#bailouts

Such a good analogy for “privatizing the profits, but socializing the losses.”

Taxpayers, not the wealthy owners of OceanGate, will be paying the millions of dollars in costs for the search and rescue—and I almost wouldn’t have a problem with that (the coastguard rescues hapless people every day, and I don’t think that regular citizens should be forced to pay for their own rescues, because saving people is what a society should come together and do).

But the owners of OceanGate not only knew of the risks, they eschewed any kind of government regulation (like having an emergency location beacon that would have made the search far easier) because they said it would inhibit growth and profits. And I can’t help but believe that the coastguard and the navy and all of the other public agencies, are searching just a little bit longer and a little bit harder, because it’s rich people who are missing.

And don’t even get me started on how Greece’s coastguard is most likely responsible for the murder of hundreds of refugees, or how Italy and much of Europe have made it national policy for their coastguards to not help refugees at sea.

Anyway, it’s well past time for more people to start seriously thinking about how our society always bails out banks and wealthy billionaires, but tells poor people to exercise better judgment and pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Peter St. Onge 6/26/26

Alan Greenspan has died at the ripe age of a hundred.

Greenspan’s passing set off a tsunami of tongue-bath OpEds how the “Maestro” centrally planned the American economy for close to 20 years.

In reality, Greenspan turned the Fed into a permanent bailout machine that gets worse with each passing decade.

In Bitcoin, the goal is independence, not just exposure. The Bitcoin Way helps step-by-step with Bitcoin self-custody, personal cybersecurity, and even Plan B residency.

The “Maestro” at the Helm

Just 69 days after taking office in 1987, Greenspan was blindsided by a market crash that he used to turn the Fed from alleged economic referee into a bailout machine where the bankers keep the wins and taxpayers -- and dollar holders -- eat the losses.

This became known as the “Greenspan Put” — put means insurance in finance. And it’s the reason Boomers — and bankers — own everything while 40-something Millennials live in Mom’s basement.

Greenspan ran that machine for 20 years, all the way through 2006 when Greenspan lit his last boom-bust bomb, ending in the 2008 Financial Crisis that nearly set off a Second Great Depression.

Unfortunately, the bailout machine Greenspan built is now a permanent feature, with every subsequent Fed chair forced to pump til it breaks then bail out what’s left at your expense.

From Counterfeiter to Bailouts

So the Fed was created by bankers — the infamous Jekyll Island putsch — as a counterfeiting cartel that prints money, but not so fast the inflation puts voters on pitchforks.

Like a gasoline thief who siphons the neighbor a quarter-gallon at a time instead of draining tanks, which would get him caught.

The way central banks do this is guaranteeing bailouts for commercial banks — so-called “lender of last resort.” Which lets those banks lend money they don’t have -- they literally create type the loans from thin air. Which is why you need to open an account to get a mortgage — the bank created the money.

Then central bankers limit the printing to tidy quarter-gallon siphons using interest rates, which determine how much loans cost.

Lower rates mean cheaper loans — and more of them. Which artificially boosts growth, generates fees for wall street, and makes it cheap for the federal government to spend more than it has.

Everybody wins. Except pleb taxpayers and dollar-holders.

The problem is having a giant counterfeit machine is Frodo’s ring: It attracts pressure to cut rates too far -- which causes boom-bust inflation and recession.

And the even more insidious pressure from Wall Street to use that lender of last resort function to bail out not just boom-bust but speculation.

Because an iron law of finance is more risk is more return. If you tell gamblers they keep the wins but you’ll cover the losses they’ll go all in all the time.

And that’s where Greenspan comes in. Starting with that 1987 stock crash -- Black Monday -- Greenspan flooded the banking system with money, promising to keep flooding til every banker was solvent.

The Greenspan Put was born.

The Wall Street Greenspan Built

Bankers went from conservative portly men in glasses to the 1980s sharks fueled by hookers and blow.

Sharks who went on to fuel near-annual financial crises under Greenspan, from the S&L crisis and Tequila crises to the dot-com bubble. The 1994 bond market massacre. The 1997 Asian financial crisis. The 1998 hedge-fund bailouts.

The mother of housing bubbles in the early 2000’s.

In every case, the sharks made billions. And in every case taxpayers and dollar holders got shafted.

When the smoke cleared finance quadrupled to become the third largest industry in America.

Worse, it put Wall Street on a risk house of cards that every Fed chair now must feed.

Our new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh has already bumped up against that, apparently ditching promises to reduce inflation by pawning Fed assets since Wall Street is now orchids in a greenhouse cannot survive in the wild.

What’s Next

Greenspan may be gone, but the bailout machine he built keeps growing. Fixing it is easy: Just announce the Fed won’t bail anybody out, if a bank fails it’s sold for scrap to more prudent banks.

Of course that would set off an instant 2008 crisis. Meaning it won’t happen.

The best Warsh can do is try and limit bailouts. But he’s locked in a straitjacket Alan Greenspan wove.

Paul Krugman:

In its dealings with other countries, Donald Trump’s administration is following a clear agenda of undermining liberal values, fomenting discord and withdrawing critical financial support. One of the administration’s first acts was to drastically cut funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development, then shut the agency down completely. Independent estimates suggest that these cuts have already led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, many of them children, and will lead to millions more deaths in the years ahead. It is trying to shutter Voice of America, a federally-sponsored news agency founded to fight the Nazis and promulgate democratic values throughout the world. The administration has vocally supported extreme right-wing parties like the AfD in Germany. He has withdrawn the US from the Paris Agreement environmental accords and the World Health Organization. He has severely reduced aid to Ukraine, a democracy struggling to survive conquest by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. So it might have seemed out of character when Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, suddenly announced on Monday that the United States is prepared to offer open-ended financial support to Argentina:

But although in this case America is offering aid rather than taking it away, our new Argentina policy is part of the same Trumpian agenda. It’s true that the plan to aid Argentina looks quite a lot like Bill Clinton’s bailout of Mexico during that nation’s financial crisis of 1994-5. But we had a compelling interest in helping Mexico, which is our neighbor and one of our most important trading partners. We had just signed a free trade agreement with Mexico, and were also trying to bolster Mexico’s transition from one-party rule to genuine democracy.

Argentina, in contrast, is not systemically important to the United States. Argentina is a miniscule player in terms of US interests. The U.S. accounts for only about 1/8th of Argentina’s imports, less than its imports from the European Union and much less than its imports from China. It’s definitely a lot less important, both strategically and economically, than Brazil, whose economy is more than three times as big as Argentina’s. Yet Trump has completely alienated Brazil, imposing 50 percent tariffs on the nation for daring to try and convict a former president who attempted to overturn his electoral defeat. Always indulging his personal grudges, Trump has imposed sanctions on the judge who oversaw Jair Bolsonaro’s prosecution — and on his wife. It obviously doesn’t matter to him that both the tariffs against Brazil and the personal sanctions are surely illegal. Trump’s behavior has had a devastating effect on America’s interests, driving Brazil into China’s arms.

[...] But the victory celebrations were premature: Mileinomics is now in big trouble. So Bessent is offering large-scale aid — not to defend U.S. interests, but in an attempt to rescue the reputation of Trump’s preferred ideology and cult of fealty. When Milei took office in December 2023, he imposed a regime of economic shock therapy, especially severe spending cuts. He also instituted a strong peso policy, propping up the exchange rate — the rate at which the peso trades against other currencies like the dollar and the euro — hoping that the currency’s strength would bring inflation down.

[...] What? In the late 1970s both Argentina and Chile tried to control inflation with what economists call a “tablita”: an exchange-rate-based stabilization plan that slows the rate at which a currency is depreciating in the hope that this will reduce domestic inflation. In both cases the reduced rate of depreciation temporarily reduced inflation and interest rates, because investors became more willing to hold peso-denominated assets, which in turn caused an economic boom. But these booms were short-lived, because while inflation did, in fact, slow, it didn’t slow enough to avoid serious problems. With prices in these nations rising faster than their currencies were falling against their trading partners, both countries found their “real exchange rates” — exchange rates adjusted for international differences in price levels — rising. This made their domestic industries ever less competitive on world markets. Thanks to this growing overvaluation, both the 1970s tablitas ended in grief. Chile experienced an extremely severe economic crisis in 1982, which caused a 14 percent decline in real GDP. The junta that ruled Argentina at the time tried to distract the public from its economic failures by invading the Falkland Islands, which did not end well.