Comment on Modern Monetary Theory: Musk Edition
GoofSchmoofer@lemmy.world 8 hours agoThe Treasury could have bought up mortgage notes instead, at pennies on the dollar, and started collecting interest on the debt just like the private banks had. Then they could have renegotiated mortgages of underwater homes at lower interest rates, while the private sector lenders filed for bankruptcy. That would have drastically reduced the foreclosure rate and dumped the material cost of the financial crisis on stock and bond holders of these private companies.
I’m curious how this action would have changed the last 20 years of politics? Those in power during that time did a shit job of really explaining why the banks got the money and not the homeowner. I think this really exposed who the federal politicians were representing, and it wasn’t the everyday voters. I think that anger and sense of betrayal that the American people were told to “kick rocks.” while the actual criminals got a bailout of our money still sits in the dissatisfaction of most of the population.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Optimistically? It would have spared us a decade of people scrambling for affordable housing as unemployment skyrocketed. It might have spared us the Tea Party backlash of '10 and subsequent economic contraction in '14 that mopped up what was left of midwestern liberal democrats. Spared us a BLM riot or two, without tens of thousands of unemployed people taking to the streets in Missouri and Delaware. Might have forestalled a lot of the rush towards Silicon Valley techno-fascism, too, while keeping more industrial business domestic and preventing the ratcheting of tensions with China and Russia internationally.
But maybe not. Maybe people would have been just as angry for different reasons. It would still have been too little, too late to salvage the pre-'08 economy. And we’d have plunged off the cliff a little sooner or a little later, under a slightly different administrative structure.
Idk how your eyes are widened to the corporate strings tugging at Obama/Biden and miss the even bigger strings hooked onto Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.
Unfortunately, I think the vulgar analysis of '09 is fundamentally correct. Americans woke up to a black president and, for a healthy chunk of them, that was a bridge too fucking far. The US could have been a paradise in 2010 and they still would have tossed all the liberals out.
The bailouts became a talking point. And Dems who made a career of trying to defend them were the first on the chopping block. But we still ended up sending Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders to fight the Big Orange Cheeto. And progressives lost downticket over and over again, often to a deluge of media ad buys and an army of professional political hatchet men. All of this was happening under the toxic cloud of Epstein-ism and AIPAC-backed genocide and horrifying pogroms in Latin America, Central Africa, and the Pacific Rim.