SEPTEMBER 11, 2008: AMERICAN PUTSCH?

With the recession, and President Obama’s subsequent stimulus debacle, dominating the media, recent revelations about the true origins of the financial crisis have been (deliberately?) ignored. Contrary to popular perception, the recession and the crisis in the financial markets are two separate and distinct events even though the effects of one affects the other. If you will recall, in September we were led to believe that a financial disaster was imminent. The President, at the urging of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, insisted that drastic action had to be taken immediately or the financial markets would collapse. The stock market plunged and trillions of dollars in value just evaporated. Therefore congress, in a rush, passed the 700 billion dollar bank bailout known as the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). Although most of us “informed” citizens are aware of the long term root causes of the financial collapse (the Community Reinvestment Act and the toxic assets it spawned) this in and of itself would not have presented its effects as an emergency of such dire proportions. These assets had been fermenting for decades awaiting a flame to ignite them. Now the revelations are coming forth…

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