Bill Bergman emails:
The GAO has come out with an estimate of the cost of the financial crisis. Here in Illinois, the former Comptroller of Dixon, Illinois (Ronnie Reagan's hometown) was just sentenced for stealing $53 million from the town.
Below is a pie chart with two slices, the black slice is $53 million and the orange slice is the GAO estimate of the cost of the financial crisis ($22 trillion)
Note: Bill assures me that somewhere in the pie chart below is a tiny slice, at scale, of the $53 million stolen by the comptroller. Who would you rather deal with, the crooked comptroller or the crony banksters?
We should keep in mind that the GAO's calculation is merely a decade's difference between reality and what the majority assumed in 2007 would continue forever. The $22 trillion is a future prosperity that never could have happened, unless Bernanke kept inflating without stop. We would then surely have been $22 trillion richer in dollar terms, though most goods would have skyrocketed as well.
ReplyDeleteWe should also not forget that most of this $22 trillion was 'lost' by the banksters themselves! They have most of the paper wealth, so it is logical to assume that they would have gained the most through the inflation of these 'assets'.
She got 19 years, 7 months. She did say she was 'truly sorry.' On the financial market side, how many of those folks have said that? Let alone meant that?
ReplyDeleteLots of ambiguity in these estimates, to be sure. How do you measure the lost potential in output growth, for instance, and responsibly relate it to the 'inflated' growth in spending and home values before the crisis arrived? Still, tho, lets just note this MASSIVE problem in recent years, well, I'm not going to go on right now. Except to note that the folks on the financial side include all those guys that made massive amounts of money before the crisis, and that they have friends in 'government' (broadly speaking)
ReplyDeleteJack Lew got $1,000,000. As he said, it was an amount inline with compensation expectations in his line of "work."
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