This is from a Daily Kos,
USA was 3 hrs away from Economic, Political Collapse in September 2008 .
In a CSPAN call-in Paul Kanjorski (D) (PA-11) described what Congress told in September, in answer to a desperate American questioning the insanity of the TARP.
I was there when the secretary and the chairman of the Federal Reserve came those days and talked to members of Congress about what was going on... Here's the facts. We don't even talk about these things.
On Thursday, at about 11 o'clock in the morning, the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous drawdown of money market accounts in the United States to a tune of $550 billion being drawn out in a matter of an hour or two.
The Treasury opened up its window to help. They pumped $105 billion into the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks.
They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts, and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn't be further panic and there. And that's what actually happened.
If they had not done that their estimation was that by two o'clock that afternoon, $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money market system of the United States, would have collapsed the entire economy of the United States, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed.
Now we talked at that time about what would have happened if that happened. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it.
I don't see the connection between what is going on with the TARP and it's management versus this event, but at least we have someone telling us what was going on.
One thing is certain, one can do an electronic run on a bank in nano seconds.
Should have just let it fail
All TARP succeeded in doing is pushing the failure out for another day.
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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
I do not see Economic Armageddon
being correlated with the actual TARP plan. I believe them on this about to happen and have written about global contagion already.
One does not need to have a global economic collapse, a melt down, etc. they describe and "do the restructuring" the way they are.
i.e. there was a terminal illness which went ravaging through the system, but the cures available are not all the same and not all equal.
I see that without Economic Armageddon
That what we'll get afterwards is just the same system with some feel-good patches on it.
True, but both you and I know the way they are doing the restructuring is just going to, at best, set the United States up for another crash in another 70 years. They aren't doing the draconian measures it would take to actually, gasp, use what we've learned from Operating System Resource Allocation to come up with a better economy. The only way they'd ever even consider such a cross-disciplinary system is if there was an Armageddon that took the system down completely.
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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
absolutely
I think everyone who is a regular on EP was blogging their brains out on the stupidity of the TARP. I must have over 10 posts on it and NDD has multiples, so does midtowng...
now we debated about the correct plan but I think we all agreed *this* plan was absurd and just delaying the inevitable at an enormous cost.