took him three tries to figure out he needs to set the rate of interest on reserves at the ff target to keep the ff rate from falling below the target.

nuff said? check out his history- no financial or fed operational experience.

How does congress, lobbied by 40K lobbyist groups, really represent the 300 million people voting for them? If I don’t pay for my meal in wafflehouse because it sucked a guy with a gun comes and locks me up in jail. Those guys with guns – you have to be careful of them – they get violent and will shoot you.

Paul Wilmott is talking about his house slaves being considered an “expense” for tax purposes and VAT stuff.

http://www.wilmott.com/blogs/paul/index.cfm/2008/10/21/Running-A-Country-Cant-Be-All-That-Difficult

My great great granpappy Jefferson had some house slaves, and some guys with guns in blue uniforms shot up lots of other guys to make them comply to their will – Wilmott better be careful.

they fought wwII for us and (fortunately) used deficit spending to sustain the wartime economy. And some trace our current national debt to those years.

Does that mean we still have to send real goods and services back to 1945. No, whatever we produce as a world gets consumed by the those alive at the time, debt or no debt.

Even distributional issues are politically determined currently, not by prior deficits.

This makes me so depressed. While the “debt” is left behind, so is the asset (the treasury bond). The federal debt (minus foreign holdings of bonds) is essentially borrowing from ourselves. The net financial transaction to the US is 0.

I’m flabbergasted that educated people can’t understand these simple concepts.

Good question. I can’t think of even one that has reserve accounting down, at least any big names. Perhaps John Taylor, but he’s a Republican, or James Hamilton, but he’s more of an econometrician. Even most heterodox economists don’t have reserve accounting down. Of course, even if they were to have it down, any mainstream economist still probably doesn’t know that loans create deposits.

Summers is the guy who said something about women not being in the upper elite of scientists (having to do with standard deviations of intelligence being greater among men), or something like that. So hopefully, that makes him untouchable as a potential treasury secretary.

That said, who is there that is respected enough in the mainstream, but still knows how reserve accounting works? Doesn’t seem like Obama has all that many options.