Michael Moore's New Film

Few areas of policy have the potential to erupt and capture the American imagination during campaign season as the bailout of the banks and financial institutions.

Visceral populist outrage is a political operative's dream.

At whom will this outrage be directed?

President Obama has resisted for several reasons the naming of names and demands for accountability from specific parties as his administartion has literally saved the world from a depression.

Can one new film by Michael Moore change the political landscape? Yes.

Moore is a brilliant political journalist and filmmaker with an unusual aptitude for understanding American political culture.

Accountability and the naming of names will be demanded and Moore's film, coming to theaters October 2, may well be the impetus

Watch for a qualitative difference in the political culture, demands for the naming of names "supplied by [Treasury Secretary Timothy] Geithner, identifying the criminally negligent, arrogant speculators."

'Save our CEOs' Teaser for Michael Moore's New Film Hits Theaters!

Frontline's Inside the Meltdown

Great thriller, surreal. And it's real:

Frontline - Inside the Meltdown

On Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008, the astonished leadership of the U.S. Congress was told in a private session by the chairman of the Federal Reserve that the American economy was in grave danger of a complete meltdown within a matter of days. "There was literally a pause in that room where the oxygen left," says Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.).

Krugman Blasts Bank Execs

I wish the Obama administration would ask for Krugman's resignation at the Times, and put this guy in charge of the economic recovery.

From Krugman:

On July 15, 2007, The New York Times published an article with the headline 'The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age.' The most prominently featured of the “new titans” was Sanford Weill, the former chairman of Citigroup, who insisted that he and his peers in the financial sector had earned their immense wealth through their contributions to society. ...

All of which explains why we should be disturbed by an article in Sunday’s Times reporting that pay at investment banks, after dipping last year, is soaring again — right back up to 2007 levels. Why is this disturbing? Let me count the ways.

Moyers Delivers on the Financial Crisis

Bill Moyers' Journal features an exhilarating conversation with scholars Simon Johnson and Michael Perino on the economic crisis.

The conventional wisdom is that the financial chimeras, like CitiBank, Bank of America, and AIG, who are targets of popular outrage, receiving massive government bailouts (to prevent a depression and promote a recovery), comprise too-big-to-fail entities. If they go down, we all go down.

"The guys who remain are more powerful, okay? And their position is, 'Look, if you want a recovery, if you want get your economy back, you've got to be nice to us,'" said Johnson.

Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT's Sloan School of Management, and Perino is the Dean George W. Matheson Professor of Law at St. John's University School of Law in New York.

Johnson blogs with James Kwak on The Hearing at the Washington Post.

The Nation's Meltdown 101

From the Nation Magazine:

As the world faces economic collapse and citizens struggle to figure out where to go from here, The Nation has assembled this special section as an online guide to the crisis, drawing largely from Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover (Nation Books) by Katrina vanden Heuvel and the editors of The Nation.

Aggregating highlights from Nation events and providing an overview of the crisis, this page will feature videos from public forums; relevant podcasts; and a curated selection of The Nation's most illuminating articles about the financial meltdown.

Check out the Nation's Meltdown 101.

Tim Geithner Will Not Be the Effective Front

Timothy Geithner's appearance on Meet the Press makes one thing perfectly clear: Geithner cannot be the pitchman for the Obama recovery from the machinations of AIG and the like and their political and regulatory allies.

There is simply no political passion, identification of bad actors, nor populist (democratic) appeal from Geithner. As Paul Krugman said on ABC's This Week, "It's a plan to rearrange the deck chairs and hope that that keeps us from hitting the iceberg. They've done some things very fast, but they've been very small things ... There's no way this could be enough." (See Huffington.)

And Republicans are absurdly appropriating the populist message in the political battle.

Obama likely sees this. So, look for Obama to be a FDR-like frontman, as he should be.

And, if you have not read it yet, do read Matt Taibbi's 8,700-word piece in Rolling Stone.

We Needed This Under Bush

Update: Obama fields questions on offshoring, health care, jobs and so on. Hey, this guy actually believes in solving problems.

Geithner to Outline Major Overhaul of Finance Rules - Officials said the plan, which will be unveiled Thursday, will subject hedge funds and traders of exotic financial products to governmental supervision.

About time, so will critics of these unregulated exotic financial products now rule the airwaves?

And M. Shihid Alam asks 'what about the victims of financial markets?'.

But, one ought to note, even Nouriel Roubini (Dr. Doom) has good things to say about the Geithner overhaul. From Roubini's e-mail:

Nouriel Roubini (March 25): Finally, Geithner and Bernanke (see respective testimonies at AIG hearing on March 24) have come to agree about the need for a new insolvency regime for systemically important financial institutions (bank holding companies and non-bank financial institutions) in order to avoid another Lehman and expensive ad-hoc bailouts like AIG

Necessary features: A new conservatorship/receivership regime of insolvency could be similar to the one used to manage the orderly takeover of Fannie and Freddie. As soon as the stress test is done some large and systemically important banks (and their holding companies and non-bank financial arms) will have to be taken over. To do it orderly we absolutely need a special insolvency regime like the one we have for the bank arms of bank holding companies and similar to the one we have for Fannie and Freddie

On the other hand Paul Craig Roberts sees financial deregulation and offshoring (shipping American jobs overseas) as having done such tremendous damage to the U.S. economy that Obama's interventions and spending may be insufficent to bring us out of this recession, with one catastrophic result being the "depreciation of the US dollar and loss of its reserve currency role":

The enormous trade deficit that has been created by the pursuit of short-term corporate profits can only be closed in two ways. One is to stop the offshoring and to bring home the offshored production. Possibly, this could be done by replacing the corporate income tax with a tax based on whether value added to a company’s output occurs domestically or abroad.

The other way the trade deficit can be closed is by the inability of Americans to pay for imports. If debt monetization wrecks the dollar and drives up import prices, Americans will have to learn to live with less imported energy and manufactured goods. American annual consumption would shrink by the amount of the trade deficit.