WIll Krugman Defend Thain’s Stimulus?
In case you haven’t heard, former Merrill CEO John Thain resigned today, presumably because of this scandal (HT2 Gene Callahan for the video):
UPDATE: This video was messing up my precious Google ads, so I took it down. You can click the link above to watch it.
On his show today Rush made the great point that people should be congratulating Thain for creating jobs. Rush was kidding of course, but really, it works: If Thain hadn’t spent that money, Merrill / Bank of America would just be sitting on it. So the politicians are simultaneously yelling at the banks:
(A) “What are you doing, playing it safe with your loans? We gave you those billions so you would get it out into the community, putting people to work on infrastructure.”
and
(B) “What are you doing, taking money that we gave you and wasting it on fixing up your office building?! Be careful with those taxpayer funds!”
