Neil Barofsky, the former regulator tasked with policing banker bailouts in the Bush administration’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) told talk show host Bill Moyers another major banking crash is now “inevitable” because neither of the political parties have the stomach to end “too big to fail.”
I trust what this man is saying, and I admire his honesty and integrity. He tells us how it is on the inside with the big money players and government. He was frustrated in trying to do the job he was hired to do when so many government officials were telling him not to rock the boat in taking his job too seriously.
Reprinted from The Raw Story. Images selected and added by Ray
“This was the government policy created by the architects, Ben Bernanke who is chair of Federal Reserve, Tim Geithner, who was then the president of the New York Fed before becoming Treasury Secretary, and Hank Paulson,” he explained, describing the Bush administration’s actions during the 2008 economic crisis. “Their solution originally was to further concentrate the industry, to make the too big to fail banks bigger.”
That’s a policy the Obama administration has mostly continued, placing only modest limits on the debt load financial institutions are allowed carry, but neglecting broader reforms like restoring the long-standing firewall between checking and savings accounts and the big banks’ more risky ventures on Wall Street.
It’s not as if there isn’t some support for restoring that firewall either, which effectively lets banks risk their investors’ money while keeping deposits safe from major swings in the markets. It used to be the law, but that law was repealed during the Clinton administration, in legislation created with the help of former Citigroup CEO Sanford I. Weill. In the wake of the crisis, however, Weill admitted in July that the time has come to restore the division between investment and consumer banking, which would essentially ban the “financial supermarket” model he created that’s led to institutions becoming “too big to fail.”
Barofsky added that the consolidation of over-leveraged banks like Merrill Lynch into somewhat more healthy institutions like Bank of America ultimately put the markets on a more dangerous path than the nation’s top financial regulators realize. That’s because “you have institutions now that are just monstrous in size, over $2 trillion in assets by certain measures, close to $4 trillion by other measures,” he said, calling the reality in today’s markets “terrifying.”
“The idea that any of these institutions could ever be allowed to fail is pure fantasy, at this point,” Barofsky lamented.
That’s when Moyers cut right to the chase: “Are you suggesting that we could have another crash?”
“I think it’s inevitable,” he replied.
On a scale of significance and importance to the Future well being of America and the World, this report and Testimony of Mr. Barofsky should be the #1 issue in this election campaign and shouted from the rooftops!
Watching from CanaDa, this American election is an exercise in Fraud, deception and manipulation. It doesn’t really matter who wins the Presidency. For those who think Romney can turn things around in less time than Obama had, think again! Hard Times are ahead.
Mr. Barofsky confirms what most people already suspected. “The rich bankers will sell their souls for a few points of profit.” Jesus chased them out of the Jewish Temple, saying the House of My Father is a House of Prayer for ALL NATIONS and you have made it a Den of thieves. Is there anything new under the Sun?
This honest realism of Mr. Barofshy with his inside experience is so refreshing to see in this election campaign of lies and misleading half-truths. The mainline news media don’t have any Integrity left in investigating and reporting the Truth in my opinion.
And Judgment is turned away backward, and Justice stands afar off: for TRUTH is fallen in the street, and EQUITY cannot enter. Yea, Truth fails; and he that departs from evil makes himself a prey: and the LORD saw it, and it displeased him that there was no Judgment. Isaiah 59
No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.
The ceaseless expansion of economic exploitation, the engine of global capitalism, has come to an end. The futile and myopic effort to resurrect this expansion—a fallacy embraced by most economists—means that we respond to illusion rather than reality. We invest our efforts into bringing back what is gone forever. This strange twilight moment, in which our experts and systems managers squander resources in attempting to re-create an expanding economic system that is moribund, will inevitably lead to systems collapse. The steady depletion of natural resources, especially fossil fuels, along with the accelerated pace of climate change, will combine with crippling levels of personal and national debt to thrust us into a global depression that will dwarf any in the history of capitalism. And very few of us are prepared.
“Our solution is our problem,” Richard Heinberg, the author of “The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality,” told me when I reached him by phone in California. “Its name is growth. But growth has become uneconomic. We are worse off because of growth. To achieve growth now means mounting debt, more pollution, an accelerated loss of biodiversity and the continued destabilization of the climate. But we are addicted to growth. If there is no growth there are insufficient tax revenues and jobs. If there is no growth existing debt levels become unsustainable. The elites see the current economic crisis as a temporary impediment. They are desperately trying to fix it. But this crisis signals an irreversible change for civilization itself. We cannot prevent it. We can only decide whether we will adapt to it or not.”
Heinberg, a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, argues that we cannot grasp the real state of the global economy by the usual metrics—GDP, unemployment, housing, durable goods, national deficits, personal income and consumer spending—although even these measures point to severe and chronic problems. Rather, he says, we have to examine the structural flaws that sit like time bombs embedded within the economic edifice. U.S. household debt enabled the expansion of consumer spending during the boom years, he says, but consumer debt cannot continue to grow as house prices decline to realistic levels. Toxic assets litter the portfolios of the major banks, presaging another global financial meltdown. The Earth’s natural resources are being exhausted. And climate change, with its extreme weather conditions, is beginning to exact a heavy economic toll on countries, including the United States, through the destruction brought about by droughts, floods, wildfires and loss of crop yields.
Heinberg also highlights what he calls “the highly dysfunctional U.S. political system,” which is paralyzed and hostage to corporate power. It is unable to respond rationally to the crisis or solve “even the most trivial of problems.”
“The government at this point exacerbates nearly every crisis the nation faces,” he said. “Policy decisions do not emerge from deliberations between the public and elected leaders. They arise from unaccountable government agencies and private interest groups. The Republican Party has taken leave of reality. It exists in a hermetically sealed ideasphere where climate change is a hoax and economic problems can be solved by cutting spending and taxes. The Democrats, meanwhile, offer no realistic strategy for coping with the economic unraveling or climate change.”
The collision course is set. It is now only a matter of time and our personal response.
“It could implode in a few weeks, in a few months or maybe in a few years,” Heinberg said, “but unless radical steps are taken to restructure the economy, it will implode. And when it does the financial system will seize up far more dramatically than in 2008. You will go to the bank or the ATM and there will be no money. Food will be scarce and expensive. Unemployment will be rampant. And government services will break down. Living standards will plummet. ‘Austerity’ programs will become more draconian. Economic inequality will widen to create massive gaps between a tiny, oligarchic global elite and the masses. The collapse will also inevitably trigger the kind of instability and unrest, including riots, that we have seen in countries such as Greece. The elites, who understand and deeply fear the possibility of an unraveling, have been pillaging state resources to save their corrupt, insolvent banks, militarize their police forces and rewrite legal codes to criminalize dissent.”
If nations were able to respond rationally to the crisis they could forestall social collapse by reconfiguring their economies away from ceaseless growth and exploitation. It remains possible, at least in the industrialized world, to provide to most citizens the basics—food, water, housing, medical care, employment, education and public safety. This, however, as Heinberg points out, would require a radical reversal of the structures of power. It would necessitate a massive cancellation of debt, along with the slashing of bloated militaries, heavy regulation and restraints placed on the financial sector and high taxes imposed on oligarchic elites and corporations in order to reduce unsustainable levels of inequality. While this economic reconfiguration would not mitigate the effects of climate change and the depletion of natural resources it would create the social stability needed to cope with a new post-growth regime. But Heinberg says he doubts a rational policy is forthcoming. He fears that as deterioration accelerates there will be a greater resolve on the part of the power elite to “cannibalize the resources of society in order to prop up megabanks and military establishments.”
Survival will be determined by localities. Communities will have to create collectives to grow their own food and provide for their security, education, financial systems and self-governance, efforts that Heinberg suspects will “be discouraged and perhaps criminalized by those in authority.” This process of decentralization will, he said, become “the signal economic and social trend of the 21st century.” It will be, in effect, a repudiation of classic economic models such as free enterprise versus the planned economy or Keynesian stimulus versus austerity. The reconfiguration will arise not through ideologies, but through the necessities of survival forced on the poor and former members of the working and middle class who have joined the poor. This will inevitably create conflicts as decentralization weakens the power of the elites and the corporate state.
Joseph Tainter, an archeologist, in his book “The Collapse of Complex Societies” provides a useful blueprint for how such societies unravel. All of history’s major 24 civilizations have collapsed and the patterns are strikingly similar, he writes. The difference this time around is that we will unravel as a planet. Tainter notes that as societies become more complex they inevitably invest greater and greater amounts of diminishing resources in expanding systems of complexity. This proves to be fatal.
“More complex societies are costlier to maintain than simpler ones and require higher support levels per capita,” Tainter writes. The investments required to maintain an overly complex system become too costly, and these investments yield declining returns. The elites, in a desperate effort to maintain their own levels of consumption and preserve the system that empowers them, through repression and austerity measures squeeze the masses harder and harder until the edifice collapses. This collapse leaves behind decentralized, autonomous pockets of human communities.
Heinberg says this is our fate. The quality of our lives will depend on the quality of our communities. If communal structures are strong we will be able to endure. If they are weak we will succumb to the bleakness. It is important that these structures be set in place before the onset of the crisis, he says. This means starting to “know your neighbors.” It means setting up food banks and farmers’ markets. It means establishing a local currency, carpooling, creating clothing exchanges, establishing cooperative housing, growing gardens, raising chickens and buying local. It is the matrix of neighbors, family and friends, Heinberg says, that will provide “our refuge and our opportunity to build anew.”
“The inevitable decline in resources to support societal complexity will generate a centrifugal force,” Heinberg said. “It will break up existing economic and governmental power structures. It will unleash a battle for diminishing resources. This battle will see conflicts erupt between nations and within nations. Localism will soon be our fate. It will also be our strategy for survival. Learning practical skills, becoming more self-sufficient, forming bonds of trust with our neighbors will determine the quality of our lives and the lives of our children.”
When people have to run faster and faster to hold on to where they were, it is time to consider some unorthodox solutions.
How about revisiting the Lord’s prayer? Forgive us our debts as we forgive those indebted to us.
There would be a huge transformation, redeeming Time and Opportunity, if the people decided they would be better off standing up and affirming their own self-interest by implementing this good, old, common sense advice as the Global Biblical Babylonian economic, military, political system has arrived at it’s end as the Bible said it would:
And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire. And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which has power over these plagues: and they repented not to give him glory
The sweltering heatwave of the last few weeks helped make this year the hottest on record so far, officials revealed. The last 12 months also have been the warmest in the continental United States since modern record-keeping began in 1895, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.Do wild weather, heat waves, and torrential rains add up to climate change? As a Canadian resident of the Great White North, I have noticed the last few Winters have brought less snow and milder temperatures than I can remember in my 69 years. This was more noticeable to me since I drive for a living. I like that although the skiers may not. If current trends continue, CanaDa may be in the best position possible among all the Nations, with a temperate climate change on the way that may open up our Northern Land to settlement and development. CanaDa has one of the biggest, uninhabited, undeveloped frontiers in all the world. The debate continues whether Global Warming or Climate Change is a totally natural phenomenon or does the industrial machine and human activity exacerbate the situation? Environmental Science is only now finding more and more evidence and data to support the notion humanity may be the author of it’s own demise.
Long before CanaDa and the industrial machine existed, when our rivers, lakes and streams were still crystal clear, my personal reference Bible was printed in 1855. The references from Revelation juxtaposed with the images come from that 1855 Book long before Environmental Science existed. It is the same edition on which Presidents Lincoln & Obama took their Oath of Office. The imagery in the Bible’s Book of Revelation only the wilfully blind could dismiss out of hand without thinking, weighing and considering. We have all seen the disturbing images of dead fish in the toxic chemical brew dumped in our lakes and rivers by the industrial machine to reduce the cost as if there is no decent respect for posterity. We all know this is going on, but for the love of money and the things it buys, it is allowed to continue for jobs. We do this clinging to the delusion we are building a better world and Future for our children but the world is heading in the opposite direction.
And the third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had life, died;……and the third part of the waters became wormwood; Revelation 8:9-11
And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood Revelation 8:8
The writer of the Revelation 2000 years ago had no concept of an oil drilling rig as he saw the vision, and with the language of the Time it seems logical and reasonable he would describe what he saw as a great mountain burning with fire falling into the sea. He would not have been aware of the detergents that turned the black oil red so it would appear as blood to him.
The Deepwater Horizon oil rig was the site of one of the worst environmental disasters in US history. In a detailed assessment of the oil spill, researchers led by a team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have determined that the blown-out Macondo well spewed oil at a rate of about 57,000 barrels a day, totaling nearly 5 million barrels of oil released from the well between April 20 and July 15, 2010, when the leak was capped. In addition, the well released some 100 million standard cubic feet per day of natural gas.
A new study of dolphins living close to the site the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe two years ago – has established serious health problems afflicting the marine mammals. The report, commissioned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA], found that many of the 32 dolphins studied were underweight, anaemic and suffering from lung and liver disease, while nearly half had low levels of a hormone that helps the mammals deal with stress as well as regulating their metabolism and immune systems.
And the nations were angry, and your wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that you should give reward to your servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear your name, small and great; and should destroy them which destroy the earth
Therefore rejoice, you heavens, and you that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knows that he has but a short time.
As the Chief Stewards of CanaDa, it falls within your responsibilities and influence to be aware of the Prophetic information in my latest article: REVELATION: GLOBAL WARMING – FACT OR FICTION? TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES? The Revelation is being revealed Day by Day.
With the Global economy teetering on the verge of toppling over like the inverse pyramid in the Star of David, and the possibility of WWIII/Armageddon starting in the Middle East being revealed Day by Day, Christ will come as a thief in the night just when the people least expect it as indicated in Revelation 16.
While the devil and his earthly agents want to see Armageddon come, Revelation 16 clearly indicates it is not God leading the world to that catastrophic event, but the Pride of Power.
Scientist Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, joins Bill Moyers to describe his efforts to do what even Hurricane Sandy couldn’t — galvanize communities over what’s arguably the greatest single threat facing humanity. Leiserowitz, who specializes in the psychology of risk perception, knows better than anyone if people are willing to change their behavior to make a difference.
Barofsky, the former regulator tasked with policing banker bailouts in the Bush administration’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) told talk show host Bill Moyers another major banking crash is now “inevitable” because neither of the political parties have the stomach to end “too big to fail.”
“This was the government policy created by the architects, Ben Bernanke who is chair of Federal Reserve, Tim Geithner, who was then the president of the New York Fed before becoming Treasury Secretary, and Hank Paulson,” he explained, describing the Bush administration’s actions during the 2008 economic crisis. “Their solution originally was to further concentrate the industry, to make the too big to fail banks bigger.”
lets banks risk their investors’ money while keeping deposits safe from major swings in the markets. It used to be the law, but that law was repealed during the Clinton administration, in legislation created with the help of former Citigroup CEO Sanford I. Weill. In the wake of the crisis, however, Weill admitted in July that the time has come to restore the division between investment and consumer banking, which would essentially ban the “financial supermarket” model he created that’s led to institutions becoming “too big to fail.”
Barofsky added that the consolidation of over-leveraged banks like Merrill Lynch into somewhat more healthy institutions like Bank of America ultimately put the markets on a more dangerous path than the nation’s top financial regulators realize. That’s because “you have institutions now that are just monstrous in size, over $2 trillion in assets by certain measures, close to $4 trillion by other measures,” he said, calling the reality in today’s markets “terrifying.”
