{"id":19586,"date":"2015-02-11T09:43:18","date_gmt":"2015-02-11T14:43:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=19586"},"modified":"2015-02-11T09:43:18","modified_gmt":"2015-02-11T14:43:18","slug":"geithner-the-end-of-capitalism-as-we-know-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2015\/02\/11\/geithner-the-end-of-capitalism-as-we-know-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Geithner: \u201cThe End of Capitalism as We Know It\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

New Economic Perspectives<\/em> has the article Geithner: \u201cThe End of Capitalism as We Know It\u201d<\/a> by William K. Black.\u00a0 Black makes a couple of important points.<\/p>\n

First he talks about an item in David Axelrod’s new book.<\/p>\n

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… the finance guys argued that retroactive steps to claw back the money would have violated existing contracts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\nNotice that there is a contradiction in the description of the issue. Preventing banks that received bailouts from paying future bonuses is not \u201cclawing back\u201d bonuses. Clawing back bonuses means recovering bonuses that were improperly paid based on false accounting statements that massively overstated bank income. Neither of the practices I have described would have \u201cviolated existing contracts.\u201d The people that \u201cviolated existing contracts\u201d were the bankers who massively inflated reported net income in order to collect massive bonuses while the bank suffered huge losses and the bankers that made massive bonuses by leading frauds that ripped off customers. Both forms of fraud invalidate any contractual claim by the managers to bonuses. Bankers should not get paid in full under normal bankruptcy provisions when they run the bank into insolvency (including a liquidity crisis).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Second is his comment about capitalism as we know it.<\/p>\n

Anyone that wants to save \u201ccapitalism\u201d must destroy the current corrupt system \u201cwe know\u201d that is posing as \u201ccapitalism.\u201d To sum it up, there was no greater service that the Obama administration could have done for (real) capitalism than to produce \u201cthe end of capitalism as we know it.\u201d Geithner was absolutely right in his diagnosis and absolutely wrong in his response. Wall Street hates \u201ccapitalism\u201d \u2013 Geithner and Summers acted to save, rather than exorcize, its corrupt doppelg\u00e4nger.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The supporters in Congress of the oligarchs claim to be supporters of capitalism and free markets, when, in truth, they support no such things.\u00a0 They actually support oligarchy and controlled markets as long as the oligarchs are in control of the markets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New Economic Perspectives has the article Geithner: \u201cThe End of Capitalism as We Know It\u201d by William K. Black.\u00a0 Black makes a couple of important points. First he talks about an item in David Axelrod’s new book. … the finance guys argued that retroactive steps to claw back the money would have violated existing contracts. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-19586","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19586"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19587,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19586\/revisions\/19587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}