"Dear Mr. Greenspan, I think you're pretty terrific ... " -- Tim Geithner at the 2006 FOMC meeting

[Octafish]

Follies at the Fed

by DEAN BAKER
CounterPunch, Jan. 19, 2012

In keeping with its policy of releasing transcripts with a five-year lag, the Federal Reserve Board just released the transcripts from its 2006 Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings. There is much there to cause pain and amusement.

In the latter category, there is probably nothing that can beat Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (then the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank) telling outgoing Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan:

“I’d like the record to show that I think you’re pretty terrific, too. And thinking in terms of probabilities, I think the risk that we decide in the future that you’re even better than we think is higher than the alternative.”

But there is more than obsequiousness on display here. There is also profound ignorance of the economy among the nation’s top economic policymakers.

CONTINUED...

[xchrom]

1. My mother has a saying: birds of a feather flock together. Nt

[Octafish]

3. The Birds sure do.

More from Dr. Baker:

Here’s what Frederick Mishkin, a Federal Reserve Board governor who later played a starring role in the movie Inside Job, had to say about the risks from the housing market in that same December 2006 meeting:

“I don’t see any indications that we will have big spillovers to other sectors from weak housing and motor vehicles. In that sense, there’s a slight concern about a little weakness, but the right word is I guess a ‘smidgen,’ not a whole lot.”

Please allow me to volunteer that your mother would make an excellent forensic economist, xchrom.

[xchrom]

5. my mother would indeed.

no magical theories or magic investing ideas.

the kind of math one can do in ledger book is what she would be all about is what her economics -- forensic or other wise -- would be about.

[Autumn]

2. I read articles like this and I get a feeling that all hope is lost

We know who and what have created all the problems we have and the very people who have been put in charge of overseeing the economy and the DOJ are THE problem. There can be no repairing the problems we have. Not in 4 years, not in 8 years. WTF do we do? More of the same or more of the same, only fractionally worse.

[Octafish]

4. NGU. NGU. NGU. NGU...

The day of accounting for the greedhead-warmonger class may be soon or far-off. Either way, it won't get here if more people don't give a damn. That's why Corporate McPravda makes out that there's no outcome other than what's best for their owners and Wall Street.

Please don't let the current facts get in the way of finding the path to the best outcome -- a just society built on liberty, democracy, and the rule of law. Bill Toben and Fred Alan Wolf, co-authors of "Space, Time and Beyond," looked at the role of consciousness in the universe. It may be our minds themselves serve as the "master field" that determines what was, is and will be. Jacques Vallee describes it as an "Associative Universe."

Because you care, Autumn, that happy day is moved a lot closer to the present.