The Great Recession Blog

When Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen worries about growing wealth inequality in America, I wonder if she’s truly unaware of how she creates this disparity. All of the Fed’s efforts at economic recovery have been directly applied toward helping the America’s most wealthy recover first. How can you not create greater wealth inequality in America when the recovery program for the Great Recession […]

We’ve spent an unprecedented fortune trying to rebuild out of the rubble of The Great Recession; yet, we are building by the same architecture that caused our economic structure to collapse in the first place. We all recall how the buzz phrase of the Great Recession was “too big to fail.” The lynchpin that triggered […]

Watching the aftermath of hurricane Sandy, I found myself repeating something I’ve complained about for decades. I watched the tired story of millions of people living in dark because of power lines being whipped about in a storm. What a metaphor that is for how truly in-the-dark America has become. I listened to stories of […]

I’ve posted a new video for a song I wrote to give Bank of America credit that is due for helping to create a great recession for us all. The video is illustrated with photos from the Great Depression. My tribute to Bank of America with images of the time when it was born:

There are more thousand-dollar bills stuffing the suit of a Goldman Sachs executive than there are straws in a scarecrow. The Wall Street people who piloted us all into the Great Recession have overturned banks that received more than a trillion dollars in free loans and outright gifts from beleaguered tax-payers. They could not have […]

Senator Bernie Sanders said that the Fed’s bailout programs are “socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else.” (This is what makes this such a great recession for those rich ol’ boys with government-issue golden parachutes.) It’s been half a year since the audit that Sanders and Ron Paul pushed for revealed that […]

American International Group has received to date $170,000,000,000 of U.S. tax-payer’s money. The zeroes start swimming in my vision with numbers like that, as my eyes cannot focus on numbers so wide. If the numerals were letters, that’d be enough letters for three four-letter words. Don’t know why I think of four-letter words in the […]

We’ve all heard the plan for saving the nation. Create a “Bad Bank.” Deposit all the bad loans in the nation into the bad bank, and flush them away. The bad bank will buy these loans with money that is minty fresh This magic money will come from the next generation. Our legacy to them […]

Today begins the Chinese Year of the Ox. I wasn’t sure how much stock to put in the Chinese Year of the ___ stuff. (Right now I’m not buying stock in anything.) Then I had a brainstorm. I can easily see if there is anything to this Chinese New Year stuff by looking back at […]

I was still feeling kind of swishy in my belly this week as I read about various CEOs who brought down fat bonuses by bringing down their banks. And I was thinking, what is it that a top-of-the-line CEO does to bring down one of the world’s largest banks that makes him or her worth […]

When the present economic downfall was really getting under way last fall, Ken Lewis, the CEO of Bank of America, was lauded around the world for scooping up Merrill Lynch in a fire sale. What a brilliant man, the world thought, for picking up a Rolls Royce like Merrill Lynch for pennies on the dollar. […]

The Congressional Budget Office recently announced that the United States will be running its first trillion-dollar deficit this year — $1.2 Trillion if we count the pocket change. That’s about three times more than it’s been in any other year. Most Americans seem ready to agree with congress that this is necessary in order to […]