whyzowl1,

Yes the answer is obvious but they are ramming “it was too big a systemic risk (a.k.a. too big to fail)” down our throats. They are further adding that unlike the depression era these institutions were too complicated to nationalize in order to rationalize the bailout as the only reasonable solution.  The current absurdity is that they are being kept too big to fail based on the promise that the government is going to regulate them to behave well.  So Obama/Geitner/Banksters, how does the government effectively regulate an industry that was too complicated for you to understand to nationalize (or at least forcible reorganize)?  And can you please excuse me while I go vomit after you finish answering this question!!

Given the opportunity, I would’ve asked Mr. Bernanke why he and Hank Paulsen intervened to PREVENT the markets from clearing when they had priced the derivatives toxic sludge contracts down to 32 cents-on-the-dollar. Once the markets had discovered the true value of those junk bonds, their owners would have had no reason not to write down the mortgages backing them to bring them in line with the debtors actual ability to pay. Millions of foreclosures, and all the destructive economic fallout that inevitably follows in their wake, could have been prevented.

Further, the economy will not and cannot recover until its enormous debt load is written down. So why did Banker Ben and Banker Hank decide to keep all those often fraudulent debts in place instead? Why did they decide to risk the destruction of the economy and the sure immiseration of millions of Americans just so the parasitic banking establishment on Wall Street didn’t have to take a well-deserved loss?

These are questions that answer themselves. No?

You’re welcome Glider, and here are a couple more that have stuck in my mind….

“There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.”
John Adams

“Give me control of a nation’s money supply, and I care not who makes it laws.”
Mayer Amschel Rothschild, Founder of the Rothschild banking dynasty.

We have been conquered and enslaved by our own consent, without even realizing it.

For an interesting article on Ben Bernanke’s failed monetary policy, click on http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/0709friedman.html

hello. i am beginning to be scared about what this guy might do. first he acts on special interests whispering in his ear threats they could plunge us into a depression (whom could they be?); and he believes them: as if we were still an agrarian based economy. and now everyone scolds him. i know he is going to show us…. he is going to snap, and he is going to do the unthinkable… he’ll show us! the elephant would have been harvested by the grass dwellers, the way it is supposed to be. the smarter ones do still run out of the way when the ‘sky is falling’. this entire ‘too big to fail’ menace to tax payers ought to be corrected; at what ever cost.

In all fairness to Bernanke, at least for the most part, his comments are understandable. May not be correct, in the strictest sense. May not offer comfort to the oppressed. May not even make sense sometimes. But unlike Greenspan, at least you can understand what he says. And come to recognise the underlining of the wrongness of a position held by the Federal Reserve long before Bernanke came to be Chairman.

I’m speaking of Greenspan of course. Where is that man? Waiting for the profits created out of thin air by virtue of his encouragement to follow the flitting fairy into the la-la land of imagined return, no doubt. He will wait a very long time.

So while Bernanke gets hung out to dry, Greenspan fades into oblivion. But we still have the record of his speechifications, don’t we. And if ever a man lived who personifies the descriptive writings of George Orwell, it is Greenspan.

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”
George Orwell

Oh gosh, that reminds me of Secretary Paulson. And almost every repub still standing.

Watch the great art of insincerity daily unfold, when they take their place at the mike. It’s enough to make a sane person give up c-span!

Bernanke is a criminal. He should be staring at the walls in a supermax for the way he has “fixed” our economy. If you care about your grass, you need to fence the elephant out. Every village elder understands that.

Glider asks the right question, However we must turn that question into a demand. We can start by demanding the return of laws that controlled media concentration.

No matter the industry consumers are best protected by competition not the monopolies we have been forced to endure

Here is a quote from Woodrow Wilson (who by the way signed the current Federal Reserve Act into law)

Our great industrial nation is controlled by our system of credit.Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of our nation, therefore, and all of our activities are in the hands of a few men… who necessarily,by very reason of their own limitations,chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom.

We have come to be one of the worst ruled,one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world. No government by free opinion, No longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority,but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominent men

Thanks for that quote catlady!

Sorry but what a stupid question to ask Bernanke! Obviously he will fall back on this “too big to fail” talking point.  Instead look ahead a little bit.  Ask him why the government is not breaking up these “too big to fail” companies into ones that are small enough to fail in the future.  Then when he answers that they are enacting legislation that will regulate these behemoths ask him what proof he has that the government can successfully regulate them, particularly since the government is now highly infiltrated with their ranks, and isn’t it more prudent to reenact the legislation that safeguarded this nation for 70 years before these SOBs bribed our officials to overturn it.  I want to hear him tell us how and why we citizens need these wonderful financial innovations that enriched the banking class and f*cked the rest of us.

If Bernanke was “disgusted” and “had to hold his nose” should those not have been reasons to resign and tell us why? I have no sympathy for him whatsoever. He aided and abetted in fact a huge raid on the lives of our children and grand children.

“It wasn’t to help the big firms that we intervened,” Mr. Bernanke said, diving into a discourse on the damage to the overall economy that can result when financial firms that are “too big to fail” collapse.
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Of course not ,Benny, of course not. It was just a freaking coincidence that all those billions went almost exclusively to those large financial institutions most responsible for the economic nose dive. It must be a further coincidence that you yourself are a product of those enormous institutions and stood by while boxcar loads of money disappeared with no impact at all on the falling economy.

Benny belongs in a jail cell next to Bernie.

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies. If the American people
ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of their property until their children wake up homeless on the the continent their father’s conquered.”

Thomas Jefferson

“When the elephant falls down, all the grass gets crushed as well,”

there is a whole lot of grass that has been stamped on by the elephant for manny years. let it fall.