US inflation unexpectedly increases
US inflation unexpectedly increases
www.bbc.com US inflation unexpectedly increases
US inflation increased by more than expected last month, pushing up the cost of living for Americans.
169 comments
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He also had an affair
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Did he have an affair? I hadn't heard about that... probably wasn't a big deal and people likely didn't blow it out of proportion.
obviously /s
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That's up to him, his wife and his mistress.
I only care about his track record when it applies to the Economy.
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His track record ends in 2000.
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Actions have consequences.
Or do you think the responsibility of a shooter ends when the bullet leaves the barrel of the gun?
For the Economy, repealing Glass-Steagal was the most widely impactful measure taken by politicians in the US since the New Deal and the current situation of a massive property bubble and growing inequality can be traced all the way back to it as a cascade of consequences of that act: the repeal leading to Retail banks going into ultra speculative investing and the overextending of Finance, leading to the 2008 Crash and the need for Government bailouts to save all the bank accounts of common people as the banks that were sinking due to their own speculative investing were (because of there being no Glass-Steagal) taking down retail customer funds with them, leading to the slowest recovery from a Crash ever and ultra low interest rate policy which was supposedly temporary but really wasn't (interest rates are still below the historical average), which in turn pumped up of massive bubbles in housing because of that ultra-cheap money and continuation of speculative investment by Retail banks.
Clinton and the Democrat Congressmen's actions (as I stated elsewhere, fully supported by the Republicans, who if I remember it correctly wanted even more derregulation of Finance) directly led to the present situation of empoverishment of all layers of American society except the top (who have become far richer, the higher they are the more so) and probably also to Trump getting elected because of so many desperate drowning people trying to grab any perceived buoy ended up voting for the biggest scammer of all because he doesn't sound like a mainstream politician.
Whilst I seriously doubt that Trump was the result Clinton expected when he repealed the Glass-Steagal, he was the one who started the chain and before doing so he was definitely warned that removing the main regulatory protection on Finance put in place after the Great Depression to stop a similar Crash and Depression from happening again was going to have nasty consequences.
For the benefit of a few Finance fatcats (for which he got massively rewarded for it with things like millionaire gigs in the speech circuit, as did his wife) Clinton fucked up massively and hundreds of millions now suffer for it, so let's not laud that disgusting sold out politician a great statesman and steady hand steering the Economy.
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Bullet? If anything, a venomous snail or something like that.
The builders of the titanic weren't to blame for the sinking, it was the guy at the Helm at the moment. In my book "some guy 8 (at least) years ago plotted this course" is not a valid excuse for sinking the economy.
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Now that's just a tribalist attempt at excusing "one of your guys" with any excuse you can come up with no matter how illogical.
The speed with which the consequences unfold is irrelevant to responsability, only the awareness that there could be such consequences or lack thereof.
If somebody sets up a factory which releases contaminated water that poisons the region's water table with carcinogenic material resulting after several years in many people there dying of cancer, are those who set up a factory leaking carcinogetic materials not responsible anymore because of the time it took for people to end up dead?
Same thing with tobacco manufacturers once they had the scientific reports that tobacco caused lung cancer. Were they not responsible for continuing to sell their product without warning people of the dangers just because it took decades for the users of their product to die?
Whilst they didn't mean to kill people, they knew it could and went ahead anyway, hence they are responsible - just because it took years and was indirect doesn't reduce the responsability.
There is no doubt whatsoever that the repeal of Glass-Steagal led to the 2008 Crash - it's one of those rare measures where one can show a direct line between that specific piece of deregulation, retail banks engaging in massive speculative investing and them having to be saved as they would have taken depositor's money as they went down: what Glass-Steagal did was exactly to force the banks to keep the retail operations separate from proprietary investment hence with it in place even if the banks had a separate arm doing speculation which failed, depositor's money would never have been at risk and only said investment arm would have gone under.
There is no question Clinton was unaware of the possible consequences of repealing Glass-Steagal because that act had been very explicitly put in place after the Great Crash and the Great Depression exactly to stop another major Crash and Depression, which was widelly discussed at the time.
Clinton was responsible for the direct consequences of repealing Glass-Steagal because retail banks could never had started investing in a speculative way and end up sinking and taking depositors money with them with Glass-Steagal in place since that its purpose was exactly to stop that (and it worked for over half a century) - so it's there's a first order causal relation between the repealing in 2000 and the retail banks starting going under in 2008 - and because at the time he repealed Glass-Steagal he knew it had been put in place exactly to avoid a major Crash and Depression - he both did the deed and was aware of the possible consequences.
The only question there is around it was if he was reckless, deeply incompetent or Machiavelic (if he acted to benefit from it expecting problems would take years to come and hence be somebody else's) in chosing to repeal that act which he knew was meant to stop major crashes and depressions and which had worked successfully doing just that for over half a century.
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It's not "one of my guys", I'm not even American, I have no idea who Clinton ran against.
I just don't condone blaming someone for a disaster that happened a decade after they left office, with two general elections in between.
The speed of events is very much relevant, specially when it's preventable. Once you release toxic waste into groundwater it is impossible to get out. Here a simple bill could have undone it, especially as more information was collected over time. Tobacco manufacturers are responsible for continuing to sell tobacco once the harmful effects are known. In particular, whoever is the CEO today. We don't blame native Americans for coming up with the idea of smoking tobacco leaves.
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Then you know nothing of Finance, Economics or how Sector Regulation works - the full impact of regulatory measures on those things takes years or even decades to unfold: we wouldn't have had 5 decades of Neoliberalism if the full effects of unlimited deregulation were manifested immediately after a regulation is removed.
I was in the Finance Industry when the 2008 Crash happenned and most of what went wrong then would not have been possible if the Glass-Steagal act was still in place, so much so that after the Crash a weakened version of that act was put back in place, only to be thrown out again by Trump during his first presidency.
Clinton knew what the Act was for (plenty of Economists very publicly explained it back then) and why it had been put in place and he repealed it anyways because the Finance Industry could make more profits without that regulation (which they did, for a time, until the Crash, hence the boom-related suplus you loudly celebrated), all of which is very much the situation you described of, once knowing the long term harmful effects of something (specifically in this case, of removing certain regulations), doing it anyway for the short term benefits (the tobbaco industry got profits in their case, Clinton fueled a bubble and that yielded those celebrated Clinton surpluses, plus he personally got lots of money from the Finance Industry after he retired from the presidency).
His responsability is undisputable in Finance circles and all that's in dispute is how much of the total is his and if he was either reckless ("Conditions have changed so this time it's not going to happen"), incompetent (i.e. literally did not informed himself about the purpose of the Act he was repealing) or machiavelic ("My friends in the Finance Industry will be very thankful if I remove these costly regulations and if something happens it will be well after I'm POTUS and somebody else will get the blame") in repealing Glass-Steagal.
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Ah yes the "all the secret experts agree with me" argument, and "if you don't, you have no idea". Disregarding that a decade passed where two administrations could have done something about it, and didn't. Let's blame the Wright borders for Boeing's fuckups while we're at it. After all, if they hadn't invented the airplane, those accidents wouldn't have been possible.
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Ah, yes, the "I don't trust experts" argument.
If my explanation so far on how the Glass-Steagal forced separation of Retail banking from speculative investing and in doing so protected retail depositors' money from the bank's speculative investments blowing up, and the nonexistence of said protections was exactly why the 2008 Crash was so bad and had such widespread effects hence why we can directly trace most of the problems of that Crash to the repealing of said act, then me talking to you is a real life illustration of the pearls to pigs saying.
Your ignorance is 100% willful and there is no point in feeding such trolls.
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You don't even get my point. The inexistece of those protections in 2008 is not Clinton's fault, unless he created a constitutional ammendment to forbid them or something irreversible. Bush was president for 7 years at that point, and as they say "the buck stops here". He had 7 years to bring them back and he didn't. Might as well blame Washington for creating the country.
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169 comments