I hope he is wrong
 

.. . but I am afraid he is right. Tried to create a shortcut to this Newsweek article but it only wanted to put it on my desktop and then would not let me copy it here. Article by Niall Ferguson saying that we don't have a debt problem, we have a growth problem.


"The Fed's Critics Are Wrong: We Need to Avert Depression
Dec 5, 2011 12:00 AM EST The Fed is working to prevent an economic calamity. Why do its critics seem eager to repeat the mistakes of 1931? "


The actions yessterday by the EU are exactly the wrong move as they will stifle growth and lack of growth is the real problem. Before the recession Spain and Italy were paying down their debt but the recession has cut revenue and so the lenders jack up the rates and only make matters worse. I thought it was a cardinal rule - when you are in a hole, stop digging.

When Hoover decided to cut the debt in 1931 he started the Great Depression and all the bank failures.:eek:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...NjO_story.html

This is worth reading also.

Heard them talking about this last night on NPR's/PRI's "The World". Pretty scary stuff, having their economies shrink to a point where there is no way of ever paying the debts off.




Barney

I guess it goes to show that politicians only have the capacity to phuck up the economy and not fix it.

Isn't this actually being driven by the bond traders and other money people? It seems like short sightedness has been a common malady among money people lately. It's not as much that the Europeans are ceding their sovereignty to a central government but to financiers.

Regards,

D-Ray

"Give me control of a nations money supply, and I care not who makes it's laws." Mater Amschel Rothschild

Chas

It does seem as if the splitting up of the E.U. is inevitable.

Yeah but two great depressions in one lifetime is pushing it.

Tell me you didn't go to Bartlett's for that one.

Regards,

D-Ray

I didn't go to Bartletts.

Chas

Is it like deja vu all over again?

Chas

Some sh@t when you can't devalue your currency!

In that same issue Simon Schama, the noted British historian had a nice comment about Standars & Poor's and Moody's;

"Credit-rating agencies—those ravening hyenas of fiscal trouble—move on from one economy, mutilated by sovereign-debt downgrade, to another, traveling north from the basket cases of the Mediterranean, crossing the Alps in search of freshly fallen game. You might think that the agencies that were the enablers of the subprime calamity and were capable of making a trillion-dollar error in calculating American debt reduction over the next decade would have the decency to go into hiding for just a while before presuming to decree the viability of hard-pressed states to meet their bond obligations."

I agree with this assessment.

Methinks you may be on to something, Chas.

Dave

Believe it or not, this dovetails nicely with a lot of opinions advanced by the John Birch Society.

Myself, being a fool from Bugtussell, who's only knowledge of high finance boils down to an analogy of a simple minded poker game....

Whenever you look around the table, and you can't tell who the sucker is , then the sucker is you.

Chas

Brilliant!

We appear to be in agreement on this issue. I have no use for the ratings agencies; however, they still have an effect upon financial decisions despite their record.

You keep agreeing with lefties and people are going to start questioning your ideological purity. :rolleyes:

Regards,

D-Ray

The ratings agencies are trying to CYA after they missed the mortgage crisis.

Hoover started the Depression? That's a new one on me :headscrtch:

Pete

Instead of spending money to jumpstart the economy he set out to balance the budget same stupid ideas the GOP is putting forward today.

He knew the sytem was rotten, pulled his cash out of the stock market before the crash and told everyone who would listen to do the same.

Many of the programs continued by FDR were started by him. The big difference is Hoover wouldn't give money directly to people, he gave it to the States for disbursment.

Pete

Everyone pulling all of their money out of the market and the banks accelerated the crash. That was the reason for the "Bank Holidays"---to staunch the hemorraging. This is why, today, the government(s) simply tries to take it (money) from people and put it back into the market. Stagnant cash flow caused by panicked hoarding does nothing to help the economy.

Encouraging people to oppose the action, for purely political reasons, only prolongs the agony.

Dave

With the Fed keeping interest rates at essentially zero soooner or later those fat cats that are sitting on all that cash will wake up. That money is practically earning them zilch so maybe they will wise up and realize they can make more by loaning it out.

Seems like they have figured out a another way, new fee's on banking.




Barney

True enough for banks but not for corporations, if they do not put all that extra cash to work they are losing. Corporations may be people but dollars are not. Lock two of them in a dark room and they will not generate little dollars.

Blue, I got'cha, but he pulled his out a year before the crash.

Pete

Must have known his own policies and ideology were about to wreck the economy?

Dave

Man the left loooooooooooooves to demonize the Great Humanitarian.

He was in office 8 months. He was also a supporter of Teddy Roosevelt and the Smoot Hawley tariff act.

Pete

Who is this "Great Humanitarian" you speak of?

And, what's that we like to say about presidents these days?

"If it happens on his watch, he owns it!"?

The Crash of '29, right?

Did nothing but get worse while he waited for the "market correction" that never happened.

Okay, so yes, Hoover owns the Great Depression.

There's a reason why he lost to FDR and it wasn't because FDR had a charming smile. It was because Hoover was a loser Republican sitting on his ass waiting for the rich folk to spontaniously resume creating jobs, and as we now know, it did not work.:p

Dave

Kinda wild how these guys figure that after the market creates a disaster, the same guys can be relied upon to fix it.

Hoover had his problems, but he certainly wasn't "sitting on his ass." He took some quite progressive positions. He also tinkered with the economy via Smoot-Hawley Tarrif Act, expanded Federal Civil Service, rescinded private oil leases on federal property, and appointed Cardozo to the Supreme Court. These are not what I would call Laissez-Faire or conservative positions. He never really had a lot of charm to his personality like the NE elitist FDR.

WHich kind of makes me curious about the next few months, it seems the Dems have given up the idea of a surtax on millionaires. I will be waiting with baited breath to see all those new jobs that these "job creating" millionaires are going to come up with.

Hoover is credited with saving millions of lives in Europe and Russia during and after ww1.

Pete

How, he did not get to be POTUS until 1929.

Yeah, whatever. He owns it, it's his. FDR IN '32!!!!!!!:p

Dave

He was a powerhouse in charity work.

I don't like FDR but he belongs on the dime because of his support of the March of Dimes. Hoover did far, far more.

".....

When World War I began in August 1914, Hoover helped organize the return of 120,000 Americans from Europe: tourists, students, executives, etc. Hoover led five hundred volunteers in the distribution of food, clothing, steamship tickets, and cash. "I did not realize it at the moment, but on August 3, 1914, my career was over forever. I was on the slippery road of public life."[13] Hoover liked to say that difference between dictatorship and democracy was simple: dictators organize from the top down, democracies from the bottom up. Belgium faced a food crisis after being invaded by Germany. Hoover undertook an unprecedented relief effort with the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB). As chairman of the CRB, Hoover worked with the leader of the Belgian Comite National de Secours et Alimentation (CN), Emile Francqui, to feed the entire nation for the duration of the war. The CRB obtained and imported millions and millions of metric tons of foodstuffs for the CN to distribute, and watched over the CN to make sure the German army didn't appropriate the food. The CRB became a veritable independent republic of relief, with its own flag, navy, factories, mills, and railroads. Private donations and government grants supplied an $11-million-a-month budget.

For the next two years, Hoover worked 14-hour days from London, administering the distribution of over two and one-half million tons of food to nine million war victims. In an early form of shuttle diplomacy, he crossed the North Sea forty times to meet with German authorities and persuade them to allow food shipments, becoming an international hero. The Belgian city of Leuven named a prominent square Hooverplein after him.


After the United States entered the war in April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Hoover head of the U.S. Food Administration. Hoover believed "food will win the war", and beginning on September 29, this slogan was introduced and put into frequent use.[14] Hoover established set days to encourage people to avoid eating particular foods to save them for soldiers' rations: meatless Mondays, wheatless Wednesdays, and "when in doubt, eat potatoes." This program helped reduce consumption of foodstuffs needed overseas and avoided rationing at home. It was dubbed "Hooverizing" by government publicists, in spite of Hoover's continual orders that publicity should not mention him by name.

After the war, as a member of the Supreme Economic Council and head of the American Relief Administration, Hoover organized shipments of food for millions of starving people in Central Europe. He used a newly formed Quaker organization, the American Friends Service Committee, to carry out much of the logistical work in Europe.

Hoover provided aid to the defeated German nation after the war, as well as relief to famine-stricken Bolshevik-controlled areas of Russia in 1921, despite the opposition of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and other Republicans. When asked if he was not thus helping Bolshevism, Hoover retorted, "Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!" At war's end, the New York Times named Hoover one of the "Ten Most Important Living Americans". In July 1922, Soviet author Maxim Gorky wrote to Hoover:

Your help will enter history as a unique, gigantic achievement, worthy of the greatest glory, which will long remain in the memory of millions of Russians whom you have saved from death.

Hoover confronted a world of political possibilities when he returned home in 1919. Democratic Party leaders looked on him as a potential candidate for President, and President Wilson privately preferred Hoover as his successor. "There could not be a finer one," asserted Franklin D. Roosevelt, then a rising star from New York. Hoover briefly considered becoming a Democrat, but he believed that 1920 would be a Republican year. Also, Hoover confessed that he could not run for a party whose only member in his boyhood home had been the town drunk.

....."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert...r#Humanitarian

Pete

Don't care. He was a Republican, the economy collapsed on his watch. He owns it.

No face on the dime for Herbie.

Dave

The creation of the E.U. was catalyst of this problem.

Before the E.U. every country was its own problem, to rise or fall on its own decisions. Today with the E.U., they are all collectively responsible for each others decisions. United they Fail.

I don't know how Germany is still fairing so well, but time will tell.

Bill

They have really good steel.

Well Rob, you asked.:)

Great, so how come he was such a screwup as POTUS?