Steve Rattner: "GM Had No Idea On Any Given Day How Much Cash They Had" (VIDEO)

Video:  Former Auto Czar Steve Rattner on Morning Joe

Interesting discussion of TARP, the auto bailouts and Larry Summer's departure.  For the truth on Steve Rattner, see the following:

• TARP Nonsense With Former Auto Czar Steve Rattner

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Related:

• Steve Rattner: Why I Fired GM's CEO

• Video:  Annoying new bailout commercial compares GM to Evel Knievel
  

Comments

[DailyBail]

Power Breakfast with Former Car Czar Steve Rattner

http://www.benzinga.com/general/10/10/508747/power-breakfast-with-former-car-czar-steve-rattner

[DailyBail]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Rattner

he was originally a nyt reporter before he became a private equity investor...

[Dr. Pitchfork]

he was originally a nyt reporter before he became a private equity investor...
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great minds (crazy ones?) think alike. i just checked this last night because I had no idea what Rattner did before TARP. brown grad, too. typical.

[Dr. Pitchfork]

On the teetering U.S. economy Rattner said, "there's so much economic illiteracy and confusion about what to do" in the face of weak growth and the possibility of deflation. "I can't imagine that anyone would disagree with the notion that we need to maintain an expansionary fiscal and monetary policy, keeping interest rates low and willing to tolerate an unnaturally high rate of deficit for a while.''
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Herein lies the problem. Smarty-pants "can't imagine" that anyone would disagree with him about economic policy. I "imagine" that Geithner and Summers and all the rest of them have similar attitudes. Thanks, mandarins! You're doing a heck of a job.

[DailyBail]

"I can't imagine that anyone would disagree with the notion that we need to maintain an expansionary fiscal and monetary policy, keeping interest rates low and willing to tolerate an unnaturally high rate of deficit for a while.''

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it's fucking arrogance...well mr. rattner...intel ceo paul otellini disagrees...greeenspan disagrees and nassim taleb disagrees...and that's just a few names from the past 3 weeks to speak out against any further monetary and fiscal stimulus...

oh...and stiglitz just yesterday...

[DailyBail]

mandarins...a new term i haven't heard...?

[Dr. Pitchfork]

http://factsanddetails.com/china.php?itemid=1077&catid=2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_%28bureaucrat%29

From the OED:
1. a. An official in any of the senior grades of the former imperial Chinese civil service. Also (more generally): a similar official in any East Asian country. Now hist...
c. A person (esp. an official) who commands considerable power or importance (freq. one perceived as reactionary and secretive); (spec. in the United Kingdom) a leading civil servant...
C2. attrib. Freq. depreciative. Designating a person or thing considered esoteric, highbrow, obscurantist, or disdainful.

[DailyBail]

nice...so geithner, summers and bernanake are mandarins...orange bastards,,,

[Dr. Pitchfork]

Swift's Academy at Lagado in Gulliver's Travels gives sort of the same idea of expert-as-quack. Here's Gulliver describing an experiment being performed on a dog while he toured the Academy (I always think of Bernanke and QE when I read this passage):

I was complaining of a small fit of the colic, upon which my conductor led me into a room where a great physician resided, who was famous for curing that disease, by contrary operations from the same instrument. He had a large pair of bellows, with a long slender muzzle of ivory: this he conveyed eight inches up the anus, and drawing in the wind, he affirmed he could make the guts as lank as a dried bladder. But when the disease was more stubborn and violent, he let in the muzzle while the bellows were full of wind, which he discharged into the body of the patient; then withdrew the instrument to replenish it, clapping his thumb strongly against the orifice of the fundament; and this being repeated three or four times, the adventitious wind would rush out, bringing the noxious along with it, (like water put into a pump), and the patient recovered. I saw him try both experiments upon a dog, but could not discern any effect from the former. After the latter the animal was ready to burst, and made so violent a discharge as was very offensive to me and my companion. The dog died on the spot, and we left the doctor endeavouring to recover him, by the same operation.

[Dr. Pitchfork]

nice...so geithner, summers and bernanake are mandarins...orange bastards,,,
LOL!

[DailyBail]

nice passage from swift...kind of like the peter schiff clip where he called keynes a witch doctor...

http://dailybail.com/home/look-out-krugman-belief-in-keynes-is-belief-in-self-delusion.html