Our Lives In The Bush Of Ghosts 3: Markets

From the wonderful European Tribune: http://www.eurotrib.com/ Don't forget role of Bush's policies in asset inflation "Sir, In his article “Why the Federal Reserve has to keep the party going” (August 22), Martin Wolf refused to acknowledge one obvious cause of the current financial crisis: the policies of the Bush administration, carried out with the open support of the Greenspan Fed. These policies, through tax cuts aimed at the well-off, massive corporate pork made possible by a war of choice, and lax monetary and banking policies, had as their goal making the investment class richer – at the expense of everyone else who participates in the economy. Stagnant wages, made possible by weakening of corporate regulation and increased access to the Chinese labour pool, were instrumental in making higher profits possible, and lax monetary conditions allowed bubbling financial asset values. Lower taxes made capture of that wealth easier for the rich, and share buybacks (instead of investment) have been among the preferred instruments to get it done. The debt bubble also had the great advantage of making it possible to hide from most Americans that they were not sharing in that wealth capture, by hooking consumers on a habit of corrosive easy debt that substituted for real income increases..." It is a bit too much to blame President Bush for all this. He merely followed the crowd to the trough of slops. Our Government has always been a follower of the needs of the powerful and corrupt, except for the Iraq War. That War it created whole cloth from its own image.