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Larry Summers Opens Mouth, Proves All His Critics Are Correct
Larry Summers, whose days in the Obama administration are thankfully numbered, presents the most incoherent rambling defense of our monopoly banking system, yet to appear in the public domain. When asked if US mega banks should be broken up, reports the HuffPo, "Summers said no. He added that it's not significant. But that's not the important issue," Summers said during the interview, adding to his answer as to why the U.S. shouldn't break up megabanks. "[Observers] believe that it would actually make us less stable, because the individual banks would be less diversified and, therefore, at greater risk of failing, because they would haven't profits in one area to turn to when a different area got in trouble. And most observers believe that dealing with the simultaneous failure of many -- many small institutions would actually generate more need for bailouts and reliance on taxpayers than the current economic environment." We dare you to reread the above from Larry the Hutt and not have your frontal lobe disintegrate into antimatter. Sure, 4 out of 5 Goldman CDO traders totally agree that Goldman's monopoly in the capital markets is terrific, and, in fact, if someone could "organize" a liquidity event at RBC, Barclays, UBS and CS, they would really apprciate it, doubly so if, like JPM, they could then acquire the firms for a dollar over their Fed guaranteed debt. As for everybody else, well, if you have any doubt that Larry Summers is having his future personal assistant organizing his corner office at 200 West, he hope this should resolve it.
Yet there may still be hope that not all of America is run by corrupt demagogues. HuffPo writes:
A bill championed by Democratic Senators Ted Kaufman of Delaware, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Robert P. Casey of Pennsylvania and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island proposes to break up financial behemoths. Observers say the proposal is gaining steam.
A test vote in the Senate Budget Committee on Thursday, which essentially would have expressed support for breaking up megabanks, failed by just a 12-10 vote. The small margin was surprising, one Senate aide said.
HuffPost posed the following questions, which were based on Summers's remarks, to the White House:
- Does Mr. Summers and/or the administration wish to see a Canadian-style banking system in the U.S. in which a handful of firms dominate the market in exchange for tougher oversight?
- Does Mr. Summers and/or the administration believe that larger institutions pose less risk to the financial system, due to their diversity?
- And for clarification's sake, how does "the simultaneous failure of many -- many small institutions...actually generate more need for bailouts and reliance on taxpayers than the current economic environment"?
In response, an administration spokesman e-mailed the following statement:
"The Administration has made clear its commitment to comprehensive Wall Street reform. The Administration's approach to ending Too Big To Fail includes stronger, more comprehensive regulation, higher capital requirements, new resolution authority to allow failing firms to fail, and restrictions on the size and scope of financial institutions. We cannot and will not go back to the status quo that caused the financial crisis."
Once the ponzi blows up, we hope that all those "representatives" who voted against Kaufman's bill will have long since moved to non-extradition countries. For their sake.
Fast Forward to the 4:34 mark in the video below:
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I second that, Chindit produces perhaps the best threads in Zero Hedge land and is much appreciated for his insights.
I agree that Chindit is a master of the art. And Tyler is aware of this, because several of his best comments have been promoted to full Articles on the site, where they provided a growth medium for yet more thought-provoking comment threads.
But no voting, please. I can understand the attraction but I think ZH has avoided this for a reason. Sites such as Seeking Alpha have a rating system which I believe tends to encourage groupthink, and often punishes contributors with fresh but discomforting viewpoints.
Thomas Jefferson just rose from the grave special to high-five you.
Get ready to roll peeps. We're about there. It's going down.
Here is how I fight:
I consume nothing. I made a bicycle and ride 30 miles to work. My wife does not work outside the home. We homeschool our kids. We are not rich at all -- quite poor in fact -- but the machine will not get a dime from us, even if we had money to burn.
I fight by not participating in their pillage, not as a reaper and not as the harvest. I don't trust them, I don't like them, I wish them unbounded ill, I would not shed a tear in the case of their demise.
They cannot move forward without our participation, for we are their beasts of burden. Without us they walk. Without us they are nothing.
I am not willinging to bear them, and my children will not.
And if I should meet them on the long road they had best look to the sheltered trees and the deeper shadows then and there for I will surely eat them.
cougar
Second that
Months ago i emptied my current house, sold the old one, sold the apartment, sold the second house, sold all my cars (4 of them). I threw out everything out except for 3 beds, two closets, a sofa, computer and the kitchen. I buy nothing except food and on occasion books which i can not DL on the internet. All my money is in bonds issued by the governments which i support both politically and economically. The rest of my money is in cash and stashed not in a banking account but in a deposit box. I sold the interest in the company which has been started and run by my family. My monthly living expenses (not counting health) amount to 1000$, and im anything but poor. I have put in my will that all my assets (the house i own, money and bonds) be sold and the proceeds from the sale equally distributed among the people i named in my will (none of those are my family and some will be, i am sure, surprised as never in their lives when the letter comes to them that they inherited X euros). Also everything that is left with my name on it or my face on it shall be destroyed by my lawyer once i pass away. The best thing is not to be remembered by a world in which, for most of my life, i wished not to participate in. Free yourself from owning things, free yourself from trying to be remembered, free yourself from the accumulation of ultimately worthless things. Just fucking free yourself. It is reaching a whole new level of existence. I only wish i have done it earlier. Whatever you do, dont try to hard. Its ultimately worthless. This is of course only what i did and what i believe in, not what you should do. And for god sakes, stop caring for petty, worthless things. JUST FUCKING STOP.
The last check I'll ever write will be to the undertaker and it is gonna bounce. Success!
I'd never go back now for any amount of money - Miles
I totally appreciate this. Some of us are wired a little differently, we're built into the system and we want to do something about the system without taking ourselves out of it, including holding people responsible and even getting some emotional satisfaction and enjoyment out of that fact, which is probably less than zen but a guilty pleasure that keeps our system in check (at least it did). Don't forget the rest us is your wisdoms!
Awesome man, just awesome.
Cougar, Cheeky,
I stand on the end of the diving board. I can't jump. I am afraid for what will happen to my kid and my husband if don't keep doing what I do. I am afraid of feeling responsible for making their lives what they might perceive as miserable. I have withdrawn a hell of a lot relative to the rest of the world. Shop good will, only really spend money on good food and wine for the most part. With the house and car paid, no bills, I save a lot (relative to what I came from). I will keep you both in my thoughts. I know what to do, I guess I just don't have versthen with it just yet.
Thanks for the snap shots of your lives.
i am overwhelmed with this community.
Once more pal, all you need to do is what you are doing. Just by being yourself you are providing monumental assistance to the process. Above all, be yourself. It is this aspect, being ourselves and most especially being so in community is the real deal. Just as this enterprise needs CB & Cougar to be themselves, so it needs you to be you. Trust yourself to make better choices than not, I do and I am sure those close to you do too. Remember that all of our separate pathways are important. Stay strong. TRUST YOURSELF TO BE YOURSELF! After all, everyone else is already taken... even if many are temporally lost to themselves. peace
deep thread party people. my kids definitely throw a wrench in the works as which path to take.
No doubt. We each have our own circumstances and from that the pathway to take. It is in each of us following our various paths that will help the person to person aspects of all this.
Just Fucking Stop is the key to all of this. We will be free and they will be chained. You are a great soul Cheeky
Absolutely.
cheers for that, Cheeky. nothing is worth what it seems it is.
"We may already be dead."
It may be that this is us remembering...I have thought that. This is us during the split second before the volcano, nuke, whatever....rehashing the whole situation. It would make sense, especially for us that are hot on the trail of these bastards. WE REMEMBER. See you on the other side.
PS, I know their stupidity too. They lack foresight.
PPS, we are limitless. All of us.
"PPS, we are limitless. All of us."
indeed we are...limitless & worthless
well you made me laugh, in a 'oh, man' way.
I find it amusingly puerile that so many evidently believe "they" have some dastardly plan they are pursuing. It's the negative God-fantasy: It is comforting to believe that Daddy knows all and controls all, even if Daddy is a rat-bastard. Far harder to cope with reality.
"They" do not understand it better than you do. Their plan is to find something that works, then do it over and over until it stops working, at which point due to the fact that there is an astonishing lack of actual good ideas in the world they will probably keep doing it anyway just because they can't do anything else.
There is nothing personal about this--either in effect or cause. There are a dozen Blankfeins, thousands of Fabs out there. Chew them up, and thousands of others are waiting to take their places. It is not a strategy conceived by any cabal, any more than a sound wave is conceived by the molecules that propagate it.
Summers may be fat and flatulent, but I guarantee you he understands this.
and summers will have fun fun fun until daddy take his t-bird away
Right, dat.
This is just how we roll. It's right there in the genome. Kill off the head monkey and there are 10 more monkeys fighting to take his place and do exactly what he did. And mother monkeys are birthing new monkeys every day to keep that going.
Look around you. Monkey crap everywhere, clogging the gutters and storm drains, polluting the air. People's heads full of monkey business.
We need better humans. Or else we need more cats. I can't decide.
http://www.takeitbackday.org/
President Bill Clinton was asked if he thought he got bad advice on regulating complex financial instruments known as derivatives from his former Treasury Secretaries, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. He acknowledged that he was wrong to take the advice of those advising him against regulating derivatives.Phucking absolute & utter MORON! His parents should have stuck to oral s&x and not intercourse!
It's utterly astounding this fucking moron still has ANY position in ANY area of finance, let alone working for the US Government. JUST COMPLETELY INSANE!
First of all, IF ANY FIRM FAILS, IT FAILS! DONE, OVER!
If you fuck up and you fail, you are OUT OF BUSINESS!
NO MORE BAILOUTS EVER!!!!!
FDIC seems to be hitting a stride now...7 more failures reported today, following 8 from last week. Total is 57 so far for the year...on pace for about 185 by end of year. 2009 had 140 failures. The economic recovery is proceeding according to plan.
I wonder sometimes at the measured pace of these announcements. Were this week's failed banks the only ones bad enough to call? Or does the FDIC have a much longer list of bad (not just "troubled") banks, to be parcelled out at a calculated rate below the public's attention threshold?
To grasp how significant this five-fold bubble increase is, let's put that $516 trillion in the context of some other domestic and international monetary data:
U.S. annual gross domestic product is about $15 trillion
U.S. money supply is also about $15 trillion
Current proposed U.S. federal budget is $3 trillion
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/derivatives-are-the-new-ticking-time-bomb
Goldman and the billions pale in comparison to JP Morgan and the Trillions...
The push to stiffle any recovery to maintain oil prices...
The recalibration of the world markets, to maintain trade...
Looks like... Utility Output Slows the Increase in Industrial Production
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/blog/Industrial%2520Production%2520March%25202010.pdf
The dog and pony show that has everyone jumping is not where the real problem is and / or will be.
larry summers is a bucket of horse shit....his passage from this earth can come none too soon....may he die a horrible death.....
Summers' statement can only be seen as:
"the broad masses more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small one"
(Not on ZH though...)
So Larry Summer is saying we should have a single global bank to ensure financial safety?! This is so strange.
As late as March 1998, the Clinton Treasury under Robert Rubin was publicly opposing HR 10, the Financial Services Competition Act, a year-earlier version of Gramm-Leach-Bliley, which did not pass. Summers took over from Rubin in July 1999, and reversed Treasury policy to actively support repeal of Glass-Steagall. When that was done, on Nov. 17, 1999, he immediately hailed it. "Today," Summers crowed, "Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression, and replaced them with a system for the 21st century. This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy."
President Clinton has recently admitted that the repeal of Glass-Steagall was the worst mistake of his Administration, and Rubin said, in his autobiography, that he would have "gone slower" with financial derivatives—but his deputy Larry Summers kept comparing the superiority of these "financial weapons of mass destruction" to that of the new graphite tennis rackets over their wooden predecessors.
Summers was not only the seminal influence in the repeal of Glass-Steagall, but assisted Greenspan and pushed Rubin, in 1999, to stop opposing the fantastic explosion of derivatives contracts. The so-called "notional value" of these derivatives was already then reaching the tens of trillions; it reached the quadrillion level by late 2008, before vast batches of these contracts suddenly became worthless.
In early 1999, Summers learned of a plan by Brooksley Born, chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), to regulate derivatives and force them to be traded only on registered exchanges. Summers immediately called Born and dressed her down, reportedly, shouting and badgering. He said that any move to regulate derivatives would cost the United States billions in lost financial business, and cause international chaos. He marshalled calls from major bankers opposing Born. And Summers got Rubin to write a letter to Born saying the regulation of derivatives by the CFTC would be illegal. Summers and Greenspan called Born to the Treasury for further dressing down.
When all this failed to stop the CFTC chairwoman, Summers and Greenspan got Congress to stop her by passing the Commodities Future Modernization Act of 2000. This act mandated that financial derivatives could be traded over the counter by financial institutions without regulations.
At least now I understand why we went into Iraq to free the ruler from his oil. We apparently really needed it to tide us over when the dollar collapses and we transition to a new monetary system. The reckoning hour of Nixon's deed on Aug. 15, 1971 is upon us. The 'smartest guys in the room' are now babbling incoherent evil rubbish like Linda Blair possessed.
How Larry Summers lost Harvard $1.8 billion
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/11/29/how-larry-summers-lost-harvard-18-billion/
Really need to know why Obama would pick Clinton failures to do the most important job he was elected for. Staged hug of little Timmy, whilst Summers overseeing in aisle, at State of the Union, sent shudders. He was bank enabler at NY Fed. He is now adjusting to his new role, and may actually understand enabling may now be discouraged.
FYI all on taxes going up in 2011...http://www.cnbc.com/id/36736921
DOW chart threatening to break out.
MARKET UPDATES:
http://www.zerohedge.com/forum/latest-market-outlook-0
Let's think about it this way.
The previous president of Harvard....fired from Harvard.... highly responsible for the loss of a significant portion of all the funds given to it by other people, in addition to firing people that did not agree with the decisions that lead to these massive losses ? And to this day , has not been held accountable for the losses at Harvard, and even to this day....has not been appreciative of those people that were fired becaused they did not like the risks that were causal of the massive losses at Harvard ....
And via Shaw offered derivative based products to other sovereign govt. funds....and said it was a proper strategy even while these very instruments were already failing at Bear Stearns ....
What does this suggest about Summers ?
he belongs in a kitchen trash compactor?
Taxation with fu$ked up representation.
I have finally come out of the closet to join the community. Thank you for the privilege. We have so many fantastic contributors on this site. Keep up the good work.
Larry Summer's is a complete fucking imbecile.
In the real world, we have a simple formula
That's it Folks. 'No New Tale to Tell'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVFMTBcMBRs&feature=PlayList&p=5E889BBCCDC51EAE&playnext_from=PL&playnext=2&index=16
Welcome. And a modest suggestion, for newbies and veterans alike: when you are done typing, just hit Save. No need for 2 screen inches of trailing line feeds.
ZH, please keep posting so I can remember which way is up.
It' not as complicated as you all think. Three hundred years ago, debt based currency was actually a very good idea, because it did provide a useful accounting of value that grew relative to productivity, at a time when economic measures were otherwise non-existent.
unfortunately the flaws in the model are becoming terminal, as the entire productive aspects of the economy are subverted to create more debt based wealth, rather than stable productive growth and the dispersed wealth able to absorb it.
Yes, the system is going to crash, but hopefully we now have the computational abilities to create a truly productivity based currency, since money is drawing rights to productivity, which is the real basis of value. Not debt and not any one commodity, such as gold.
The Elite want the system to crash. This is all by design. The next monetary generation will protect you in ways you never thought of.
bwahahahahaha
IBM RFID Commercial - The Future Market
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eob532iEpqk
Many grazing sheep forget to use simple math.
http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/home.aspx
One more thing. Once you realize that this red/blue thing dosen't really exist, and that the TV personalities job is to fuel the blame came and polarize us, your life will change.
I really enjoy watching some TV news once in awhile or reading the Journal with my propanganda sensitive (pick up) glasses on. One side is a blue lense, the other side a red lense.
TIME magizine is my favorite for seeing what the propangandists are up to. SOmetimes you even get future forecasts if you know how to read inbetween the lines.
TIME will tell you the future and what to think about it. I read TIME to see what THE plan has in store for all of us peasants.
@ There's something deeper going on here.
???
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=10470948
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."