Dylan Ratigan was brought in last week to assist talking head Mika Brezinski in her interview with Dr. Romer (another clueless Keynesian academic who advocates stealing from your children), who chairs Obama's White House Council of Economic Advisors (CEA).
Ratigan put on the gloves and knocked her senseless. She thought she could float through with soft platitudes and financial phrasing that would leave Brezinski begging for the next hard break. Not today, Dr. Romer, not today.
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Transcript
RATIGAN: Yeah, I’ll jump in right there and say, uh, Christina, that is fantastic, that is great news, that you’re going to leave risk with those who decide to take the risk in the first place. Can you give me any sense of what the capital requirement will be? In other words, setting a new capital requirement is – sounds great, but again, for a market that was once thought to be highly levered when I borrowed five or six dollars for every dollar that was out there, and even in the peak of the eighties’ takeover boom we were at ten-to-one, we allowed this marketplace to go – in some cases to go forty-, sixty-, even a hundred-to-one in some cases. I’m curious as to what you believe – what your agency believes fair leverage is.
CHRISTINA ROMER: You know, I think the crucial thing is, that is a topic which is going to be worked out, it’s going to be something –
RATIGAN: Well, worked out by who, though? That’s – my concern is, because I know that the financial lobby has exploded over the past couple of months into Washington D.C., and my concern is that the size of that leverage will be set by the same people who set it last time, one of which was Hank Paulson, who was at the time the CEO of Goldman Sachs, and went on to be the Treasury Secretary, and then he went on to be able to have a secret meeting where he gave out, you know, a few hundred billion of the taxpayer’s dollars behind closed doors. I’m curious what the new process of setting leverage will be.