recommended before he left the Treasury Department that removing policies that “artificially constrict the size of markets” should remain a priority for the US government.[4]
Along with Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan, Summers brought about elimination of key US financial regulations including the Glass-Steagall Act. He was particularly aggressive in his efforts to block regulations of derivatives, regulations that might have prevented the economic meltdown the US suffered in 2008. According to economist Dean Baker, "The policies he promoted as Treasury Secretary and in his subsequent writings led to the economic disaster that we now face." [5]
Support for Repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act
When he was Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers advocated repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act[6], which was a target of the financial industry. In their report - “Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America” - Robert Weissman and Harry Rosenfeld identified the repeal of this legislation as one of the main causes of the 2008 financial crisis. According to Weissman and Rosenfeld, “The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 formally repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 (also known as the Banking Act of 1933) and related laws, which prohibited commercial banks from offering investment banking and insurance services…The 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall helped create the conditions in which banks invested monies from checking and savings accounts into creative financial instruments such as mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps, investment gambles that rocked the financial markets in 2008.” [7]
Summers worked for Congressional approval of the Financial Services Modernization Act, sponsored by Republicans Phil Gramm, Jim Leach and Thomas Bliley. This Act eliminated provisions in the Glass-Steagall Act that prohibited banks from affiliating with securities firms. It also repealed provisions in the Bank Holding Company Act that prevented banks from underwriting insurance. Arianna Huffington points out that the Financial Services Modernization Act “created an oversight disaster, with supervision of banking conglomerates split among a host of different government agencies -- agencies that often failed to let each other know what they were doing and what they were uncovering.” [8]
Summers has promoted financial deregulation as a form of modernization, rather than a return to the lack of government oversight and instability of the pre-Depression era. In 1999, Summers claimed the Financial Services Modernization Act would create a financial regulatory system “for the 21st century” and “promote stability in our financial system.” [9] However, Democrat Senator Byron Dorgan warned at the time “I think we will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have done this, but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930s is true in 2010. We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness.” [10]
Summers argued for elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act by saying it imposed “archaic financial restrictions.”[11] He said that the US government “must allow competition to work” and that meant “allowing common ownership of banking, securities and insurance firms.” Summers insisted that US financial organizations must have the ability to choose “the structure that is right for them” and to offer “a full range of products.” In Summers’ view, the Financial Services Modernization Act that repealed Glass-Steagall struck the right balance between giving financial institutions more flexibility and protecting US taxpayers. [12]
Summers cast the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act as a victory for the international competitiveness of US financial firms and for US consumers: “If it can be done without compromising other critical objectives, repeal of the common ownership restrictions of current law would be an important boost to our financial system. Our leadership of the world's financial markets would be enhanced. And consumers would see the benefits in the form of greater innovation and lower prices.” [13]
However, the financial innovation that followed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act has been criticized for its damaging effects on the US economy and US taxpayers. In their report proposing financial regulatory reform, the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program observed that “Creativity and innovation are too often channeled into circumventing regulation and exploiting loopholes.” The Panel’s report notes how after the introduction of key financial regulations during the Depression - including the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act that Summers helped to repeal - the US had enjoyed a long period of high economic growth that was also free of major financial crises. [14]

Congressional Budget Office defends stimulus
By Lori Montgomery, Published: June 6
Did the stimulus work?

Certainly not according to Republicans, who regularly blast President Obama’s “failed” economic policies on the campaign trail. GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has called the $787 billion package of temporary tax cuts and spending hikes “the largest one-time careless expenditure of government money in American history.”

But on Wednesday, under questioning from skeptical Republicans, the director of the nonpartisan (and widely respected) Congressional Budget Office was emphatic about the value of the 2009 stimulus. And, he said, the vast majority of economists agree.

In a survey conducted by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, 80 percent of economic experts agreed that, because of the stimulus, the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been otherwise.
“Only 4 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed,” CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf told the House Budget Committee. “That,” he added, “is a distinct minority.”

Elmendorf’s testimony came in response to questions from Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.), a member of the tea party caucus. Huelskamp asserted that the stimulus was a failure because it did not keep the jobless rate below 8 percent, as the Obama administration predicted.

“Where did Washington mess up?” Huelskamp demanded. “Because you’re saying most economists think it should’ve worked. It didn’t.”

Most economists not only think it should have worked; they think it did work, Elmendorf replied. CBO’s own analysis found that the package added as many as 3.3 million jobs to the economy during the second quarter of 2010, and may have prevented the nation from lapsing back into recession.

Look at the evidence: The stimulus worked

August 31, 2011|.[/color]