Oil Wars

I was going to post on this hysterical piece of garbage but unfortunately I don't have a way to upload the files onto my blog at the moment. Furthermore, anyone who can't see that this fool simply can't add or that still believes that Venezuela doesn't produce exactly as much oil as it says it does is holding a religious type conviction that simply isn't worth bothering with anymore.

However, there was something else that I thought was worth commenting on and that is Hillary Clinton's notion that bringing back the ghosts from past economic booms will somehow prove to be the elixir that the U.S. economy needs.

From today's edition of the Wall Street Journal:

Sen. Hillary Clinton wants Alan Greenspan on her high-level “emergency group” to deal with high-risk mortgages even though she admitted yesterday that she never understands “what he’s saying,” a reference to Greenspan’s vaguely worded “Fed speak” that he used in his 18-year tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve.

It seems a little bizarre to me that you would want to bring back Alan "I never met a bubble I didn't like" Greenspan to presumably solve a problem that in large measure he helped create in the first place as the article also noted:

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal last year, Edward Gramlich, who was Fed governor from 1997 to 2005, said that he had personally proposed to Greenspan around 2000 that the Fed ramp up efforts to examine predatory lending. “He was opposed to it, so I didn’t really pursue it,” said Gramlich, a Democrat who was one of seven Fed governors.

And I am not the only one who thinks this way. Even one of Hillary's top cheerleaders, Paul Krugman, had to admit the idea was "pretty dumb"

What I found to be very interesting though was her reasoning for wanting him back:

But Clinton defended her naming of Greenspan to the commission because he has a “calming influence” and because he had backed away from his earlier emphasis towards deregulation. “He’s moved on his understanding and depth of the problem,” she told the editorial board of the Philadelphia Daily News.

The New York senator also admitted that she didn’t understand why he has a calming influence: “Don’t ask me why because I never understand what he’s saying.”

While she admits she doesn't have a clue about Greenspan's ideas or policies she wants him around again because ... things were pretty darn good when he was the chairman of the Federal Reserve. In fact that seems to some up her entire campaign - "Things were great when Bill was running the country so vote for me and the prosperity of the 90's will come back".

I wonder if she got this campaign strategy from former Venezuelan president Carlos Andres Perez who presided over one boom in the mid 70s and was re-elected in the late 80s on the hope that having him back in Miraflores would bring back the good times? After all it did work for him as he was relected (things didn't turn out so well for Venezuela as rather than bringing back prosperity CAP proceeded to run the country into the ground). Given that Mark Penn and James Carville are two big Hillary advisers and both worked for the Venezuelan opposition a few years back maybe they brought some of CAPs brilliant ideas to Hillary.

Further, if you give it some thought the similarities between the Clintons and CAP extend beyond just this type of stupid campaigning. For example, both are good at campaigning as though they are left of center only to move to the opposite side of the political spectrum the second the last polling station closes.

Of course, Venezuelans bringing back CAP did nothing to bring back prosperity. Will Americans be smart enough to realize that bringing back Hillary (and Greenspan) will probably not re-inflate the stock market and housing bubbles and hence not bring back the 90s?

We shall see.
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