Re: John Stewart slams MSNBC, CBS, Fox News and CNN for ignoring Ron P
^ Yeah, cause the mainstream theories that "discredited" him are doing such a wonderful job.
If you want to point fingers, I suggest you point them at people like Paul that think perpetual tax cuts, deregulation, and fiscal austerity are the solution to everything. Stay away from monetary policy, because that simply wasn't the problem here. Alan Greenspan, despite being as big of an idiot as Ron Paul, was not the root of this problem. The root was banks not giving a shit about who they loaned money to, because they could pass the entire risk off to the investor class by securitizing their bad loans and getting S&P to rate their feces AAA.
Of course, that's the short answer. The long answer involvs giving almost everyone in the country a slice of the blame (Hoping to flip your house, or ReFi before your ARM resets, or else you lose everything is a dumb way to live). The answer to getting us out of malaise can be summed up even more simply: create demand by deficit spending. New infrastructure. Replace the roads, bridges and metros that are falling apart anyway. Get the construction workers who are otherwise sitting on their asses or working crap jobs at Wal-Mart a job building things again.
Forget the debt/GDP ratio, because quite simply, no one that actually buys T-bills really cares about it. Hell, do you know where all the money went when the Dow dropped 600 points after the S&P downgrade? Investors went and bought T-bills, pushing down yield. Yes, the US got downgraded and the world responded by buying more US debt. They let the US borrow at a 2% interest rate. Since inflation runs 2-3% a year, that means this is
free money. In fact, countries are basically
paying the US government to hold their money. Since the US can still easily afford interest payments (recall that tidbit from the debt ceiling crisis), it should be loading up right now until no one is willing to lend at such an insanely low rate.
THEN and only then (which should be 2-3 years from now when this recession is finally over) do you enact austerity measures and pull back on spending.
None of this involves monetary policy, BTW.
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