Daewoo

I thought somebody else would post this. They didn't so I am.

Greenspan Warns of Likely U.S. Recession: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

But...helicopter ben already told us that the economy was in fine shape and we had achieved a "soft landing" under his expert guidance.

Here is the part where Greespan actually takes a runnign start and kicks Bernanke right square in the nuts:

Nobody denies that there WILL be spillover. What he is saying here is that we just have not seen it yet. This is also part of Bernankes "soft landing" bs. He sat in front of congress not long ago and said that the economy had absorbed the housing slump well and he did not think it would be a problem. here is Greenspan saying "we have not even seen it yet".

Anybody who has studied economics already knew that Bernake was just blowing hot air when he said that. Single sector slowdowns like we are seeing in the housing market typically take 4-6 quarters to spill over into the wider economy. This is because most purchasing done in large quantities (the purchasing that REALLY matters) is typically done on contract, not on a cash and carry basis. The effect of prices fluctuations and slowdows does not become apparent until current contracts have expired.

In many areas, like unemployment spillover, construction is especially problematic because traditionaly construction companies will pare hours company wide before they will start laying people off. This keeps unemployment numbers steady, but drives down payroll figures, which also does not become apparent as a pattern until several months later.

I bet Bernanke is FURIOUS with greenspan right now. He already has some SERIOUS credibility problems when it comes to his role as an inflation fighter. Now he has Greenspan, who is still respected (probably more then Helicopter Ben) getting up and making these blunt public comments that directyl contradict Bernankes BS.

On the other hand, I guess Bernanke now knows how Greenspan felt when Volker would open his mouth....like following the dot com crash when Volker warned that pumping excess liquidity into the market would just lead to an even bigger equity bubble in the real estate market.

Sebelius for VP, not Hillary

Nice thread title. lol

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Daewoo

I call them like I see them, and I figured that would get some views

Sebelius for VP, not Hillary

OK, so I get the basic point of your thread. Greenspan says that the spillover from the decline in the housing market is yet to come, and Bernanke said that it was already over.

However, from the tone of this thread, I'm guessing you didn't like Bernanke even before this. Why?

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Daewoo

I don't dislike Bernanke any more than I dislike Greenspan. Greenspan lied to the American public for years. Now Bernanke is doing the same thing. I think that Greenspan is starting to worry about his legacy. Ever since he left his post at the Fed he has been making increasingly alarming public comments.

Personally, I am of the Paul Volker school of thought when it comes to the top job at the fed. Volker believed that his job was to get up there and tell the American people how it is. You did not see Volker trying to pass a bunch of BS and give cryptic signals. He firmly believed that a real recession was better than an imaginary boom. When the government first started trying to play around with how they reported economic numbers, Volker was the first one up explaining the changes to the American people, which screws things up if what you are trying to do is pull the wool over the american peoples eyes.

The problem with manipulating numbers and using government spending to boost your already manipulated GDP is that you end up with a false economy. History has show us that the longer you foster a false economy, the worse it is going to hurt when the correction come. All things return to fundamentals in the end.

When Reagan went shopping for somebody to lead the fed, he did NOT want a volker. He wanted somebody who would follow the government line and not say anything that would confirm to the public that they were being fleeced. He foudn that man with Alan Greenspan. Now, Greenspan has been replaced with Bernanke who is even MORE of a shill.

Sebelius for VP, not Hillary

So basically because Greenspan and Berkanke don't say that the US in a "real recession" by your appraisal of the situation, that means that they are shills?

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Daewoo

No, that is NOT what I said at all. I said that they should be honest about the state of our economy. If we are in recession, they shoudl say we are in recession. If not, they should not.

2 weeks before greenspan left office he gave a speech about the US economy. He talked about what fine prospects there are for it, how resiliant it is, and what a great gift we were leaving our children. A month after he left office, he said that the dollar was a junk currency in the making, and that if we did not get our house in order our nation may not survive another 20 years.

So, yea, the guy is a fucking sleazeball who thought that his job at the fed was to keep the consumer spending so the rich could keep getting richer and everybody else could just fuck off.

Bernanke is even worse. The stuff that comes out of his mouth does not even make sense. Bernanke knows damn well that we will not see the macroecnomic impacts of the housing slowdown until the second or third quarter of this year. When the dot com bubble burst, he wrote an extremely long and well researched paper showing that the macroeconomic fallout of that would not actually hit the US economy for 12-18 months. At the time a lot of people disagreed with him since we had already seen some effects. He argued (and rightly so) that the effects we were seeing were sector specific and what little we were seeing outside that sector was just a very small amount of bleed through. So it is not like he does not understand the principals. It is not like he MAY disagree with the idea that flow through is going to take some time. He is simply a liar. The guy is a shill.

Ygorl

Clips from pgs. 1 and 2


There's obviously much more to this report. However, I've brought this issue up in the past MYSELF. That is, why we continue leaving our borders open for illegal immigration to continue.



Ben Bernanke: "Spending on entitlement programs will begin to climb quickly in the next decade."


Bernanke cited two main causes of this growing problem: Demographics and a continuing escalation in medical costs. Falling fertility and increased life expectancy are forecast to drop the ratio of "producers" (20 - 50 year olds ) to "retired" (over 65 years old) from 5 to 1 to 3 to 1 in the U.S. In other words, the taxes paid by only three people will have to maintain one retired persons lifestyle.


Up to now, many people in both Europe and America have wondered exactly why their governments have been so extraordinarily lax in controlling immigration across their borders. We believe these covert policies to boost immigration to help solve the "producer vs retiree" ratio are both dishonest in the short term and potentially disastrous to the lives of our fellow citizens in the long term.

By consistently abusing its power to buy votes by dangling extended entitlements, Congress has pushed the American economy into a dangerous and fundamental state of imbalance. It will take many years and considerable political courage to correct this economically debilitating condition.


We hope that Fed Chairman Bernankes remarks will not become buried in political trade offs, before it's too late for Congress to enact remedial action. Even as Cogress fails to act, the international currency market takes notice.

Ygorl

Well, lets see.

Who got the job ?

Some guy on the internet that posts anonymously using the screen name "Daewoo" and calls Ben Bernanke a "shill" a "liar" and a "fucking sleazeball" ?

Or is it Ben Bernanke ?

If you know so much, why aren't you in that position sir ?

sarukun

This is pretty much the most ineffectual arguement against anything I ahve ever seen.

If you just blindly assume that someone got to where they are by knowing what they are doing and what they are talking about, you end up with Adolf fucking Hitler, alright? He's calling the man out and giving some pretty specific examples as to why he's full of it, if you want to discredit him, you don't do it by coming up with bullshit like this.