Is Paul Volcker Looking For a Job?

I know Ben Benanke has already been confirmed as fed chief again, but when I read Paul Volcker's article in The New York Times, he really dances around the concept of "too big to fail". He really doesn't, in my estimation, make a good case for bailing out banks, or any other private entity. Just that "Aggressive action by governments and central banks — really unprecedented in both magnitude and scope — has been necessary to revive and maintain market functions." He really doesn't disagree with Obama much, and doesn't really offer a solution other than "protection against the outliers".  While we should limit the possible effect hedge markets have on banking, I do not see the need to bail the banks out in the future. They will have learned nothing from this experience. May be banking and hedge funds need to be separate entities, and have rules about what can be invested in hedge funds along with how and who. The hedge funds inversely leveraged the debt to the point of it being toxic to everyone. It's like turning a stick of dynamite into a 50 megaton bomb.


What is missing here is a solution that the banks should have come up with as opposed to having their hand out. It wasn't forthcoming. Volcker either is pitching for a future seat as chairman of the fed when Bernanke get the bus backed over him, or he's trying to stay on the inside with Obama. Nothing really changes in either case. It's more of the Wesley Mouch big government largesse to banks at our expense and detriment. We do not exist because of banks, but the reverse, and the same can be said of the government. It's about time corporations and government recognize the proper relationship and realize they serve us, not themselves. We also have to take responsibility for voting in self-absorbed, self-agrandizing, and selfish politicians that pass acts like the CRA, and go after corporations because they will not operate outside of good business practices. Lest's be clear here: The government enable people at large to borrow money they knew they could not pay back, and live beyond their means for a short while. The banks followed suit because of fear of being litigated against or in violation or the CRA. On top of this we had government lending institutions like freddie and fannie leading the way with bad lending practices, and then when the shit hit the fan, the bad loans were securitized into instruments the hedge funds tried to bury, there you have the stick of dynamite transmogrified into tsar bomba. To add to it, politicians like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd to mention only two, benefited with special preferential loans fro lending institutions. The only people left out in the cold to clean up afterwards were the american people not caught up in the mortgage bubble mania.

We don't don't need Paul Volcker or Ben Bernanke. We certainly don't need Alan Greenspan. If Milton Friedman was alive, I'd say give him a shot, but he's dead. If it were up to me, I'd have a sit down with Dr. Thomas Sowell and ask him what he thought. Too bad it isn't up to me, because now we'll have the FDR II show for the next 3 years. We remember how that went.

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