if you dismiss that debt of $1.6 trillion and that payment came off, all of a sudden we would get a reprieve. the only thing i think is dangerous about that, they ll take it like oh, boy, i can get back to spending again and we don t have any pressure on us to solve the problem, but it would solve the problem of no need to close the government down and we wouldn t have to threaten people and say the social security checks won t be out. and i think it s a great way of making the point that people forget, which is that the central bank is the instrument by which we are financing our own national borrowing at the treasury department. we re lending ourselves our own money that we re making up on a comput computer. it s fraud and deceiving the people. iron today, before bernanke, the financial service committee, i brought up the subject again, there s a lot of people at fault, all this special
the first place. we re seeing the consequences of politicians in the world, most notably western europe. the latest country teetering on the bring now italy. these guys have a trillion 2 in debt that needs to be refinanced. the president and finance minister continue to bicker, blocking any path to the solution. meantime, ireland is the third country to have its bonds downgraded to junk, in other words people think they re less likely to pay them. italy and spain are teed up as we could not possibly create enough austerity or collect enough money in taxes to deal with the problem of the debt that we have. meanwhile, the only thing that could possibly help us is
is that the two sides don t agree on the same facts. i think there are reasons for this. they wouldn t trust treasuries, wouldn t trust experts. you meet republicans who say, one, we can move this money around in a way that treasury says we can t. even when goldman sachs says we can, says it would be damaging, or two if we defaulted, it wouldn t be that bad. i m saying restructure it, cancel it. i m saying 1945, you owe $60 trillion and you ve got $3, so guess who is not getting paid? the people who are owed $60 trillion. the sooner we wake up and smell the coffee, and i feel like no politician wants to have that conversation. 2340 we haven t heard much about that yet. i ve heard it in the context of greece, but not in this context. so there s still an idea this is a way to get us to an austerity package, if we re optimistic, or a way to pass this onto barack
of any wrongdoing in the aspects of the crisis if it wasn t so outrageous if it wasn t a tv show, i would be yelling and screaming, but i have to behave in a manner that s reasonably appropriate most of the time, so i maintain my exposures, on the brink of disasters because of the actions of these individuals. barry is joining us. why is a proposal like this so insulting? how much time do we have? it lets people who helped create the whole crisis off the hook. it lets people who knowingly engaged in criminality, knowingly engaged in fraud, it s just write a check, you want to murder, rape, rampage, as long as you can write a check for a couple billion which, by the way, we gave them. we ve given all these companies much more money than they re paying in fines, so ultimately
about this back in january 2008. this is before bear stearns, before lehman, before everything. they said, prepare yourself, credit crises cause very severe dislocations in stock markets, in real estate markets, but it also really causes a huge increase in debt because on a government level, tax revenues drop, unemployment goes up, and then there s always an attempt to throw money at it. it s not necessarily all the money that s spent on the bailout, which was a substantial sum, though less than originally believed. it s just suddenly the economy grinds to a halt, but the expenditures keep going. unemployment goes up, house values go down, which means less tax money. and all of this ends up on sungle sam. even things like madoff, uncle sam has to cover. on top of all that, you have the bailouts and everything else. don t forget fannie and freddie have become the back-door