Wednesday, October 08, 2008

The crisis came out smokin', but Bernanke ain't jokin'

It just might shock ya and amaze ya???

Well (with apologies to M. Ali) I don't know about the last bit, but Ben certainly has been doing everything he can (and more?) to take on the financial crisis. The Fed has pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the market, started directly lending to firms, and now, in coordination with the Bank of England and the ECB, has cut the Fed Funds rate from 2% to 1.5%. There's not much more he can do beyond selling apples outside the Fed building, is there?

Meanwhile Paulson has named an ex-Goldman Sachs guy to run the mighty official bailout.

With the bailout plan seemingly DOA (it's passage seemed, if anything, to trigger the market selloff), Ben is pretty much the guy for fixing things around here.

One other thing, when did Bush resign as President? Did I miss that somehow?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

W is workin' hard, or hardly workin', does it really make much difference?

I am most surprised by how little the press understands DC. Now the the Treasury has this authority, it still needs to issue rules and regulations for how to exercise it's new powers. This takes years! Just forming a new agency, and get it up an running at a base level will be 6-12 months.

Combine this with a prez election and the fact that Paulson will be out of work in a few months, not much is going to get done between now and January.

This is truly an absurd scenario from my perspective here in the nation's capital. To me, is as if Congress declared war, then told the administration to build an army. Great, the invasion/bailout should begin the sometime next decade - and that is fast for dc.