As the DOW hit 9000 for the first time since January, NBC’s “Today” refused to give up its crusade against big banks. Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC appeared on July 24 to offer his opinion on what caused the economic crisis and what needs to be done in order to prevent another.
Not surprisingly, his answer to one of these questions was government regulation. And here’s a shocker, it was not the answer to the first. Ratigan came out swinging against the bank’s greed that supposedly brought the American economy into “total collapse, essentially” as host Meredith Vieira worded it.
Ratigan blamed the banks for the economic crisis and portrayed the bailout as the saving grace of the American people: “…the banking rules allowed our banks to create trillions of dollars in risk in order for the people running those banks to pay themselves billions of dollars. The American taxpayer is now responsible for the terrible decisions of those people, but those decisions of those people created so much risk that the American people and the American government felt it had no choice but to take that risk away.”
And as banks record record profits and the DOW hits 9000, Ratigan and Vieira seemed ready to bet on greed bringing the system down again. “We also haven’t created a system where that won’t happen again,” Vieira pointed out to Ratigan. Ratigan agreed.
“That’s the thing that frustrates me the most,” he complained, “It’s as if we just inflated the airbag in a car that ran off the road into a ditch, but no one wants to talk about why the car just ran off the road into the ditch. Don’t confuse the airbag with the solution. The solution is to fix the system; the airbag was there to prevent us from being eaten by a bad system. We need to create a good system.”
His way of creating a good system? “[T]he American people have to reform the way our government makes rules for banks, the way our government makes rules for health, and other things.” In other words, the American people need to give government more power to save them from themselves with increased regulation on businesses, banks, and every aspect of so-called free enterprise. Otherwise, there’s nothing between us and “the disastrous practices that were being exhibited on Wall Street”
Yet Vieira and Ratigan both ignore the fact that the system did not break itself, but rather the government pushed the system until it cracked under the weight of all the regulations already imposed, regulations such as CRA, Sarbanes-Oxely, and of course the famed government creation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Yet to Rattigan, and most of the mainstream media, government intervention solved the problem, not created it. And even more government intervention is the only way to curb the horrid greed of the free market.
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Re Reasons for Meltdown
July 24, 2009 - 13:41 ET by slickwillie2001I noticed that this early-July report on the reasons for the financial meltdown went largely unreported by the liberal media, likely because it did not parrot the PC-narrative that the meltdown was caused by "Wall Street greed" or any of their other usual suspects:
Federal Government Was Culprit in Housing and Economic Crisis: http://www.cnsnews.com
"Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were the chief culprits in the housing crisis because they encouraged people who could not afford payments to borrow money, according to a congressional report released Tuesday [July 7th]."
So, Fannie and Freddie are
July 24, 2009 - 21:07 ET by b4m4wySo, Fannie and Freddie are guilty. How about those who got the payoffs go to court, loose 'their' house(s), pay back all of those unearned bonuses.
Government's first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.
Ronald Reagan
Those people , those people...
July 24, 2009 - 13:48 ET by upcountrywaterYou should name them...The banking queen and chris dodd.
And the gang at hud
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Department of
Housing and Urban Development today announced new federal regulations
that require the nation's two largest housing finance companies to buy
$2.4 trillion in mortgages during the next 10 years to provide
affordable housing for about 28.1 million low- and moderate-income
families.
I bookmarked your "regulations" link , good one.
Almost no one I talk to gets it!
Reagan VS Liberalism
Ratigan, just the latest in MSNBC's conga line of asshats.
July 24, 2009 - 18:23 ET by CTRatigan is just the latest asshat in MSNBC's parade of obnoxious leftwing asshats. MSNBC has gone beyond doubling down on asshats and is apparently trying to corner the market.
Schuster, Matthews, Schultz, Olbermann and the Mancow
The dirty little secret
July 24, 2009 - 14:48 ET by KC MulvilleYou can't pass a law and make everyone safe.
The only way to guarantee safety is to remove all freedom. Instead, we've traditionally balanced safety and freedom with prudent regulations ... but no one should think that regulations guarantee anything. It's still a crapshoot.
It's scary to realize that mommy won't make everything better if things go wrong. It is scary, and it's supposed to be. That's why the market doesn't encourage all risks. It only encourages smart ones. If Ratigan and Vieira think that we can regulate the economy so that it will always be safe, well, they're just idiots.
Besides, as I understand it, there already were regulations agains working on unsafe margins. They weren't enforced, or people found loopholes. The smart move is not to create more regulations, but to enforce and tighten the ones already in place.
KC, Here's an economic
July 24, 2009 - 16:14 ET by Chris NormanKC,
Here's an economic regulation the liberals in Congress would like:
a federal law that makes recessions illegal and bars their occurence.
The "Mainstream" Media: By liberals. For liberals.
Now why didn't we think of that?
July 24, 2009 - 17:15 ET by KC MulvilleBecause as well know, convenience is a right!
Dylan Ratigan is right - regulation did lead to the crisis..
July 24, 2009 - 16:21 ET by Gary HallDylan Ratigan is correcto - regulation did lead to the crisis.. and it was government greed that led to the crisis.
Can you say, "Give me a bubble?" It's right here:
HUD regulations. Greed by the likes of Cuomo, Clinton and Obama.
The fed greatly assisted HUD in creating the housing bubble.
And yes, most everyone else jumped on the bandwagon. Banks and mortgage companies (Countrywide Financial, etc.) had to help HUD's orders to Fannie to push business. Wall Street had to sell the debt instruments, and AIG needed to insure them.
As Obama said to Brian Williams in Sep't 2007:
Obama: Well, I uh, think there are a lot of folks who have to take some responsibility. The original idea was a good one, which was, let's if we can distribute risk more broadly and make it easier to provide loans to people who otherwise might not be able to get it [them].
Government Intervention
July 24, 2009 - 17:14 ET by aixnpainsGimme a frickin' break. Increased government intervention breeds inefficiency and loss of individual freedom. Heck, government could not even manage a house of ill repute on a military base with bacnkrupting it. Ratigan should emigrate to Red China.
One useless man is an idiot, two is a law firm and three or more is a Congress. - John Adams
July 24, 2009 - 17:30 ET by jessieHIf you want to know who's to blame, look to the people in office who have been there the longest. If they let this go by without noticing, what good are they. Hey, Waxman, you listening? Murtha? Frank? Kennedy?
Real Reason for Dow 9000
July 25, 2009 - 11:41 ET by Dr_LibertyThe biggest killer to the economy right now is uncertainty -- uncertainty based upon the rate of inflation to expect in the coming months, tax rates, and a whole set of new rules on how to run your business including health care. Businesses don't want to make long or even medium-term investments when they don't know if those investments will pay off. That includes hiring workers.*
It was about a week or week and a half ago that serious doubts started surfacing about whether Obamacare would pass. This is when the uptick began. The bigger the doubts on a day-by-day basis, the bigger the rally was. When O basically caved in on getting it done by August, the Dow had its biggest rally.
* I am aware that other factors are at play too, including the rise in the minimum wage -- largely affecting low-skilled, teen labor. However, the rise in the minimum wage was easily anticipated and has been built into hiring decisions months ago.
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