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And which entities are receiving the most heat? The exchanges. The least? The OTC derivatives markets and the rating agencies. Why is this?

Previously, the distinctive mark of social democracy was the belief that it is the duty of a community to protect all its members against the powerful forces that they are unable to resist as individuals.

But that ain’t where he’s at. Mulligan still enjoys a blogger position at the New York Times, and still spews incoherent freemarket dribble and economic predictions, which proves that for the idiots running this country, it’s all about the “free markets” and the “free pass for whatever fuckup I make, no matter how disastrous the consequences for you!”

The fall in consumer spending, the largest since December, is in part the result of the end of the government’s cash-for-clunkers program on August 24. Economists have said that this program, among others, accounts for much of the increase in third-quarter consumer spending and GDP.

The very next day, March 12th, Bear went into free fall. By the
end of the week, the firm had lost virtually all of its cash and
was clinging to promises of state aid; by the weekend, it was being
knocked to its knees by the Fed and the Treasury, and forced at the
barrel of a shotgun to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase (which had
been given $29 billion in public money to marry its
hunchbacked new bride) at the humiliating price of … $2 a
share. Whoever bought those options on March 11th woke up on the
morning of March 17th having made 159 times his money, or roughly
$270 million.

The IMF at its Istanbul meeting notably ignored the increasingly contentious question of US monetary policy.

Thailand is historically the US’s favorite Southeast Asian stooge, so there has been little motivation for executive criticism of the Thai government. Occasionally, as in late August, when a Thai woman was hit with an 18-year prison term for insulting Bhumibol, American newspaper readers are reminded of the bizarre crime of lese majeste. But the media has been overwhelmingly silent about the king’s personal powerlust: deflecting sporadic criticism of his policies—corporate exploitation for the enrichment of the country’s light-skinned elites—onto a chimerical political structure.

The Europeans see this as an attempt to place their banking sectors at a disadvantage in relation to US banks. The big US banks already have larger capital reserves than their European competitors, in part because of the massive scale of the US bailout of Wall Street, and could more easily meet such requirements.