Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Dollars, but no sense, at The Fed. $13 trillion and counting!

Mark Pittman and Bob Ivry at Bloomberg News continue shedding light on the extent to which Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers are demanding the printing presses be run:

The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year...

The money works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. and 14 times the $899.8 billion of currency in circulation. The nation’s gross domestic product was $14.2 trillion in 2008...

The combined commitment has increased by 73 percent since November, when Bloomberg first estimated the funding, loans and guarantees at $7.4 trillion...


Click here to see the entire article, including the details of the $12.8 trillion that Ben, Tim, Larry and Hank Paulson decided to print.

Tim White

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What's different from the the Bush recession and the great recession.

In the 30's the U.S was a manufacturing powerhouse and now China with the help of the U.S government, the major retailers and CEO's to create short term profits and the resulting huge bonuse, sent millions of jobs overseas. We are now a consumer nation, not a manufacturing powerhouse, we are borrowers that borrows billions that we can't ever afford to repay China.

As a result, the benefit of the stimulous package lacks the power it would have had in the 1930 environment. Much of the money, after it is spent will now fly to offshore manufacturers and service providers.

In the 39's, the money that was spent went to buy American products and as a result had a high multiplier factor. I believe that without recapturing much of the manufacturing that was lost, this country will continue to be on the slippery slope.

People say free trade is good, but we now have a system of dumb trade that is far from a level playing field. They say we should not be protectionists, but does that mean we have stand silent and wave as our manufacturing, service and way of life are moved offshore?

We need a fresh look at trade and we should defend our workers from unfair practices. We also need to change the way CEO's get bonuses from short term profits that are a major cause for moving jobs overseas. We also have to eliminate stock options for directors as this gives the directors the same short sighted goals that are based on greed.