Happy Larry Summers isn’t the Fed Chair Day! #OWS
So yesterday there I was with my Occupy group, we’d just gone over our plans for the second anniversary of Occupy Wall Street this coming Tuesday. We talked over releasing our book and the press conference in Zuccotti Park at 10:15am. We talked over the group’s web presence and how we had to improve it a bit before then, what flyers to hand out with the book, and how to get everyone copies of the book before then. In other words, logistics.
Then we turned to the content of the meeting, namely working on our op-ed focused on Larry Summers and why he shouldn’t be named the Fed Chair.
We’d brainstormed about it last week, and I put together a crappy first draft, and then another in our group had blown away my milquetoast logical argument with a couple of paragraphs of pure Occupy outrage. We were thinking about how to combine them, and we were also trying to decide whether to come up with a list of better candidates or just say “anyone would be better than Larry Summers.”
All of a sudden, someone in our group, who had been browsing the web in search for better candidates, suddenly interjects that “Larry Summers has withdrawn from consideration for the Fed job!”
That’s some good fucking karma.
And yes, it’s a pretty awesome moment when exactly what you’re working towards comes true like that, even if it’s only one thing on a very long list.
Here’s the next thing on the list: Too Big To Fail needs to end, people. Someone named Scott Cahoon sent me a video regarding that very topic last night which advertises his book called “Too Big Has Failed,” available on Amazon.
p.s. also, it’s been 5 years since the crisis, and not enough has changed.
mathbabe 
Schadenfreude, eh? Ideological purity and a shift to the extreme is what destroyed the Republican hold on power. Now it’s the Democrats turn. Yin and yang. In the mean time we all lose. Eventually it will force a return to center.
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I hope you’re right, since we’ve got a long way *left* to go to get near the center.
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Would you please post a link to those drafts? Even if Summers is out of the way, it would be good to hear some decent ranting!
re: “Not enough has changed.” Some would say nothing has changed. I had the opportunity to speak to someone who had retired from one of the big European banks last year. He grimly noted that nothing substantial had changed and that the system is running close to the edge more or less all the time.
On the political front, despite some glimmers of the original Obama, the change all seems to tend to the right. Some commentators now see him as a mini-Bush. Washington inertia looks impossible to overcome. Sad to say, I agree.
Finally, speaking of OWS, I just saw an utterly amazing doc at the Toronto International Film Festival last week about the events in Tahrir Square by focusing on a handful of totally engaged citizens in the midst of all the ferment, agony, anger and exhilaration. It’s called simply The Square and it just won the TIFF audience award for docs after previously winning at Sundance. Anyone who’s been even remotely involved in the spirit of Occupy would find this film well worth seeing.
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Sorry to be critical (you know I love you!), but I’ve got to be negative about the negativity. Surely the day should be called Janet Yellen Day if you think she’ll be a better Fed Chairperson?
Also, to reinforce the comments from beewhy: this is very much the view from Europe and the reason why the ECB will continue providing incredible amounts of excess liquidity and intermediating between banks in the funding markets (formerly known as the interbank market). The system can’t stand on its own.
In the US, things seem a bit better, especially as housing prices rise. However, TBTF is still a problem, but I think the real question is complexity and not size. JPM management have proven that no one is smart enough to keep control of a modern, multi-business line financial institution and, by direct corrolary, no one is smart enough to regulate such a contraption. Combine that with an absence of a proper resolution mechanism and rules (which I think is still the case for all major financial centers?) and you have the certainty of another problem at some point.
Who said: “you need to make it simple enough for any idiot to manage because eventually some idiot will be running it?”
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Babe! It’s not negativity, it’s relief! I’ve seriously been having nightmares about this.
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The poll question in the article that quotes you that you link to with “not enough has changed” contains a negative. I think the results will be difficult to interpret.
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The good news is that also in Israel two rich-white-well-connected-males shamefully redrew from Israel’s central bank head position. The first, Yaakov Frenkel (who was BTW vice chairman of AIG before the collapse), was caught stealing from a shop (not kidding!) in Japan, and the second, Leo Leiderman, had a sexual harassment complaint floating.
So maybe, thanks for public awareness, the old rich-white-male club is getting weaker?
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Yair, can we assume that you are either an Ethiopian, Yemenite or Burmese man? BTW, it was Hong Kong, not Japan, where Frenkel’s shoplifting incident occurred. Charges were later dropped. Chinese, Japanese, what’s the difference? Right, Yair?
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