Pilots who can't fly

Fantastic interview on Bubblevision (no thanks to the bubbloids with their lousy questions) this week with Nouriel Roubini and Nasim Taleb, two of the few who called this depression. Taleb thinks that we are very early in this debt unwinding and I believe that he is right.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1027496846

Taleb mentions that he would like to see the responsible people out of office. Example, Bernanke. Someone crashed your plane and now you are giving him a new plane. He suggests that someone like Nouriel Roubini be called in to fix the problem. At least he saw it coming.

I am very disappointed that President Obama appointed Geithner as Treasury head since he was part of the Establishment that watched this happen. He talks about change and yet he has the “same old” (Summers & Geithner) running the show. Perhaps he should have appointed Former Fed Governor Paul Volker to the Treasury. Volker at least understands tough medicine and wrote a prescient article back in April 2005, that really stuck out at the time, a solid 18-24 months before the crisis began in earnest.

A great line in his article:

I don't know whether change will come with a bang or a whimper, whether sooner
or later. But as things stand, it is more likely than not that it will be
financial crises rather than policy foresight that will force the change.

The problem is that even with the current crisis, we are not forcing that much change. We are trying to use more debt to stimulate the economy, when the problem is already too much debt and consumption. Even Volcker seems to be going along with this crap in his current role as an economic advisor to Obama.

The same logic applies in Canada. Why do we listen to all these Big Bank and BoC economists, none of whom, with the possible exception of former NatBanker Clement Gignac, saw this coming? We are giving them our plane (our taxpayer dollars borrowed from our children). Even right wingers PM Harper and Flaherty, who are supposed to be conservative, are going along with all this stimulus crap. The electorate wants to bribed with its own money.