A porcupine with a bad head cold taking excessive amounts of tranquilizers after watching a 24 hour marathon of Beavis and Butthead episodes could have figured out that keeping interest rates low was a good thing to do recently.
Then again, Big Ben learned from the person who really caused this mess and that is his predecessor, Big Al Greenspan.
Al and his briefcase, that probably had a baloney sandwich in it, kept rates very high earlier in the decade and then did not see the regulations that needed to be put into place to keep the economy real late in his term.
From then on, he thought he was more important than Jesus (sorry, John Lennon).
We will look back on this decade as a time that we were lucky we didn’t get into trouble earlier but hopefully, we can get out of it and return people to work, have them buy homes and give them logical loans.
BTW, It’s been written that Greespam (not a misspelling) actually had an Option Arm on his house. Makes you wonder.
Mike
December 19, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Don’t keep me in suspence, throw out a few names that you do like for the gig, if not Ben.
Joe Loomer
December 20, 2009 at 8:49 am
Seems to me Al and Ben had nothing to do with passing the Community Reinvestment Act, the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, or the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 – all of which laid the groundwork for what happened in 2006.
Would I keep Ben in there given the choice? No, but there’s plenty of stupidity out there to fall back on if he’s gone, and they’re back in power.
Navy Chief, Navy Pride
Matthew Rathbun
December 20, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Al and Ben were to blame? Really, I thought greed and lack of education on behalf of well…everyone was to blame.
Ken Montville
December 21, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Hey, Fred, I’m with Mike. Any recommendations?
I’m not that enamored of Ben, either, but he’s kept us from going completely belly up. Al “I was wrong” Greenspan was just out-of-control. You’re right that he began to believe his press clippings a bit too much. Then, again, I’ve never had his libertarian leanings.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens when interest rates inevitably start to rise. I don’t think all the money on Wall Street can delay it too much longer. Who knows? Maybe we’ll just let the Chinese run the show.
Fred Glick
December 21, 2009 at 4:26 pm
I”ll tell you what Ken, if I could arrange it, I would have the Bank of China buy all our mortgage paper direct and eliminate Fannie, Freddie, Ben and AG Cuomo!