Charlie Rose interviews Paul Volcker, longtime former chairman of the Federal Reserve and currently the chairman of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Volcker talks bluntly about fixing the broken financial system, compensation on Wall Street, the future of the American economy, and the Obama administration’s performance so far. Volcker is particularly pessimistic about getting things done in Washington: “The American political process is about as broken as the financial system.” [%comments]
Yes We Can? Paul Volcker’s Not So Sure
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The financial system is broken because the political system is broken. And vice versa. MAD attains; Mutually Assured Destruction.
he was close- change “broken” to “corrupt” and you have the accurate diagnosis
That’s what we got for 30 years of corrupt Reaganism and deregulation. And I don’t know if we can do much about it at this late date. We allowed fascist corporatism and crony capitalism to run our lives. Like vampires, they battened down on us and sucked the lifeblood out of this nation. We are almost out of blood now, and too weak to fight back. The time to successfully fight was long ago, but too many people let flag-waving, fundamentalist religion, and wannabe-ism blind them to what was really going on. We are just circling the drain now.
From the Article:
Some agency will go in there and say, “You’re going to fail,
but we’re going to provide a more orderly exit.”
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Exactly!
Volcker is wrong. The American political system is MORE broken than the financial system. And nothing seems to be changing.
Put very simply, there is a huge financial incentive built into the government which causes members of Congress and the President, and other government officials to put the needs of immensely wealthy and therefore also powerful interests ahead of the interests of the American people. It takes a strong will and a matryr like mentality to oppose these interests. These interests can break the career of the most competent, intelligent and energetic people without any problem. Or, if they are pleased, they can reward you with financial rewards and possibly also fame and your name in the history books to a degree beyond the imagination of themost competent, intelligent and imaginative/hard working people. A real question right now is whether the president would like to be a multimillionaire many times over and be extremely well respected by the media and historians, or would he be content to be a force for revitalizing this country, and indeed the world in a much more modest manner, ala Al Gore.
The most important line from the interview was “let them fail.”
Without the possibility of losing everything invested no disincentive exists for the banks to take risks. Long Term Capital Management should have been allowed to fail and so should every other bank that forgets that sound lending requires solid underwriting on underlying assets of value and to people who aren’t stretched to make their payments from the first payment.
@gerald chasin
I don’t think ol’ Al is as altruistic as you think. He’s making plenty of coin these days. And I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen the word “modest” in the same sentence with the name “Al Gore”.