Garfield, the bar has been raised with this bailout
Fed chair Ben Bernanke said Wednesday to expect economic activity to “fall short of potential for a time.”
A bit of an understatement on the day that the Dow dropped another 733 points, eh?
Peter Goodman at The Times noted Mr. Bernanke also made this curious observation at his Economic Club of NY appearance:
The real concern that we have is that we have got and developed, in this country, a very serious ‘too big to fail’ problem. And that problem, we’ve just recognized now in the current situation, how severe it is.
Just recognized? That’s right. I forgot the banks just kinda merged themselves.
Or has this all just been a red scare?
These cartoons of Comrades Paulson and Bernanke come courtesy of Bill Perkins, 39, a Houston-based venture capitalist at Small Ventures USA who has run all three as full page ads in the New York Times and other media recently.
Sez Stephen Colbert: “Garfield, the bar has been raised.”
The story goes that Perkins had made $1.25 million betting that Goldman Sachs had better fundamentals than its peers. He cashed out after Paulson announced the bailout plan and pledged to use his gain to campaign against the bailout.
“The stock did OK because the government came in and said, ‘No one can fail,’” he told the Journal. “It’s capitalism on the way up and communism on the way down.”
He commissioned an art collective called Otabenga Jones & Associates to draw cartoons for the campaign.
Why cartoons?
“I felt like a bunch of words on a piece of paper – people wouldn’t read, but with a picture, people get it right away,” he said.
Of course, the bailout passed anyway. And the government could yet commit hundreds of billions more to banks.
In an email, Perkin’s assistant said that they are considering the possibility of running more ads, but haven’t finalized anything at this time.
I hope they do. I’m fed up with the NY Times not having a comics page.
October 17th, 2008 at 9:46 am
This kind of guy is always amusing to me. When the “free market” needs help from the government they cry foul. But when something in the market directly affects them negatively, they cry “where was the government?” A truly free market doesn’t exist in my mind because every modern market has rules. And as we’ve seen this year, rules that keep markets fair and honest are a good thing. These rules might hurt profit, but then you don’t have huge bubbles and crashes and all that has become reality now.
October 19th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Well, well…nice to see some good illustrations. You need to be clearer in the top of where you were going. If I were an average reader, I would have bailed after the Bernacke quote….Shouold have clearly signaled what the post was really all about