Rogers: Stimulus Bill will Make the Problem Worse

Warns that more debt based monetary policy will lead to hyperinflation

Steve Watson | Infowars.net |Tuesday, Feb 10th, 2009

Renowned investor and respected financial commentator Jim Rogers has slammed the latest economic rescue package, declaring that it will not work and will most probably make the situation worse than it already is.

Rogers, the creator of the Rogers International Commodities Index (RICI), told CNBC that the latest so called “stimulus” is more of the same debt based policy that has led the world to the brink of total financial meltdown.

Rogers also pointed out that the offered solution is coming from the very same people who allowed the financial crisis to arise in the first instance.

“It is mind-boggling to me,” Rogers told “Squawk Box Europe.”

“If I were on your show 15 weeks in a row and was wrong, you’d probably never invite me back. These guys have been wrong year after year after year consistently and here they are making the same mistakes again. This is not going to solve the problem, it’s going to make it worse.”

Obama’s Treasury Secretary? Let’s Hope Not

Robert Scheer | Truthdig | Posted on Nov 6, 2008

Barack Obama is rumored to favor Lawrence Summers as his treasury secretary. That’s a terrible choice, says Robert Scheer, if the president-elect is at all concerned about the financial meltdown.
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Transcript:

Truthdig: Today on the Truthdig podcast, Truthdig editor Robert Scheer explains why the man rumored to be Barack Obama’s choice for treasury secretary would be a huge mistake. The frontrunner who has emerged for Barack Obama’s treasury secretary is rumored to be a man named Larry Summers, who was the treasury secretary under Bill Clinton. Tell us why you think that would be a terrible mistake?

Robert Scheer: Lawrence Summers is as responsible as anyone for the current economic meltdown. He was Robert Rubin’s protege in the Treasury Department, and he became secretary of treasury after Rubin, who had come from Goldman Sachs to be Clinton’s secretary of treasury, went off to CitiGroup—which was the first company from the kind of deregulation pushed through under Clinton. Summers was the secretary of treasury that got Clinton to sign off onto the two most egregious pieces of legislation that permitted the financial meltdown. This was legislation carried by Phil Gramm, the Republican senator who was head of the Banking Committee, and his name is one of them, it’s called the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, or otherwise known as the Financial Services Modernization Act—that was in 1999. And in 2000, as a lame duck, the Clinton administration approved after Congress passed again at Graham’s insistence, something called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. These two pieces of legislation allowed the current meltdown. They allowed the commercial banks, investment banks, stockbrokers and insurance companies to merge. That’s why you have this problem of AIG buying these phony toxic securities and everything. And it did not have any degree of transparency, it allowed them to merge their data, it allowed them to merge their activities. And the Commodity Futures Modernization Act said that all these new-fangled financial instruments that they developed, the hybrid instruments, the credit swaps and so forth, were automatically freed form any government regulation or any… were not covered by any pre-existing regulatory legislation. It’s those instruments that have gotten us into this problem. We don’t know what they’re worth. Taxpayers are now being forced to buy them. And that’s the heart of the whole thing. And it was Lawrence Summers who was secretary of the treasury, who in 1999-2000, urged Clinton successfully to sign off on those two pieces of legislation. It’s now admitted that they didn’t even known what was in them. That it had not been vetted, there had not been hearings in Congress on the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, and so Lawrence Summers has got his fingerprints all over these things. He assured the president, he assured everyone else, that this was a very good thing to do, but what in effect did, was end the regulatory regime that had been put place under Franklin Deleano Roosevelt during the Great Depression to prevent such a meltdown. So the idea that you would now reward Lawrence Summers for having gotten us into this mess by making him secretary of the treasury, and in an administration that has been elected to promise change and go back to this retread, go back to this guy who helped get us into this mess, is mind-boggling.

Ron Paul: Greenspan, Bernanke Should Be Criminally Charged

Paul Joseph Watson | Prison Planet | Friday, September 26, 2008

Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, a former 2008 presidential candidate, gestures during a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2008, with third-party candidates to call for greater inclusion of candidates beyond the Republican and Democratic majorities. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Congressman Ron Paul says that the bailout bill is likely to pass, heralding a 10-year plus economic depression for America and the potential for martial law should civil unrest arise as the financial meltdown worsens.

Speaking on The Alex Jones Show, Paul said of the bailout, “They want dictatorship, they want to pass all the penalties and suffering on to the average person on Main Street,” adding, “We will have a depression or recession, it’s locked in place due to previous Federal Reserve actions.”

“When they say that if we don’t do exactly as they say and turn over more of our money and more of our liberties and exempt themselves from any court in the whole nation, they’re trying to intimidate us and lead us into doing the wrong thing,” said Paul.

The Congressman added that serious problems would arise if nothing was done to address the problem, but that more serious consequences would follow should the bailout be passed.