Tag: Economic Advisers

Closing Thought–27Apr21

I stated several times during the last four years that I thought that the last president surrounded himself with morons as advisers…..and the biggest moron was a economic anchor on CNBC, Larry Kudlow…..basically he played an economist on TV.

As someone who studied economics I heard nothing from this person that would have lead me to feel confident that the last guy had good advice.

Over the weekend this toad opened his mouth and spewed stupid.

To the point hat I shot coffee out my nose.

He was helping spread the bullsh*t that Biden’s climate change ideas would eliminate red meat from our diets……of course this is just a BS line because they have nothing else but lies and disinformation.

And now for the stupid from yet another Trump moron…..

Larry Kudlow, a Fox Business host and former Trump economic advisor, raged against the idea of “plant-based beer” on his Friday-night show and falsely claimed that President Joe Biden’s climate plan would require Americans to give up meat.

“Get this: America has to stop eating meat, stop eating poultry, fish, seafood, eggs, dairy, and animal-based fats,” Kudlow said. “OK, you got that? No burgers on July 4. No steaks on the barbie. I’m sure middle America is just going to love that. Can you grill those Brussels sprouts?

“So get ready: You can throw back a plant-based beer with your grilled Brussels sprouts and wave your American flag. Call it July 4 green,” Kudlow said.

(businessinsider.com)

Think about his last statement….a plant based beer.

What does this moron think beer is made from?

To be fair FOX has walked back this amount of stupid…..

The network has since walked back Kudlow’s claims. Fox News’ John Roberts told viewers on Monday that Kudlow had highlighted a study from the University of Michigan and wrongly linked it to Biden’s plans to mitigate the climate crisis.

“On Friday, we told you about a study from the University of Michigan to give some perspective on President Biden’s ambitious climate-change goals,” Roberts said. “That research from 2020 found that cutting back how much red meat people eat would have a drastic impact on harmful greenhouse-gas emissions. The data was accurate, but a graphic and a script incorrectly implied that it was part of Biden’s plan for dealing with climate change. That is not the case.”

AS typical conservs making something out of nothing…..a lie that becomes news.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

…..But He Plays One On TV

Pres., Trump recently lost his economic adviser over his, TrumP, deal with tariffs….the prez has picked his new adviser…….who is not an economist but he plays one on TV……Kudlow.

“I’m looking at Larry Kudlow very strongly,” President Trump said the other day, and as a result of all that strong, powerful, muscular looking, Trump finally selected Kudlow to be the new chief of his National Economic Council. It was a decision perfectly in line with Trump’s general philosophy of personnel, which is that he turns on Fox News, decides who sounds good, and then hires that person. In fact, when Trump called to offer the job, he told Kudlow he was looking at his picture on television. “You’re looking handsome, Larry,” he said.

We’ve gotten so used to cable television being the primary means through which Trump gets information, decides what’s important, and determines who should advise him that it’s become almost cliche, a source of easy jokes. But it’s yet more evidence that the most powerful person in the world views everything through the lens of a forum where our worst impulses are cultivated and the shallowest people are given the most exposure and influence.

http://theweek.com/articles/760937/youre-looking-handsome-larry-how-reality-tv-president-found-perfect-idiot-chief-economic-adviser

The perfect choice….not an ounce of expertise like most others on his, Trump’s, cabinet….amateurs playing governance…..classic Trump!

Another One Bites The Dust (Again)

In the beginning there was a person that the people wanted to lead them into a new world….and this person brought with him his advisers….and soon after the man took his rightful place in the halls of governance…his advisers started falling like flies….

The Obama team is losing people quicker than a Hair Club for Men….first it was his National Intel Director and then his budget dude, Orzag and shortly after that came the resignation of Romer, an economic adviser and now (may I have a drum roll, please)…..it is time for Summers to turf out in a dead run……

Summers, In my opinion, should NEVER have been allowed anywhere near economic policy…why?  It was his policy with Clinton’s help that de-regulated Wall Street and set the stage for the biggest financial crisis sine the 30’s….I ask at the beginning of the Obama strategy, why he would allow this man to help make economic policy, considering his track record……

With all that said…the departure of Orzag, Romer and Summers, how long will we have to wait until Geithner is shown the door or better yet shoved through it…..I question any thinking that puts the very people that helped cause our economic crisis in any position of authority or to influence policy….

Should He Go Or Should He Stay #3

This is the final part of my series on why the Obama economioc team should get the Hell out of Washington…..

I have said in my other two parts that Geithner and then Bernanke should depart as the economic team in Washington…..but I would be remiss if I left out the actor in the wings…the guy backstage that is a :key” piece of the economic recovery team….Larry Summers.

In the beginning there was Larry Summers…Mister Magic was wanted as secretary of treasury but was left out because of his controversial time at Harvard when he made some unfortunate comments about women…..the future Prez and his handlers figured that Summers would be a huge distraction and that their proposals would go unnoticed by the sideshow of his nomination….so he became a behind the scenes adviser and let Geithner fade the heat because he was more easily nominated….

But to me there is more to this story than most know and because of that I say he needs to be yet another member of the Obama adviser corps that nbeeds to leave Washington and maybe the middle class would have a fighting chance with new economic leadership….

So of the stuff that was readily reported about Summers and his ‘expert’ economic leadership…….the website Exiledonline.com has an excellent anbalysis on the past economic endeavors of Larry Summers……

But let’s return to the Summers timeline. After his stint in the Reaganomics brain trust, he returned to Harvard to serve as one of the university’s youngest professors. In 1988, he was Michael Dukakis’s chief economic advisor, but when that campaign failed to bring Summers to power, he turned to America’s great rival, the former Soviet Union, to try out his economic experiments. In 1990, Lithuania, a restive Soviet republic seeking independence, hired Summers to advise on that country’s economic transformation. Poor Lithuania had no idea what it got itself into. This was Summers’s first opportunity to tackle a country in economic crisis and put his wunderkind theories into practice. The results were literally suicidal: in 1990, when Summers first arrived, Lithuania’s suicide rate was 26.1 per 100,000 and falling. Just five years after Summers got his hands on Lithuania’s economy, life became so unbearable under the economic transition that the suicide rate nearly doubled to 45.6 per 100,000, worse than any other ex-Soviet republic in transition. In fact, it was the highest suicide rate in the world, suggesting something particularly harsh and brutal about the economic transition in that country as opposed to the others, where suffering and pain were common. Things got so bad that in 1992, after just two years of Summers-nomics, the traumatized Lithuanians voted the communist party back into power, the first East European nation to do so–even though just a year earlier Lithuanians actually died on the streets fighting communism.

Fresh off his success in Lithuania, Summers moved to the World Bank, where he was named the chief economist in 1991, the year he issued his famous let’s-pollute-Africa memo. It was also the year that Summers, and his Harvard protégé Andrei Schleifer (who worked with Summers on the Lithuania economic transformation), began their catastrophic “rescue” of Russia’s crisis-ridden economy. It’s a complicated story involving corruption, cronyism and economic devastation. But by the end of the 1990s, Russia’s GDP had collapsed by more than 60 percent, its population was suffering the worst death-to-birth ratio of any industrialized nation in the twentieth century, and the financial markets that Summers and Schleifer helped create had collapsed in what was then the world’s biggest debt default ever. The result was the rise of Vladmir Putin and a national aversion to free markets and anything associated with Western liberalism.

In light of all of the corruption, cronyism and devastation that have marked his career, Summers’ statements about an under-polluted Africa or intellectually-inferior women no longer seem like provocative eccentricities but part and parcel of the Summers shtick. And now there’s talk that President-elect Obama may hand the keys to national treasury to Summers–meaning that he’ll be in charge of overseeing a trillion-dollar taxpayer bailout of the entire financial industry, a process already rife with conflicts of interest, cronyism and corruption.

Now I asked…after you guys have read this about Summers what part of his past would lead you to believe that he would have any successful answers to the recession?  What part of his past shows any concern for the plight of the middles class?

Now with the abysmal record and doings of the “big three’ of economic recovery, what part or which one of them seems to have a grip on what to do to improve our standings?  For the good of the country…ALL three of these people should be run out of Washington on a rail with tar and feathers applied….NONE of them has the interest of the middle class as a priority….they are ALL paid for by Wall Street and they function as Wall Street surrogates in Washington.

Things To Get Better Than Forecast

The admin cheerleaders are predicting that the economy will be getting much better by the end of the year.

The Obama administration projected that the U.S. economy will expand at a 3.5 percent annual rate by year-end, a rebound that would be almost twice as strong as private forecasters expect.

As early as the end of this year, GDP may rise at a 3.5 percent annual rate, the same pace projected for all of next year, helped by a $787 billion stimulus package, the administration said in the report today. That’s more optimistic than the 1.8 percent fourth-quarter growth estimate in the monthly Blue Chip Economic Indicators survey released May 10.

The administration expects “housing starts to reach bottom this year and to begin a robust recovery as relative housing prices stabilize,” today’s report said.

The Federal Reserve’s “novel” policies of extending funds to banks to boost liquidity and purchasing short- and long-term Treasuries also will help underpin the recovery, the White House said. Still, a doubling of the Fed’s balance sheet to about $2 trillion “holds the potential for an explosive increase in the nation’s money supply,” it said.

With each passing day the news coming from the Obamna economic team keeps getting better and better…..personally, I do not see it, but then I am not trying to convince a country of my outlook.

A New Chief Performance Officer (CPO)

President-elect Barack Obama has picked Nancy Killefer to serve as the federal government’s chief performance officer (CPO), a newly created post designed to help improve government efficiency and reform budget practices.  That sounds familiar for some reason.

Obama said Killefer is “uniquely qualified” to serve as the nation’s first CPO, calling her “an expert in streamlining processes and wringing out inefficiencies so that taxpayers and consumers get more for their money.”  Huh?

To illustrate her strong desire to enact reforms, Obama said that when she was offered the opportunity to serve in the Clinton administration, Killefer said “If you’re willing to embrace significant change, then you’re looking at the right person. But if you just want to keep the trains running on time, don’t ask me to do this job.”

Wait just a damn minute!  Why is Obama creating a job that is already being done?  Why is he creating yet another massive bureaucracy?  Why not let the GAO do the job it was created to do?

The GAO was established as the General Accounting Office by the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 (Pub.L. 67-13, 42 Stat. 20, June 10, 1921). This Act required the head of GAO to “investigate, at the seat of government or elsewhere, all matters relating to the receipt, disbursement, and application of public funds, and shall make to the President…and to Congress…reports (and) recommendations looking to greater economy or efficiency in public expenditures” (Sec. 312(a), 42 Stat. 25).

Does anyone really know what the hell is going on?  This is just absurd.  To think that earmarks and inefficient programs can be eliminated is foolish.  All it is doing is creating another payroll for the taxpayers to fund—wait is that not an inefficient use of funds?  Maybe her first action should be to dissolve the position of CPO.  The move would be efficient, would streamline government and save us money.  She would be doing everything the position calls for.

Just a thought.

Biden Picks Economic Adviser

Finally, someone has pick an economic adviser that has the middle class in mind.

Vice President-elect Joe Biden on Friday named Jared Bernstein as his chief economic policy adviser, a new post created as the nation faces a recession.

Bernstein, a senior economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, has been an informal economic adviser to President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign. He also served as deputy chief economist under Labor Secretary Robert Reich during the Clinton administration.

In a written statement, Biden called Bernstein a “proven, passionate advocate for raising the incomes of middle class families.

“His expertise and background in a wide range of domestic and international economic policies will be an invaluable asset to the Obama-Biden administration,” Biden said.

Bernstein holds a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, master’s degrees in social work and philosophy and a doctorate in social welfare.

But will he be listened to is the biggest question?

Enemy Of The Working Class

If you work for a living then you had better pay attention to what your president-elect is up to…he is appointing people that are not friends of working men and women.

The selection of Volcker that is the sharpest warning to the working class. No other individual in modern US history is so closely identified with the deliberate creation of mass unemployment to drive down wages and smash the organized resistance of the working class to the demands of corporate America. He put into motion policies that led to the destruction of large sections of industry and the explosive growth of financial speculation in the US economy.

Volcker served as Fed Chairman from 1979 to 1987, a critical period in the history of the American working class, in which the official labor movement was effectively destroyed as an instrument of workers’ self-defense, and the unions transformed into what they are today: a mechanism for the suppression of workers’ struggles and the destruction of their jobs and wages.

Runaway price inflation had sparked a series of bitter strikes by workers seeking to defend their living standards, and the Carter administration had suffered a humiliating defeat when more than 100,000 coal miners struck for 111 days in 1977-78 in defiance of a presidential no-strike order under the Taft-Hartley Law. The White House had been unable to cow the miners into submission—they publicly burned copies of the president’s back-to-work order on the picket line—and Carter was compelled to rely on the leadership of the United Mine Workers union to deprive the rank-and-file of any gains from their struggle.

Volcker was brought in to initiate policies that would suppress inflation—and the wages movement in the working class—by driving up the rate of unemployment. Under his leadership, the Federal Reserve rapidly raised interest rates to an unprecedented 20 percent, choking off home-buying and purchases of cars and other durable goods and triggering a series of corporate bankruptcies.

Like a criminal returning to the scene of the crime, Volcker now goes back to Washington as a principal adviser to another Democratic Party administration preparing to bail out bankrupt auto manufacturers at the expense of the auto workers and the working class as a whole. He can rely on his direct personal experience with the UAW bureaucracy to demand that the union finish the job it began three decades ago: transforming what was once the most powerful section of the American working class into a super-exploited mass of low-paid, casual laborers, without any rights.

Volcker’s record from 1979 to 1987 suggests what this “fresh perspective” will consist of. Unemployment in the United States reached 11.3 percent in 1982, double the level of 1975. The average wage of young workers fell 30 percent by 1987. Infant mortality, family violence, drug addiction and other concomitants of economic hardship soared.

But the wealthiest 1 percent of the population saw a staggering 50 percent increase in their wealth during that period. That is why the American ruling elite remembers the Volcker years fondly, and why, acting through their servant Obama, the financial aristocracy has summoned the old reactionary for one last service in attacking the working class.

I have given you something to consider and something of a prophecy….will I be proven right?  You will see.

To Slash Or Not To Slash

In the last week I have heard the president-elect mention the budget and what he would do with it as soon as he is sworn in…not sounding too promising, IMO.

Obama said his economic team would go through the federal budget “page by page, line by line, eliminating those programs we don’t need, and insisting that those we do operate in a sensible cost-effective way.”

While he reiterated his earlier statement that “there is only one president at a time,” Obama made it clear that his increasingly frequent appearances before reporters in Chicago—a third press conference is set for Wednesday—is being driven by the deepening economic crisis gripping US and world capitalism and a desire to reassure the financial markets.

The immediate backdrop to the press conference was the announcement of fresh figures indicating that the US economy is continuing to spiral downwards. The Commerce Department reported Tuesday that economic activity had declined at a rate of 0.5 percent during the three months ending in September, while the average American’s disposable income had plummeted during the same period at an annual rate of 9.2 percent, the steepest decline recorded since such figures were first kept in 1947.

Obama drew a sharp distinction between his proposal for an “immediate and temporary infusion that’s going to be required to kick-start our economy” and plans for cutting “the structural spending that’s been taking place in Washington that has created this huge mountain of debt.”

He reiterated that the temporary program he is advocating would “help save or create two-and-a-half million jobs.” While the price tag for the program has been estimated as high as $700 billion, the objectives are wholly inadequate given the depth of the crisis. Nearly half as many jobs as Obama claims would be saved or created over two years have already been wiped out in the past year alone, and new jobless claims have climbed to over half a million a week.

This rhetoric serves only to mask the economic and social realities of the unfolding crisis. Wall Street is being bailed out at the expense of “Main Street.” Average working people, who bear no responsibility for the financial meltdown, are being forced to pay the price for years of financial parasitism and speculation that enriched the top 1 percent, while the vast majority of the population saw its real income stagnate or decline. The inevitable response to the kind of economic austerity policies being prepared by the incoming Obama administration will not be a “banding together” of “Wall Street and Main Street,” but rather a resurgence of class struggle in America.

Who Are The New Economic Wizards?

Here is a look at the Obama economic team–they are not, IMO, the saviors of the middle class, but a continuation of the Wall Street favoritism.

Geithner has been intimately involved in the federal bailout of the financial industry, working closely with Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke and current Treasury secretary Henry Paulson. It has been reported that Geithner was the principal architect behind the government-backed bailout of Bear Stearns, among other deals.

Before being appointed as president of the New York Fed, Geithner worked as a policy director for the International Monetary Fund and was a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a leading diplomatic think tank.  (read my post on the IMF and how it screws the people of a country in the name of capitalism)

The financial elite delivered its verdict on Geithner’s selection on Friday. When the Obama transition team leaked word of his selection, the markets rallied. The Dow Jones industrial average climbed 494.13 points, or 6.5 percent. Geithner will be considered “Wall Street’s man” in the Obama administration.

Lawrence Summers, Obama’s selection to head the National Economic Council, was a leading economic official in the Clinton administration. As Treasury secretary, Summers became famous for using federal budget surpluses to pare down the national debt, even as Clinton slashed social spending.

Obama appears set to name Peter Orszag as director of the Office of Management and Budget. An economist with a PhD from the elite London School of Economics, Orszag has served as the director of the US Congressional Budget Office since January 2007. Previously he was a Senior Fellow at the liberal think tank the Brookings Institutution, and served in the Clinton administration as Senior Adviser on the Council of Economic Advisers.

Orszag is an advocate of revamping Social Security. He co-authored a book in 2004 called Saving Social Security: A Balanced Approach. In it, Orszag argues that a fundamental reason for the predicted insolvency of Social Security is that life expectancy “has risen by four years for men and five years for women since 1940,” “making benefits more valuable to recipients,” but more costly. To address this dilemma, Orszag advocated a combination of payroll and “benefits adjustments”—i.e., cuts in social security payments to retirees.

Jason Furman will likely serve as a senior economic adviser. Furman has expressed support for setting up private social security accounts and cutting benefits. Furman has headed the Brooking Institution’s Hamilton Project, an economic think tank founded by Robert Rubin.

A New York Times article on Monday, noted that Geithner, Summers, Orszag, and Furman are all protégés of Robert Rubin, whose advocacy of deregulation of financial institutions and markets has contributed to the current economic crisis. Rubin also played a leading role, as a senior adviser, in the policies adopted by Citigroup that have led it to the brink of ruin—and a second government bailout in two months

Appears that change is not coming to the economic team for Obama…these people are more of business as usual.  Sorry….if change was expected…then you will be sadly disappointed.  You think I am mistaken?  Then look at the markets when these appointments were laeked then announced….they shot up about 800 points…confidence on Wall Street that nothing will change…sorry to be the bearer of bad news.