"Altruism" and "virtue" are two words that, as far as the Bank of America/Countrywide is concerned, might as well be pronounced in Klingon. Because those are concepts that, by the evidence of their conduct, are not known to them.
On the contrary, it's probably a safe bet that FDR's bank regulators would have had them in their sights from early on.
3 comments:
I harbor no good thoughts for that asswipe. Deliberately engineered a war with Japan, and then it recently was discovered that he also persuaded the Europeans to declare war on Germany, instead of just letting Hitler attack the Soviets, as he intended to all along. To top it all off, he also caused the Depression to last until the war started, by screwing around with the economy by trying to "control" it.
Any good he might have done is infinitesimal compared to that.
The Anglo-French guarantees to Poland of the early 1920s?
Not doing anything and letting the markets work was tried by Hoover. It had over three years to work and it wasn't working. Hell, the Euros have followed the right-wing austerity plan in a time of recession this time around and it hasn't worked for them.
The right-wing plan of "let the markets work and let the people stave" hasn't ever worked.
I can't recall the specifics, but FDR was passing the word through one of his diplomats that the US would back up any country that would stop Hitler from annexing any more of Europe. Documents detailing this were found about a year ago. He was told, and the leaders of those nations were told, that Germany was more powerful than all of them together. But, they thought with the US on their side, they could do it. Turns out FDR couldn't sway congress anyway, but even worse, they all discovered the reports were correct regarding the German capabilities. FDR started dragging his feet about entering the war, as his advisers pointed out we were not going to be able to directly engage the Germans for at least a couple years.
We supplied virtually all of Japan's oil and a great deal of their metal. When FDR cut them off, and froze their accounts here, they had an oil reserve of 18 months. They HAD to go to war, or starve and freeze their population. He was well aware of the expected consequences of his actions, but he was pissed that the Japanese were interfering with our Chinese markets.
This country has always had periodic downturns in the economy. Sometimes they coincided with similar problems in other parts of the world. It would appear they only got worse, and would last longer, anytime the politicians thought they could "fix" the problem. FDR's financial guy, Morganthal(?), admitted afterwards that they had screwed up, and made it much worse.
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