Obama urges banks to boost lending

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

President Barack Obama told top bankers on Monday to explore “every responsible way” to increase lending, saying they were obliged to help repair the American economy after being saved by the taxpayer-funded bailout.

In a statement after more than an hour with the executives, Obama said he reminded them that much of the financial crisis that took the U.S. banking system to the brink of collapse had been “of their own making.” He also exhorted the executives — both in private and in public — to drop their opposition to an overhaul of the nation’s financial industry.

More here.

Oh god, this is so pathetic. Please, sir, please, could you stop fucking us over? This is the most disgusting moment of the Obama presidency thus far. When you are President, you don't politely ask federal entities, which is what recipients of the bailout funds are now because the federal government owns them, to do the things you want: you fucking dictate terms; you order them to do your bidding.

Nonetheless, President Obama continues to pretend that these banks are privately owned companies. Probably because of the persistence of powerfully influential right-wing delusions of laissez-faire absolutism. But that's all over now; we no longer live in a world where the market can do no wrong. We can no longer trust these too-big-to-fail organizations to do the right thing--actually, we could never trust these uber-banks to do the right thing, but now it's achingly obvious that that's the case.

Obama had better get his shit together, had better stop pussy-footing around, adhering to economic ideology that is as defunct as Aristotelian physics, or things are just going to get worse. The Reaganomics model doesn't work. We cannot return to the glory days of the go-go 90s, which is clearly what the President's goal is, because it was all an illusion in the first place, nothing but a precursor to today's broken economy.

I'm really starting to think that we're all fucked.

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