The Bear-Sterns Bail-Out is (Bill) Clinton's Fault

So says Robert D. Novak in his op-ed in today's Washington Post:

The Federal Reserve's unprecedented bailout of Bear Stearns was crafted not at the White House or the Treasury but in secret by a New York central banker whose name is unknown to Washington power brokers and who was a Clinton administration presidential appointee.

(snip)

The plan pressed by Timothy F. Geithner, president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, effectively substitutes the central bank for the market in determining financial outcomes.

(snip)

Quick action last week when Bear Stearns was going under contrasted sharply with the normally glacial pace of the U.S. government. Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan's scholarly successor as Federal Reserve chairman, of course approved the bailout (as did Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson). But the initiator was the 46-year-old Geithner, who as head of the New York Fed maintains a traditionally intimate relationship with Wall Street. Neither a banker nor an economist, Geithner left Kissinger Associates in 1988 at age 27 to go to work at the Treasury and began an uninterrupted career in government service; he was promoted in 1999 by Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to undersecretary for international affairs.

Geithner's plan to open the Fed's discount window for the first time to non-banks stunned the financial community but received little attention from a Congress in recess, including presidential candidates preoccupied with Iraq. John McCain was traveling there, while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama exchanged barbs over who was more antiwar. An influential statement of support for the bailout came from Sen. Charles Schumer, who heads both the Joint Economic Committee of Congress and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Although Schumer is not known for nonpartisanship, he is a New Yorker who is close to the securities industry.

The reaction in the hinterland was far less favorable. The Washington office of the Independent Community Bankers of America was flooded by members from across the country complaining of discriminatory favoritism toward their big-city brethren. If they had blundered into financial failure, the community banks said, they would not be bailed out but would be investigated and prosecuted. "Too big to fail," therefore, becomes "too big to be punished."

The expense of such an intervention is not a problem because the Fed, unlike the president and Congress, can print money. The Bear Stearns bailout, approved in private by unelected officials, contributes to paranoid grievances on the left and right that built support for Ron Paul's presidential candidacy. A Fed official conceded privately this week that "we may have crossed a line" in jumping into Bear Stearns -- and that is an understatement. There is no doubt that the U.S. economy is in uncharted territory, with reverberations that cannot be forecast.

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So, despite the Republicans' eight year hold on executive power, despite Bush's appointment of the new Fed chief Bernanke and his approval by a Republican Congress, and despite the presence of a Republican appointee at the head of the Treasury Department, the bail out of Bear-Stearns is really Bill Clinton's fault, for having appointed the head of the NY Fed Reserve Bank. That's some pretty serious flim-flam.

I also got a kick out of Novak's sudden alarm at what foreigners think of American public policy decisions:

"It's a new day," commented one investor and longtime Fed watcher. Around the world, that day's dawning is viewed with apprehension because of election-year rhetoric from America.

Apparently, if the issue is human rights abuses in American prisons in foreign countries, or the establishment of an extra-legal prison Gitmo, or the invasion of a sovereign country that isn't a threat to us or anyone else, it doesn't matter what people in other countries think. But when the issue is Money (That's What I Want), than foreign opinion does matter, after all.

Head and Shoulders Above

I should probably wait for the talking heads, pundits and Internetters to tell me what to think of Obama's speech, as written, but having just read it, I'll go ahead and give my impressions.

In short, I think it's his best moment of the campaign, a thrilling--yes thrilling--example of his appeal. It is a Lincolnesque speech by a Lincolnesque candidate from the Land of Lincoln. It is explanatory without being unnecessarily defensive.

It is transcentory and transformative in its outlook and hopes. It is broad-minded, and like Lincoln, equanimous in its acknowledgment of the challenges and prejudices of the working people. It is subtly critical of the media culture and of right-wing media in particular.

It reminds me a bit of the fictional former Governor Picker, who in Primary Colors, steps in to fill the role of a candidate struck down during the primaries by a heart attack. Candidate Picker calls for calm among his new-found enthusiasts, and laments the way news and politics is packaged so that candidates spend more time attacking each other than in confronting the nation's problems. Picker immediately brings a certain dignity to an increasingly undignified campaign and country.

There are items of the speech I could quible with. But they are minor. It is overall lofty yet wisely practical and connected to the wider country, and not just about him.

It is a home-run, a speech head and shoulders above that which could be given by either of the other remaining candidates.

There's also a chance that the furor over Wright's comments could have a positive effect, as the speech provides an opportunity for Obama to illustrate the nature of the problems facing the country, whether racial, economic, or (as poorly exemplified by its media) the popular culture. And it makes Obama more real, his rhetoric less dreamy and more rooted to everyday concerns, than would have otherwise been the case.

Conspiracy Theories

I haven't scrogged through all the sermons of Reverand Wright proliferating on the Internets and which are causing such consternation among our chattering classes who apparently have never spent any time listening to conservative hate radio or sat in on any right-wingish hate sermons by popular white Christians (evangelical and Roman Catholic), many of whose rantings can be watched daily on the various religious cable teevee stations (TBN, DayStar, Inspiration, EWTN) that adorn most cable packages, or noticing the showers of love our political elite has poured upon each for decades.

And while Wright's bit about HIV being a government conspiracy is certainly offensive and nutty, I'm not sure it's any worse than being told that there is a homosexual lobby plotting the destruction of the family or that America has been a sponsor of a kilo-sized holocaust of baby killings or that if elected John Kerry and his Democrat party would confiscate all the Bibles from faithful right-wingers or that for thousands of years trillions of human souls, if not bodies, have been burning in hell and that a large proportion of the billion human souls alive today will also be destroyed by hell fire or that Russian, China, Iran and other enemies of American and Israel are set to launch a nuclear war against Jerusalem.