McMaken explains: "...The talking points have been written and the official spokesmen have been briefed. Now all that remains is for them to deliver the government-approved version of the history of the financial collapse that has led to the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression.
In recent comments to the Council of Institutional Investors, Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin's prepared remarks examined at length the causes of the collapse without mentioning the Federal Reserve system once. Nor did he mention Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. He did blame AIG, Enron, and the "opaque, unregulated market we have today[.]" The suggestion that the financial markets are unregulated will be news to anyone who has worked in the financial sector, but what we are seeing again and again is a public relations machine that has been dispatched to make it clear that the Federal government and its quasi-government monopolies will be relegated to the background as but marginal players in the system, or even as victims.
We see this attitude in the often-repeated claim by Fed representatives, such as Bernanke himself, that the Fed would have regulated better if only Congress had given it the power to do so. Thus, the Federal Reserve, the engine behind the absurdly low mortgage rates and the moral hazard that drove the bubble to such destructive ends, would have prevented the collapse if only Congress had given it more power. Ignored is the fact that, had the Fed not flooded financial institutions with cheap money, millions of high-risk and soon-to-be-delinquent loans would never have been made in the first place..."
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Comment: What is said about Russia, or, for that matter, about any other country's history as well, applies also to monetary policy: an institutions without a predicable past.
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