Top Ten Turkeys Standing in the Way of Financial Reform

Before we all go into a food coma, it’s time to talk a little turkey. I asked New Deal 2.0 bloggers to tell me what persons deserved the turkey prize for thwarting the financial reform our country desperately needs in order to prosper. Marshall Auerback noted that we are “spoiled for choice” in this season of frustration. Here, in no particular order, are the nominees…

1. Barack Obama

“Obama owed his meteoric rise to his Wall Street paymasters and now is simply rewarding their early downpayment.” — Marshall Auerback

“Blame where blame belongs. Barack Obama for listening to Rubin about the team he chose. Everything flows from that.” — Rob Johnson

2. Timothy Geithner

“‘heckuvajob Timmy’ makes Arabian horseshow marshalls look like Napaleon by comparison” - Randall Wray

3. Barney Frank

“Barney Frank is part of the problem, not part of the solution. He is to financial reform what Marvelous Marv Throneberry was to baseball players.” — Marshall Auerback

4. Larry Summers

5. Special composite award: Jamie, Lloyd, Vikram, John, Ken and the team

“…the real obstacles are those who make profit from a malfunctioning system” — Rob Johnson

6. Alan Greenspan

“Greenspan’s game of debt bubble economics is based on Friedman’s counterfactual conclusion from the lesson of the 1929 crash and the Great Depression that central banks can avoid a depression caused by a market crash merely by aggressive quantitative easing.” — Henry Liu

7. Milton Friedman

“Friedman was the guru.. of bubbleland” — Henry Liu

8. Robert Rubin

“The Ur-Turkey” — Tom Ferguson

“Rubin was the quarterback of bubbleland, whose Rubinomics constructed the game of financing the US trade deficit with circular capital account surplus through dollar hegemony.” — Henry Liu

9. Bill Clinton

“To get elected, [Obama] had to make a deal with the Clinton gang to adopt a “centrist” approach in dealing with the economic crisis” — Henry Liu

10. George W. Bush

“[when Obama took office]..the dice… had been cast by the Clinton and Bush teams.” — Henry Liu