David ([info]sageofgodalming) wrote,
@ 2009-03-09 09:19:00
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Windows of opportunity
John Quiggin has found the perfect metaphor for the US banking system.

As a matter of interest, has anyone ever found choosing 'Retry' to work?

ETA: so far pretty much everything I've read on this has been blaming Geithner, Summers and Bernanke. At some point, someone ought to point out that this is the Obama administration.

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[info]sgt_majorette
2009-03-10 04:03 am UTC (link)
And it would have been the McCain administration if the banks hadn't failed about thirty seconds after he declared the system fundamentally sound. Then there was the Sarah Palin thing.

Lehman Brothers was a place of eeeevil; not just my opinion, Jon Stewart put up a picture of Richard Fuld next to one of Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort.

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[info]judyserenity
2009-03-11 08:10 pm UTC (link)
Reading that article made me wonder what "abort, retry, fail" meant in the first place. Tom says "Abort, retry, fail" was a disk-reading error message. "Abort" meant end the program; "retry" meant try reading the disk again; "fail" meant ignore that piece of data and move on to the next disk sector instead. He claims that he sometimes saw "retry" work, but only with floppy disks (which were often unreliable), not hard-drives.

ETA: so far pretty much everything I've read on this has been blaming Geithner, Summers and Bernanke. At some point, someone ought to point out that this is the Obama administration.

Ummm, can't say I agree. The economy was in free-fall a few months ago. Since Obama got in, things haven't gotten better, but they haven't gotten much worse, either.

By way of comparison, my impression is that no-one ever blamed FDR for the Great Depression, even though it continued for a good 6 years after he got into office. It's generally the administration that was in office when a crisis started that gets blamed.

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[info]sageofgodalming
2009-03-11 09:50 pm UTC (link)
This is the sort of thing I'm talking about.

Krugman's blog has been riveting, if deeply disturbing, reading for the past six months.

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[info]judyserenity
2009-03-12 08:52 pm UTC (link)
I think the issue here is whether anyone could do better than Obama. The problem for any economic stimulus is that it needs some Republican votes to get past a Senate filibuster. And, the Republicans still seem to think that government spending is a very, very bad thing, even in a severe recession. (Not that that stopped them from voting for huge spending on the Iraq war, of course.) This really ties Obama's hands.

Krugman himself seemed to come to the same conclusion a few days later (krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/can-america-be-saved/), when he questioned whether the US economy could be saved, given the "insane" opinions of leading Republicans such John Boehnor. Boehnor recently said that what was needed was for government to "tighten its belt," the way American consumers had.

There actually seem to be a lot of people, both ordinary citizens and politicians alike, who think that what's needed is for people to cut back on spending. Sarah Palin said so in the VP debate, and no one seemed to contradict her. The view seems to be that since excessive spending was partially responsible for the current financial mess, what is needed to get out of it is less spending. That's not just like locking the barn door after the horse escapes, that's like locking it when the horse is trying to nudge its way back in!

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[info]sageofgodalming
2009-03-12 09:54 pm UTC (link)
I'm not really thinking about the politics, so for me the question isn't whether Obama has the political capital to do what needs to be done, it's whether his administration wants to try. The fact that the GOP are unable to do more than fling poo is on more than an annoying distraction.

What intrigued me, and I commented on in my ETA, is the way commentators are writing as if Geithner & co are responsible for policy: they want to preserve Obama's innocence by not thinking about the dynamic between the president and his advisers and subordinates. No doubt it's partly 100-daysitis, and they'll recover their voice. But at some point, people will have to face up to Obama's limitations. Voting Republican would, as things stand at present, be a spectacularly *bad* way of doing that, but it's not the only alternative, I hope.

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[info]judyserenity
2009-03-13 11:12 pm UTC (link)
Ah, now I see what you are saying. You aren't saying that's it's Obama's recession as opposed to Bush's; you are saying that it's Obama's policies as opposed to his underlings'.

I suppose that's reasonable, although presidents generally won't be experts on the economy, so all they can do is pick economic staff who've had good track records, and hope those people perform well in the future.

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