With all the bullshit being broadcast, you would think that some green shoots would indeed be sprouting somewhere sooner of later, but somehow it’s not all that convincing. Remember those “stress tests” used to determine the health of the banks spreadsheets under various scenarios of economic growth and unemployment? Hot damn! What a confidence booster. The banks passed them after renegotiating their grades. Even though the then-current economic conditions were already worse than the worst-case scenario envisioned. We can attribute that to “lag time,” or something. In defense of the Masters of the Universe, things really are moving faster than the speed of thought.
At least someone in charge is catching up after the fact. The woman in charge of overseeing the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program–what a sweet-assed name for a broken apocolypse condom!), Elizabeth Warren, suggests that we need to re-run the stress tests “right now” based on current conditions, because:
We’ve already blown past the worst-case scenario on unemployment.
In other words, the stress test results are about as valuable as the paper in the bank vaults. Less than not very much at all. We have already “blown past” those sunnier scenarios.
I appreciate Warren’s candor, which is certainly at odds with what we’ve been hearing from Obama and the MoUs.