Dorene Cornwell wrote:
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> My basic bottom line: just exactly what outcomes are we expecting of all
> these handouts? "Getting the credit markets" moving" sounds really amorphous
> and divorced from human indicators such as better public health, improved
> schools, reasonable public safety, and this especially so when all the
> bankers are doing is turning around and giving each other more bonuses after
> screwing up badly enough to need handouts in the first place.
>
> So what performance indicators SHOULD we be rewarding?
I don't have the foggiest idea (so what follows in the paragraphs below is irresponsible speculation -- on my part, though not on the part of those I got the ideas from). I do _know_, from the perspective of a left organizer, that (regardless of the economics) leftists should be saying No in thunder to the bailouts of financial institutions. But that is another topic.
If (as some argue -- I can't argue it on my own knowledge) this is a crisis of excess capacity, then the reason both for the bubbles and for the current freeze on lending is that there is nothing productive to invest in, and that making money available for lending will either be jpointless or will fuel another bubble. Only the destruction in one way or another of an immense amount of capacity can lead to a recovery. Machinery has to rust. Buildings have to rot. Skilled workers have to retire, die, or forget their skills, new products requireing new machine tools for their production must not only be invented but must be invented in response to developint material needs, and so forth. Then there will be someone to lend money to. In the meantime those in government can dole out cash to help out that sector of the population at large who are most politically important to them -- all those middle level troops getting multi-milliono dollar bonuses and so forth. Last time it took 10 years of slump plus five years of war to perform this task. How will bonueses for hedge-fund hotshot traders do the trick?
Carrol