Category: Politics, Religion & Money

A Point Worth Repeating

This is a comment I made on Facebook:

It’s much easier to not infect someone else than it is to avoid being infected yourself. Preventing the spread can be done with the cheap, blue surgical masks. Protecting yourself requires a more expensive, and much less comfortable, N95 mask.

It’s now clear that someone who is fully vaccinated can infect others with Delta-Covid. So the obvious thing for everybody to do, including those of us who are vaccinated, is to return to wearing proper masks in public when indoors. The virus doesn’t know politics, it only knows biology, and yet many people insist on making this a political issue.

Deflating the Fed

The ultimate winners of the 2008 investment bank debacle were the investment banks. The Fed can’t give money to people directly, it can only give money to banks in the hope doing that will help people. The banks have instead, of course, been helping themselves.

Through the Treasury, Congress can give money to people directly, which it has been doing during the pandemic. This action has been a factor in triggering short-term inflation. It has apparently even helped some people delay returning to work.

I don’t see inflation becoming a chronic problem unless income inequality is addressed. Perhaps we’re getting a taste of that, with more people demanding a higher minimum wage. If the Fed decides it must raise interest rates Wall Street will freak out, but they have to know that their free lunch can’t last forever.

Here’s some more on this favorite topic.

Panic Buying and Selling

I’m falling behind on my e-mail replies, because I am once again indulging my fascination with the 2008 meltdown of the financial markets and the Great Recession that resulted from it. Following 9/11, it was the second worldwide crisis of the Internet Age, and it was the first to happen since I began this blog, with the pandemic being of course the second. I’ll probably do more prattling after watching this video.

P.S. I wouldn’t say there’s an untold story in the documentary, but there are couple of tidbits in there I didn’t know. First, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was enduring so much unrelenting stress that he had a probable panic attack after Congress failed to approve a bailout.

After the TARP bailout was approved on a second vote, it was Warren Buffett who suggested to Paulson that the money be given directly to the investment banks, rather than being used to buy their toxic assets. That very unpopular action helped to get the Tea Party started, of course. What makes no sense to me at all was how the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street ended up on opposite sides of the political street.