JOBS - April 2, 2009

When Henry Paulson and his pals told Obama that he would have to dump hundreds of billions on the banking corporations or the country would sink, Obama did not stop to fiddle with the details or to put limitations on how the money would be spent. A large portion of the remaining assets of those companies was parcelled out to Paulson’s pals and cohorts, safe in the knowledge that US would raise whatever was called for to keep them afloat. The auto companies were only a bit more questionable, and the new secretary of the Treasury did offer a deal to buy up the toxic mortgages on the basis of winnings to private billionaires, if any, and losses to USA. We still have hopes that Congress might put its kebosh on that one-way deal. But in the meantime, the States are struggling, CA and WI being 2 examples. There was no running to give them several billion on account while DC mulled over who would get more, and no sense that if a number of States, or even CA all alone, collapsed it would be US that would have to pick up the pieces, and probably bigger pieces than the failure of the banks’ holding companies. The money that vanished from the supposed impregnable bonuses would clearly have been spent anyhow by the billionaires, while the failure of the housing industry is decimating the consumer economy. Still, DC does not hear the pains of the electricians and plumbers as clearly as those of the billionaires, who have representatives in the Administration. And we will have to keep the building tradesmen afloat with unemployment insurance while they do nothing, a cost we do not have in the money manipulators. The banking executives we could safely leave to the vengeance of their stockholders, but the builders are needed a building.