Shocking news. A representative from the banking industry praises the looting of the taxpayers to benefit his industry. The Chief Economist for the Mortgage Bankers Association (who’s a former Federal Reserve governor) has announced that “without TARP money, without the Federal Reserve program, without the fiscal stimulus programs, the unemployment rate would not be 9.6 percent, but 19.6 percent,” Really? And what computer modeling is this based on? The same computer modeling that totally failed to predict the economic collapse? Just checking. Now, I can’t say for sure that unemployment wouldn’t have hit 19 percent at some point had the government actually stopped doing the exact same things that caused the collapse, but I’m always a bit skeptical when I hear these confident statements from economists who have no idea what would have actually happened had the Congress and Goldman Sachs not looted the taxpayers for trillions of dollars.
Every time I hear this “we prevented the apocalypse” mantra I’m reminded of the “the surge worked in Iraq” mantra that the Republicans are so fond of repeating like a magic spell. “The surge” was never anything more than PR, and since “victory” in Iraq is totally unmeasurable, we can just repeat the phrase over and over until we convince some people that we actually know what we’re talking about. The same applies to “the bailouts worked” mantra. Just keep frantically repeating the phrase until some people start to believe it. And by “people” I mean anyone who isn’t an economist for a bank or auto maker or real estate trade association.
