Did you follow any of that wierd Krugman/Friedman/CEA feud over the last few days?

If not, nevermind.

But if you did, take a look at Bill Black's latest on the matter. Both Bill Black and Jamie Galbraith had already torn Operative K a new one over this, yet Bill just keeps on pounding. It's quite brutal, and supremely entertaining.

I just love open conflict between heterodox economists and defenders of the orthodoxy.

@RedSky

Ah, we've been down this road... I totally forgot, sorry.

Just briefly then: Greece fucked up prior to the crisis. Fudged numbers, corruption, banks run by the worst of the worst, economy exposed to exterior shocks, the works. They were hit hard when the crisis began, and it magnified the pre-existing conditions to a point where the entire thing became unstable.

When their banks finally admitted to being completely screwed, Greece was "motivated" to socialize the problem by bailing out the banks. If the Greek banks had gone bust, the German and French banks would have had to crawl back to Merkel and Sarkozy and beg for a bailout, only a year or so after they were bailed out the first time. Both governments would have been thrown out of office if they had bailed out the banks again, after swearing not to do it. So it was left to Greece to deal with the mess in a way that kept German and French banks out of it.

They did the same in Ireland, just like Bill Black testified before their parliamentary committee three weeks ago.

But the real mess, the social devastation, was primarily a result of "The Program". Some say it was the Greek government who enforced the measures, nobody told them to cut pensions in half. Well, the IMF still provides access to the Memorandum of Understanding, which clearly outlines just that. It was mandated by the troika and the Greek government went along all too willingly. As a result of the first troika program, GDP went down the toilet.

Anyway, the establishment in Greece is to blame for most of this, but the German/French banks (and their governments) are also to blame. Yet somehow, it is the lower/middle class in Greece who receive the punishment, and the lower/working class in Germany/Finland/Netherlands/etc who are expected to foot the bill this punishment causes for the entirety of Europe. Pisses me off to no end.

Also, it's important to check out the Youtube comments and the video uploader's description. If you did that, you'd know his non-dying performances outweigh his dying performances. Someone did all that work and now you don't need to: http://www.compleatseanbean.com/deathbycow.html

HE DIES IN:
Airborne - bye bye Toombs
Caravaggio - Rannuccio gets his throat slashed
Clarissa - Lovelace is skewered by Sean Pertwee
Don't Say a Word - Patrick Koster is buried alive
Equilibrium - Death by Poetry - Partridge is blasted away by Christian Bale while reading Yeats
Essex Boys - Jason Locke meets a nasty end in a Range Rover
Far North - Loki is frozen. Naked. In the snow. A chilling end if there ever was one.
The Field - the infamous Death by Cow - Tadgh falls over a cliff, pursued by a herd of stampeding cows
GoldenEye - Alec Trevelyan falls a long way down and is crushed by a satellite dish thing
Henry VIII - Robert Aske meets a gruesome end
The Island - Death by Clone. Merrick is shot in the throat by a nasty grabber thingy with a sharp
hook and a cable that gets wrapped around his neck, and while he's struggling with Lincoln
Six-Echo, the catwalk they're on collapses, and Merrick ends up dangling by the neck. Currently
the most creative dispatch of Sean's career. Definitely well hung.
The Lord of the Rings (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King) - Death
by Orc. Boromir. Arrows. Need I say more?
Lorna Doone - Carver Doone drowns
Outlaw - Dead Dead Dead. Was there ever any question? Dead.
Patriot Games - Sean Miller is beaten up, boathooked and finally blown up by Harrison Ford
Scarlett - Lord Fenton is dispatched
Tell Me That You Love Me - Gabriel Lewis is stabbed by Laura. Or he stabs himself. We're not
quite sure about this one, actually.
The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion - Death by summoning a god's avatar. Martin Septim (the son of the Emperor, aka The Lost Heir) meets his X-Box end when he attempts to save the world.
The Hitcher - Surely you jest. You need to ask? (There were two different versions filmed. He dies
in both of them.)
War Requiem - The German Soldier dies, but returns in the afterlife


HE LIVES IN:
(Leo Tolstoy's) Anna Karenina
A Woman's Guide to Adultery
The Big Empty
The Bill
Black Beauty
Bravo Two Zero
Exploits at West Poley
Extremely Dangerous
Faceless
The Fifteen Streets
Flightplan
Fool's Gold
How to Get Ahead in Advertising
In the Border Country
Inspector Morse: Absolute Conviction
Jacob
Lady Chatterley
The Loser
My Kingdom for a Horse
National Treasure (But only because of a rewrite. In an early version
of the the script Ian Howe got eaten by alligators in the subways of
New York. Really. Honest. I wouldn't lie to you. I wouldn't.)
North Country
Percy Jackson (Zeus is more or less an immortal so death seems a bit
redundant, really...)
The Practice
Pride
Prince
Punters
Ronin
Samson & Delilah
Sharpe (14 films)
Sharpe's Challenge
Shopping
Silent Hill
Small Zones
Stormy Monday
Tom & Thomas
Troubles
The Canterbury Tales - The Nun's Priest's Tale
The Dark
The True Bride
The Vicar of Dibley
Troy
Wedded
When Saturday Comes
Windprints
Winter Flight

Major Theatrical Performances:
Macbeth ... Yes. He dies. And gets his head impaled on a spike.
Romeo & Juliet... What do you think?
Fair Maid of the West ... Spencer doesn't die!

@blankfist, I'm kinda surprised at you. Perhaps you fell for the title, but here are some of the things Bill Black says:

1. Yes, [the bill's provision for running derivatives through a government-run exchange] is a good idea. You shouldn't be doing non-exchange traded derivatives, and this bill encourages exchange-traded derivatives. But it has loopholes that allow people to evade it, so it's probably not going to be terribly effective.
   
   Which is to say, the new regulations on derivatives are good, but they are too easy to circumvent.
   
   
2. What else do we know created perverse incentives? Professional compensation.
   
   
3. We know that the Goldmans of the world deliberately put the rating agencies in competition with each other in what in economics we call a "competition in laxity". In other words, whoever is willing to give the most absurdly inflated rating is who will get my business.
   
   Note: rating agencies are privately owned, for-profit companies.
   
   
4. So when we say the rating agencies screwed up, we don't mean that they took something that, you know, should've been a single-A and they call it a triple-A. No, we're talking about something that should have been 25 levels lower, and they called it AAA. If they're willing to do that, then they're going to be willing to bless the next insane thing, as long as the competition and laxity is allowed to exist.
   
   
5. Americans don't know that over 10 percent of all appraisers in America have signed a petition calling for the government to step in and regulate and enforce because of this Gresham's dynamic. A Gresham's dynamic is where cheaters and the least moral people prosper, and they drive the honest, moral people out of the marketplace. And that's what the appraisal industry was telling us. And the regulators refused to any do anything. And now, after a crisis measured in trillions of dollars of losses—and a trillion dollars is a thousand billion—we have, supposedly, the greatest reform bill since the Great Depression, and it completely ignores this causality.
   
   
6. The consumer bill was the other thing you asked me about. That is a good thing. But you can tell somebody has a really malicious sense of humor, because they put the new consumer agency into the Federal Reserve—the leading opponent of protecting consumers. This is the agency that under the HOEPA law [Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act], which goes way back to the '90s, had unique authority to protect us from otherwise unregulated mortgage bankers and anyone else who made mortgage loans. And even board members at the Federal Reserve went to Alan Greenspan and asked him to take action against these enormous abuses in the liar's loans and subprime, and Greenspan refused to act.
   
   This probably got your juices flowing, since it places some blame on the Fed. Unfortunately, it places blame on the Fed for refusing to regulate. Oh, and it was Republicans who insisted that the consumer protection agency be housed at the Fed.
   
   
7. So [in the subprime lending market] we had the exact opposite of what economics predicts: both parties to the transaction were made worse off. Well, why? Because the agents were made better off. Who were the winners? The rating agencies, the senior officers who walked away rich, the least moral appraisers, the least moral of the outside auditors at the big accounting firms. They were all the winners. They got rich by betraying their responsibilities. And so if you had had an Elizabeth Warren and if she had banned this nonprime product to protect consumers, now, that would enormously reduce this financial crisis.
   

In all, he's making all the usual liberal criticisms of the bill, which is that the bill's new regulations aren't nearly tough enough; which itself is based on the premise that unchecked greed and dishonesty was the root cause of the crisis.

Oh, and @marinara it doesn't "ensure Wall Street Scams keep running", a fair representation of his comments would be "doesn't crack down on Wall Street Scams."

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Bill Moyers, Bill Black, Housing' to 'Bill Moyers, Bill Black, Housing, net neutrality' - edited by MrFisk