...I've been saying for years that the biggest diff between the US and Argentine economies is: the US debt is denominated in its own currency.Dig these quotes:
"And after years of lecturing Asian and Latin American leaders about the importance of consistency and transparency in sorting out financial crises, we fail on both counts."If you care about this kinda stuff, you'll be glad you read Glenn Greenwald's column in Salon.
"How fortunate, I thought then, that the United States was not similarly plagued by crony capitalism! However, watching Goldman Sachs's seeming lock on high-level U.S. Treasury jobs as well as the way that Republicans and Democrats alike tiptoed around reforming Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae -- among the largest campaign contributors to Congress -- made me wonder if the differences between the United States and the Asian economies were only a matter of degree."
"Does anyone really doubt any more that the predominant characteristic of our political culture is "the incestuous relationship between governments and large corporate conglomerates"? Yet another former Goldman Sachs official and long-time derivatives advocate who played a major role in the repeal of key banking regulations, Gary Gesner, is now poised to become Obama's chief of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the body charged with regulating commodities and financial futures."
"In other words, the country's financial elites would use the catastrophes they'd created themselves in order to do what they'd always wanted to but couldn't get away with in normal times. They took the profit, and then imposed all the costs on everyone else."
2 comments:
There's more and more and more:
"He was basically demanding of Obama: shouldn't you be telling those dirty masses that they can't have health care and education improvements and that they're also going to have to give up their Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits (while Citibank and BoA use taxpayer money to buy up distressed assets that they will then sell at a huge profit, also to the taxpayer under the Geithner plan)?".
If you still care about the folks in "the ol' country", you should read Glenn's column like nothing you've read for years.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/26/comparisions/
Being able to issue debt denominated in its own currency is a good thing for a country, but the notion that that is the biggest difference between the US and Argentine economies is (with all due respect) laughable. Not to mention that it is of course Argentina's own fault that it cannot issue peso-denominated debt - many countries issue debt denominated in their own non-reserve currencies.
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