Main stream media really must hate Taibbi. This forces them to follow up. If this was just a blog somewhere it would be ignored.

Well, the buying of toxic assets, still about $1 trillion and over, was the Fed. I don't buy that if they had not, the world would have collapsed.

How about putting it this way, if Bernanke was head of the Treasury instead of Geithner, would we have China labeled a currency manipulator by now?

This "article" is filled with lies and half-truths. The truth is these greedy union bastards want to keep sucking at the public teat, regardless of the fact that the state is broke. I commend Governor Walker for standing up to the union thugs and the criminal Democraps.

We're at a point where the 'work out' options are punitive for the victims of decades of fraud by both parties. The foremost among the frauds are the fake wars. Viet Nam was based on a bald faced lie regarding the precipitant, the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Gulf War I was the war to save fat cat sheiks based on a melodrama before Congress where the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter lied about seeing babies thrown out of basinettes by Iraqi soldiers.  We all know about Gulf War II and the phantom WMD and doctored National Intelligence estimate that actually said the only way Hussein was a threat was if we attacked him.

In addition to the fake wars for profit (which killed and injured millions), we have the various bubbles and bailout swindles and the annual pilfering of Social Security payroll taxes to fund everything that doesn't pay for itself.  The majority of citizens provide the cash flow for the elite who poach off of it in the form of government contracts from wars and whatever else they can bilk us for.

It is totally unacceptable to think that this has to be paid for by us.  At the same time, something has to be done to make sense out of the financial system and create an equitable outcome for those who got screwed.   That means an entirely new financial system where this insanity and theft gets written off the books and derivatives vanish from the scene altogether at no cost to the people.

Barnanke is doing what he's doing because the idiots in Congress and the White House, plus the Federalist society funded cohort of rubberstamp judges, are afraid to do anything other than steal as much as they can shove in their pockets.  He's like the one neat, organized guy living in "Animal House."  It won't work because the mess is so pervasive and the players stay the same, regardless of how poor their performance is.  Bernanke is the Best of the Worst.  Ultimately, he can't do anything other than temporize in increasingly desperate ways to counteract the thieves who permeate the system.

Redo the whole system without any of the identifiable crooks and Mandarins.  Don't bother charging and trying the perpetrators.  Just take their ill gotten gains and declare them personna non grata.  I have no intention of paying for their mistakes, allowing my family to do so, or remaining quiet while another great heist occurs.  I'm not alone.  In fact, I'm in the not-so-quiet majority.

I think the difference here is I was focused on capital flows, China, "easy money", the never ending requirement by VCs to FIRE to invest, build, manufacture in China.....before the "sham" as you aptly put it.

I feel this speech is focused on those issues, versus the "no exit strategy" and "toxic assets" pumping up their "value" and things more having to do with bail outs.

If the U.S. doesn't do something about China, truly we are in deep do do and this would be true before a fictional CDS with upteam buyers placing bets on one fictional CDO with hidden condemned properties and dead people home owners.

I know it's quite popular to rail on Bernanke and believe the globe will blow up in inflation and the U.S. standard of living is in the toilet and so on.

That said, strange as it is, I find myself, not so much defending QE2 but believing Bernanke had no choice because of the inaction of our government...

I wouldn't have said that even a year ago and sure still will not say that on Federal Reserve actions with Financial Armageddon, buying MBSes, toxic assets and loans.

I notice EPers ignore the possibility he may just be right, but this is about the 3rd speech where Bernanke's words, at least for everything I've been looking at, match the statistics, facts and history.

Seriously, it's a very good paper and speech and I hope people read them and consider them.

We are considered a news source, which is why I have been so demanding on content quality, citations, references, fact checking.

Therefore, you can write the Journalist level article on EP to counter the never ending and very obviously bought media, especially most of cable noise. They never ending set up "non-debate" "debate" on cable noise with a few nonsensical Pundits, arguing over non-existent points on a bed of lies of the actual facts.

i.e. it's about the Wisconsin budget, when it clearly is not about the Wisconsin budget since this has no effect.

We can pick almost any issue and show examples of the non-debate debate to drown out any real investigative reporting and facts.

The only request is to validate data, sources as much as one can directly. In other words, if citing another person's article, and numbers, even graphs, try to check the methods and sources.

I find dealing with anything the CBO says, in particular, very numerically in the weird. For myself, I am more and more checking methods, trying to discover actual error rates, assumptions, the std. deviation, if a distribution is normal and all sorts of "in it" statistics and so on when it comes to overviewing eocnomic reports and data.

but, it can be done. Right now, like no other time in history has so much raw information and data been publicly available via a hand gesture/click of a mouse.

Big win for tax reform: Wal-Mart’s real-estate tax
scam is now illegal
http://www.wisconsinsfuture.org/publications_pdfs/newsletter/may08newlet...
I could not find a direct quote on Wal-Mart in Walker's new Budget Repair Bill. The above article was about the previous governor who closed a Wal-Mart loop-hole. The general idea is that corporations pay almost no tax in Wisconsin. In the Budget Repair Bill they say new corporate tax measures are to be detailed later. The idea was to cut government workers to pay for corporate tax benefits and also destroy union rights (government and private) to negotiate for workers. No mention was made of the ability of the Chamber of Commerce to organize companies and charge an annual fee. I will keep working on documenting new corporate benefits in the Wisconsin "Budget Repair Bill". I did quote a blogger from Wisconsin and should have included a reference.

The deficit Walker created was mostly given as a tax break to Wal-Mart. The prevention of collective bargaining extends to all union workers throughout Wisconsin. Ads prepared for this campaign in all the new red states were on the air before Wisconsin and Ohio began their "tea party" agenda. This is a well-funded, well-organized political attack to regain the government in 2012 and establish US, Inc. Democrats need to act fast and not depend on the MSM for news. Watch Maddow and Schultz on msnbc.