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President-Select gets a Public Spanking |
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By BuckcuB
The Love of Evil & The Root of All Money
A strange and unfamiliar sound swept up and down Wall Street on
January third, around one o'clock in the afternoon. Stock traders and
financial analysts are accustomed to shrieks of despair, bellows of
rage, desperate howls of "Buy!" and "Sell!", even the occasional
dropped-pumpkin thunk of some luckless broker eschewing the
elevator to exit the building--and his misfortunes--by way of the
window. But the sound noticed that day is one rarely heard on the
Street of Dreams.
Laughter. Chortling, to be more precise. You see, dear reader, just as traders returned from their lunch hour to the temples of Mammon, over the newswires came a dryly-worded announcement from Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan. The Fed was cutting interest rates by fifty basis points--a "half- percent" to you and me. An action sure to make the stock market start pumping faster than a teenaged boy's right arm. A mighty cheer went up on the trading floors--followed almost- instantly by a silence in which many hands went ponderingly to many chins--and then the laughter began. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve had just spanked president-not- elect George Bush, publicly, unmistakably, and hard enough to make Shrub unable to sit for a month. For those who do not closely follow the twists and turns of the politics of money, BuckcuB is happy to provide an explanation.
So Shrub and his handlers calculated an end-run around Greenspan. With much pomp and fanfare, Georgie summoned a few dozen of the nation's most-powerful CEOs to his digs in Austin, Texas, with the trumpeted intent of selling his stupendous supply-side tax cut to them, and garnering their considerable power to help push it through Congress. Enter Alan Greenspan The Federal Reserve Board could have cut the interest rate at its most-recent meeting, but it declined to do so at that time. Or the Fed could have waited to cut rates until its next meeting at the end of January. For the board to take action between meetings is vanishingly rare. Instead, Chairman Greenspan waited for the just-right day and time to make his market-erupting announcement. The exact day, and exact time, when Bush had gathered his gaggle of corporate leaders in Texas to insist that the economy was tanking and only his tax cut could save us from a nosedive. The timing of Greenspan's proclamation was so savagely pointed, deliberately disrupting the Bushian conclave, and the size of the rate cut so telling--double what analysts were expecting later this month-- that it cannot be mistaken for anything but what it was. A ringing public slap in Shrub's slack-jawed face, and a viciously-cutting repudiation of the trillion-plus tax cut. Taken by surprise, The Texas Twit could do nothing in response, except to stammer out disconnected chunks of an imperfectly- rehearsed speech he hadn't planned on making until the end of the month, when it was generally expected the Fed would cut interest rates. "Bold action," Shrub publicly called Greenspan's move, then haltingly claimed that more bold action was needed. (Hint, hint -- the Bushian tax cut.) Public comments notwithstanding, BuckcuB is reliably informed that the Bush Bunch's private fury was extreme. Greenspan's surprise stiletto neatly punctured Georgie's news balloon, as gushing commentary on the Fed announcement and the meteoric upsurge in the stock markets immediately following wiped the Austin meeting off the newscasts, the front page, and the national consciousness. Worse--at least from the Bushian viewpoint--the Fed announcement added a tactical thermonuclear device to the already-bulging arsenal of Congressional opposition to the giant tax cut. Alan Greenspan's name is uttered on Capitol Hill in the reverential tones otherwise reserved for Divine Providence. If Greenspan publicly opposes any tiniest economic proposal, politicians on both sides of the aisle automatically genuflect and throw that proposal aside. Most damaging of all, however, is the now-very-public spectacle of Bush at odds with the undisputed top dog of economic policy and theory. BuckcuB cannot emphasize strongly enough, to readers who may live far from the machinations of Bedlam on the Potomac -- disagreeing with Alan Greenspan on financial policy in Washington, D.C., is essentially identical to pissing on the Pope in St. Peter's Basilica during Easter Mass. As Bucky's Grammy would have put it more- delicately, "It simply isn't done, my dear." Period. So, dear reader, even before he has plunked his flabby ass down unlawfully in the Oval Office, the Texas Twit has one very big strike against him -- in his very first at-bat. Georgie stupidly tried to take on the one-man juggernaut of fiscal brilliance, and was promptly squashed flatter than the proverbial pancake. Will Bushie learn his lesson from this oh-so-public spanking? An unlikely result, BuckcuB thinks. He hasn't the smarts to realize the crushing extent of this defeat, and his handlers haven't the guts to make it plain to him. And the Bushians made the mistake of promising far too much to people who actually expect those promises to be kept. First inning: Love of Evil, 0. Root of all Money, 1. The game's getting ugly for Shrub already, and it's barely begun. Settle back with your hot dogs and peanuts, readers. This promises to be a hugely entertaining bloodbath. |
