Hank Paulsons New Treasury Powers, Explained

Hank Paulson is Mike Myers' best disguise yet. How else could a lowly and fresh Treasury secretary emerge unscathed from the Wall Street Fire Swamp, and, shuffling off the constitution's now-fragile coil, proceed to grasp the Founding Fathers' great intentions and force feed them into the most efficient shredder the world has ever seen... the only machine that could shred $3 trillion of wealth in only five-sixth the time than it took the Lord to create the Universe. The wealth, of course, belonged largely to American investors. The shredder, of course, was the Dow.

Hank Paulson is in charge. George Bush told me (from the relative comfort of the White House) that I did not need to panic, so I am trying very hard to remain calm. But with a tip of the hat to Douglas Noël Adams, my towel is here with me, draped serenely over my left shoulder.

Hank says he will now provide liquidity 'injections' for banks to 'take the edge off' the crisis and buy stock in private banks, which is a trick our grandparents' government used to try to assuage the delirium tremens of the Great Depression. GOD I love all these metaphors for illicit I.V. drug use flying around a crisis born from addiction to credit. It's so deliciously poetic! These new powers Hank's trying out would be terrific except all he and Ben Bernanke (starring himself), keep pushing the same old drug with the same old plunger in the same old needle. The US has had too many liquidity enemas in the past year; they were great at first, but now we need larger doses to compensate for the diminished effect of the drug (cash), and now cash doesn't do anything at all. But we keep shooting up money, anyway. This is stinking thinking.

Not convinced? Here's a graph that demonstrates the level of the US National Debt from 1940 to the end of 2007, but it is more than grossly outdated due to mushrooming-record spending levels in the first nine months of 2008. This chart does not include ANY money we have spent to pay for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the $900 billion-and-counting Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, or any of the Fed's so-called 'liquidity injections' that have occurred in public and in secret for at least the past year...



Financial disaster is what happens when a person drinks too much or uses too many drugs or borrows money that cannot be paid back. Losing home, job and vehicle... is what happens... when a person drinks too much or uses too many drugs or borrows money that cannot be paid back. All the hardships I just mentioned are what happens when a person, business, township, state, or country abuses credit like a drug. Reckless fiscal mismanagement is killing the United States of America. If the country keeps doing what it's doing it'll keep getting what it's getting. It is now up to average hard-working Americans to inform our electorate that their abuse will no longer be tolerated. How that will happen, en masse, sadly, I honestly do not know.

America needs to hit a meeting. It's hard enough to get one drunk to go to an AA meeting. How difficult do you suppose it would be to get an entire broke-ass nation to show up? And whom do we see about serving coffee to 300 million?

Average Americans would like to know what in the hell is happening to their country, and the rest of the workd is curious, too. Hank, Ben and George's best and most correct action might just be to get behind a 12-step recovery program for America's credit addicts. No need to start one; Debtors Anonymous already exists: http://www.debtorsanonymous.org/

Hope to see you at a meeting. I don't have a problem, I just go for the free coffee.