Tiabbi tones down, in response to...
"As is pretty much always the case with modern American politics, people seem to find hobgoblins and conspiracies everywhere in every place except where the real thing, or something close to it, actually exists."
Guess who wrote this in his most recent poltical piece in his sponsor magazine, Rolling Stone. It was Matt Tiabbi. Any regular readers here may remember that there was a post here on May 2, "Matt Tiabbi, Conspiracy Theorist on Steroids" that focused on his missatements, misleading assumptions, weak sources, and self-adulating approach to an accusation that there was a vast conspiracy underway in fixing the global interest rate and swap rate markets. As his crazed article went on he even suggested that all traded markets, not just rate and swap markets but gold, gas, oil, and other commodity markets were priced by "little private cabals of cigar chomping insiders that we are forced to trust."
That this article was even published was irresponsible. My blog commentary was far too long to be a comment to the editor, but I sent it to RS's "letters department" anyway, not expecting a response and I did not get one. Or maybe I did when I read Tiabbi's sentence above.
The article that this is sourced from is in the June 6th issue and the title is "The Mad Science Of The National Debt." The focus of the article is the political "debate" in D.C. about the debt ceiling and somewhat tangentially the Fed concept of quantitative easing. Quantitative easing in plain English is when a central bank prints more money and pushes it into the system for various reasons - to stimulate bank lending, to buy up and hopefully repackage bad assets that are gumming up the system, to prevent deflation while keeping interest rates as low as possible to force assets into riskier classes that are more productive for the economy, and to steal interest income from savers, mostly the elderly, to finance this action. The U.S. has led the way with this approach, Japan has followed with gusto, and Britain has now stuck its its toes in the water.
In fact, central banks broadly are flooding the system with liquidity. If this results in a stablization of markets, a halt to panics, and the beginning, just modest beginnings of growth in some places and slowing of deterioration in others, it may be tethered back slowly over time without some radical shock to the system. That of course is the positive goal, and perhaps one of the only choices we have at the moment. It is also an ambitious goal that eventually will require some sanity among our politicians. The downside is that the "tethering" pushes us back into recession combined with an outburst of inflation, the worst of all worlds. This is serious business and a risk that requires intelligent insight and action to manage, here and globally.
Tiabbi's approach to all of this is much more opinionated and he appropriately lambasts all of the Republican rhetoric comparing running a massive global economy to a family sitting around a kitchen table balancing their monthly budget. While focusing on the Republican's misrepresentations (ridiculing some in a humorous way) on virtually everything about scaling back our national debt in a sane way that doesn't just cut necessary public benefit programs, he also takes some Democrats to task as well, including some nonsense talk by President Obama. Some of the writing is entertaining, depending on your political inclinations.
The most refreshing thing is that compared to the "massive conspiracy" article written about here on May 2, Tiabbi does not end with some with some ironclad conclusion from his own imagination. He writes, "global monetary policy is drifting in the direction of semi-permanent stimulus, and no one has any idea how it all ends... God help us."
Guess who wrote this in his most recent poltical piece in his sponsor magazine, Rolling Stone. It was Matt Tiabbi. Any regular readers here may remember that there was a post here on May 2, "Matt Tiabbi, Conspiracy Theorist on Steroids" that focused on his missatements, misleading assumptions, weak sources, and self-adulating approach to an accusation that there was a vast conspiracy underway in fixing the global interest rate and swap rate markets. As his crazed article went on he even suggested that all traded markets, not just rate and swap markets but gold, gas, oil, and other commodity markets were priced by "little private cabals of cigar chomping insiders that we are forced to trust."
That this article was even published was irresponsible. My blog commentary was far too long to be a comment to the editor, but I sent it to RS's "letters department" anyway, not expecting a response and I did not get one. Or maybe I did when I read Tiabbi's sentence above.
The article that this is sourced from is in the June 6th issue and the title is "The Mad Science Of The National Debt." The focus of the article is the political "debate" in D.C. about the debt ceiling and somewhat tangentially the Fed concept of quantitative easing. Quantitative easing in plain English is when a central bank prints more money and pushes it into the system for various reasons - to stimulate bank lending, to buy up and hopefully repackage bad assets that are gumming up the system, to prevent deflation while keeping interest rates as low as possible to force assets into riskier classes that are more productive for the economy, and to steal interest income from savers, mostly the elderly, to finance this action. The U.S. has led the way with this approach, Japan has followed with gusto, and Britain has now stuck its its toes in the water.
In fact, central banks broadly are flooding the system with liquidity. If this results in a stablization of markets, a halt to panics, and the beginning, just modest beginnings of growth in some places and slowing of deterioration in others, it may be tethered back slowly over time without some radical shock to the system. That of course is the positive goal, and perhaps one of the only choices we have at the moment. It is also an ambitious goal that eventually will require some sanity among our politicians. The downside is that the "tethering" pushes us back into recession combined with an outburst of inflation, the worst of all worlds. This is serious business and a risk that requires intelligent insight and action to manage, here and globally.
Tiabbi's approach to all of this is much more opinionated and he appropriately lambasts all of the Republican rhetoric comparing running a massive global economy to a family sitting around a kitchen table balancing their monthly budget. While focusing on the Republican's misrepresentations (ridiculing some in a humorous way) on virtually everything about scaling back our national debt in a sane way that doesn't just cut necessary public benefit programs, he also takes some Democrats to task as well, including some nonsense talk by President Obama. Some of the writing is entertaining, depending on your political inclinations.
The most refreshing thing is that compared to the "massive conspiracy" article written about here on May 2, Tiabbi does not end with some with some ironclad conclusion from his own imagination. He writes, "global monetary policy is drifting in the direction of semi-permanent stimulus, and no one has any idea how it all ends... God help us."
posted by John Borden at 5:50 PM
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