Hillary v. Obama on the Economy [View All]

[housewolf]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alec-baldwin/a-vote-for-hillary-is-a-v_b_94498.html

Looking at it purely from economic angle;


Obama has Paul Volcker as economic adviser -- he mopped up the stagflation of the '70s with 'tough love' of higher interest rates.

Hillary has Robert Rubin -- who demolished the last vestiges of Glass-Steagel which opened up the flood gates of securitizing loans and the current subprime (and now prime) credit crisis.

The current plan by Rubin's Goldman Sachs buddies Hank Paulson, (and Ben Bernanke), and their UK counterparts -- is to simply repackage all this bad debt and resell it again.. (making banks another fee); and hope that the problem will go away...

I do not believe this plan will work -- because in order for it to work -- long term interest rates have to go down -- which they are not likely to do now that China and India are no longer a source of cheap labor they once were... (the productivity miracle Alan Greenspan was always talking about amounted to outsourcing labor to China and now that game is up as wages in China go up and so-called productivity gains have faded).

The absolute necessity now is to stop bailing out banks, stop flooding the economy with more cheap money (money supply in US is running at an historic high of 16%), and stop raising the debt ceiling.

The buck (as in US dollar) has to stop being devalued by Paulson, Bernanke, etc. and their money printing banking friends or prices for food and gas will just continue zooming higher....

A hard, and probably a brutally hard recession has to be allowed to happen right now and the US needs to take its medicine for Greenspan's sins..

Putting off the day of reckoning with more re-packaging of debts as is the current 'master plan' of Paulson and Co. is only going to jeopardize the US dollar and possibly kill the US dollar off completely. (massive devaluation).

In other words: if Obama will force America to swallow a Paul Volcker anti-inflation economic pill than there really is no choice.

Voting for Hillary is voting for certain US dollar death.

(unless you own gold, and you are rooting for a dollar death, then vote for Hillary).

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At the Corner of Main Street and Wall Street
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zp-heller/at-the-corner-of-main-str_b_94554.html

The American Prospect's Robert Kuttner hailed Obama's recent economic address on fixing our looming financial meltdown as "a remarkable breakthrough." As Kuttner rightly points out, the crucial distinction between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on repairing our economic woes is that Obama puts the mortgage crisis into the larger context of our recession and Wall Street's political clout when it comes to financial deregulation, whereas Clinton does not.

Both Obama and Clinton favor the Frank-Dodd Bill for fixing the mortgage crisis. This bill would enable the government to guarantee new loans from banks for families facing foreclosure, but it's not enough to remedy the situation. Obama is ready to address our floundering economy as a whole and revamp our regulatory framework without bowing to special interest groups. "Obama is one of the few mainstream leaders," Kuttner writes, "calling for capital requirements to be extended to every category of financial institution that creates credit."

By contrast, Clinton's recent speech suggests that economic issues like job losses and skyrocketing gas prices started with the mortgage crisis. In other words, the subprime catastrophe is its own isolated mess. Clinton inexplicably keeps this mess apart from the problems in the financial sector, or, in Obama speak, she separates Main Street from Wall Street.

What's all the more frustrating, as Kuttner notes, is that Paul Krugman of the New York Times can't see this distinction between the two Democratic candidates. Perhaps Krugman doesn't get the significance of Obama's FDR-ish plan for broader, modernized financial regulation. He claims to be pleased by it, and yet he calls Obama's proposals "cautious and relatively orthodox." To me, cautious and relatively orthodox would be turning to Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan for advice (both of whom are responsible for getting us into this predicament in the first place), which is exactly what Clinton wants to do.