Geezah
03-22-2009, 08:55 PM
President Barack Obama said he believes the global financial system remains at risk of implosion with the failure of Citigroup or AIG, touching off “an even more destructive recession and potentially depression.”
His remarks came in a “60 Minutes” interview in which he was pressed by an incredulous Steve Kroft for laughing and chuckling several times while discussing the perilous state of the world’s economy.
“You're sitting here. And you're— you are laughing. You are laughing about some of these problems. Are people going to look at this and say, ‘I mean, he's sitting there just making jokes about money—’ How do you deal with— I mean: explain. . .” Kroft asks at one point.
“Are you punch-drunk?” Kroft says.
“No, no. There's gotta be a little gallows humor to get you through the day,” Obama says, with a laugh.
The interview is Obama’s most detailed explanation yet of his view of the world economic crisis, and he makes clear that he’s afraid the nation hasn’t seen the worst of it – even invoking the possibility of a “depression” if a series of financial institutions collapse all at once.
He is quick to add that he’s “optimistic about that not happening. Because I think we did learn lessons from the Great Depression.”
But Obama also makes clear in the interview that he believes Wall Street’s high-risk, high-reward culture was a main cause of the economic meltdown. He takes aim at traders and executives in extremely personal terms – calling them ironically at one point “the best and the brightest” – and says that even today, those same executives don’t get just how much their recklessness contributed to a recession that he says deteriorated more quickly than he expected.
“I mean there were a whole bunch of folks who, on paper, if you looked at quarterly reports, were wildly successful, selling derivatives that turned out to be. . .completely worthless,” Obama says, with a chuckle.
“Gosh, I don't think it's me being anti-Wall Street just to point out that the best and the brightest— didn't do too well on that front, and that— you know, maybe the incentive structures that have been set up— have not produced the kinds of long term growth that— that I think everybody's looking for.”
He also said he doesn’t think Wall Street has gotten his message yet, and that he must do a better job conveying it to them:
“One of the things that I have to do is to communicate to Wall Street that, given the current crisis that we're in, they can't expect help from taxpayers but they enjoy all the benefits that they enjoyed before the crisis happened,” Obama said. “You get a sense that, in some institutions that has not sunk in. That you can't go back to the old way of doing business, certainly not on the taxpayers' dime.”
Yet he stops short of endorsing legislation moving through Congress to tax nearly all the bonuses of executives at AIG — and clearly signaled his desire for changes in the legislation.
He says it’s important not to “govern out of anger.” And asked if the measure was constitutional, the former law professor said: “Well, I think that— as a general proposition, you don't want to be passing laws that are just targeting a handful of individuals…And as a general proposition, I think you certainly don't want to use the tax code—is to punish people.”
Link (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/20339.html)
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His remarks came in a “60 Minutes” interview in which he was pressed by an incredulous Steve Kroft for laughing and chuckling several times while discussing the perilous state of the world’s economy.
“You're sitting here. And you're— you are laughing. You are laughing about some of these problems. Are people going to look at this and say, ‘I mean, he's sitting there just making jokes about money—’ How do you deal with— I mean: explain. . .” Kroft asks at one point.
“Are you punch-drunk?” Kroft says.
“No, no. There's gotta be a little gallows humor to get you through the day,” Obama says, with a laugh.
The interview is Obama’s most detailed explanation yet of his view of the world economic crisis, and he makes clear that he’s afraid the nation hasn’t seen the worst of it – even invoking the possibility of a “depression” if a series of financial institutions collapse all at once.
He is quick to add that he’s “optimistic about that not happening. Because I think we did learn lessons from the Great Depression.”
But Obama also makes clear in the interview that he believes Wall Street’s high-risk, high-reward culture was a main cause of the economic meltdown. He takes aim at traders and executives in extremely personal terms – calling them ironically at one point “the best and the brightest” – and says that even today, those same executives don’t get just how much their recklessness contributed to a recession that he says deteriorated more quickly than he expected.
“I mean there were a whole bunch of folks who, on paper, if you looked at quarterly reports, were wildly successful, selling derivatives that turned out to be. . .completely worthless,” Obama says, with a chuckle.
“Gosh, I don't think it's me being anti-Wall Street just to point out that the best and the brightest— didn't do too well on that front, and that— you know, maybe the incentive structures that have been set up— have not produced the kinds of long term growth that— that I think everybody's looking for.”
He also said he doesn’t think Wall Street has gotten his message yet, and that he must do a better job conveying it to them:
“One of the things that I have to do is to communicate to Wall Street that, given the current crisis that we're in, they can't expect help from taxpayers but they enjoy all the benefits that they enjoyed before the crisis happened,” Obama said. “You get a sense that, in some institutions that has not sunk in. That you can't go back to the old way of doing business, certainly not on the taxpayers' dime.”
Yet he stops short of endorsing legislation moving through Congress to tax nearly all the bonuses of executives at AIG — and clearly signaled his desire for changes in the legislation.
He says it’s important not to “govern out of anger.” And asked if the measure was constitutional, the former law professor said: “Well, I think that— as a general proposition, you don't want to be passing laws that are just targeting a handful of individuals…And as a general proposition, I think you certainly don't want to use the tax code—is to punish people.”
Link (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/20339.html)
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