SNL Bailout Comedy: Tim Geithner Discusses The Bank Stress Tests

Geithner on the bank stress tests.

Robin and Barry Gibb (Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon) discuss the economy with Nancy Pelosi and Nouriel Roubini.

Comments

[James H]

Is TARP the $700B gift that keeps on giving?

Turbo Geithner thinks the TARP is a revolving fund that can be used fund endless bailouts. He thinks that he can use any TARP money paid back by banks to give to other banks.
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Business/Politics/story?id=7577774&page=1

But leave it to the Sherminator (Brad Sherman, D-CA) to set him straight. (Now that's what I call a tough, honest, manly SOB.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLxVlhpTFeg

[DailyBail]

Good stuff James. Have you seen this article. Very interesting historical piece.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/691adbae-40db-11de-8f18-00144feabdc0.html

[James H]

The Schama piece was a great read. Opposition to central banks and paper money has a long history. Ever since the founding of the Bank of England (1690's), many of the best-known writers of Britain and Ireland -- Swift, Pope, Burke -- have railed against the evils of "paper money" and how it served the interests of the "mercantile" (i.e. financial) elite. They also feared that the currency would be devalued if not tied to silver or gold. Here's Edmund Burke writing about the infamous paper currency of revolutionary France, the assignat. You can almost imagine he had Bernanke in mind when he wrote this.

"Is there a debt which presses them?—Issue assignats. Are compensations to be made, or a maintenance decreed to those whom they have robbed of their freehold in their office, or expelled from their profession?—Assignats. Is a fleet to be fitted out?—Assignats. If sixteen millions sterling of these assignats, forced on the people, leave the wants of the state as urgent as ever—issue, says one, thirty millions sterling of assignats—says another, issue fourscore millions more of assignats. The only difference among their financial factions is on the greater or the lesser quantity of assignats to be imposed on the public sufferance. They are all professors of assignats. Even those, whose natural good sense and knowledge of commerce, not obliterated by philosophy, furnish decisive arguments against this delusion, conclude their arguments, by proposing the emission of assignats." --from Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

[DailyBail]

Sometimes life is funnier than art. Must see.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/14/jeff-walser-fdic-economis_n_203620.html?ref=patrick.net

[James H]

Unbelievable. FDIC guy robs the friggin' bank. (It's not entirely inappropriate that he worked for FDIC, however.) Thanks for finding this, DB.

[Tridenttry]

Looks pretty interesting in here... Just saying hello

[Lese Majeste]

The inital payoff to Wall Street, the 800 billion dollar slush fund approved by Congress last Fall was only the beginning.

As soon as that's gone, the "No Banker Left Behind Act" will get more of OUR money from Congress to help Wall Street gangsters pay off their bad bets.