Obama and Summers in private conversation

The economy has been topic numero uno for many months now, including the almost three months of the Obama administration. During that time, the administration, Wall Street and the media have tried on explanations like they were trying on hats, changing stories and justifications as soon as it looked like the American people—despite all efforts—might be grasping just how thoroughly they were being screwed by what amounts to nothing more than a self-elected aristocratic elite. The following essay, Wall Street is a Nigerian scam, Obama tells Summers by Evert Cilliers (3QuarksDaily), imagines a conversation between Barack Obama and Larry Summers. It covers all the major themes, heavily sprinkled with extremely salty language. It is, at any rate, accurate in its information, from the recent details about Fitch’s finding that almost all mortgages they examined involved some fraud to the history of Summers himself having thwarted Brooksley Born’s attempts to regulate exactly the derivatives that ended up sinking the global economy.

As said, the language is very salty; here’s Obama wrapping things up in a neat little bow:

“What the hell is financial engineering, Larry? It’s one skeevy scheme after another, betting on this and that, casino capitalism, inventing derivatives, and then it all blows up, and my beautiful fucking agenda is fucked in the ass to the consistency of chocolate mousse by the banks who’re too chicken to admit they’re insolvent, they’re not men, they’re sissies bawling for bailouts, and how can I be a transformative president like Reagan and build a more perfect union if I don’t get any fucking money to transform fucking anything because we have to give all the money to fucking Wall Street to transform itself into a financializing excrementalization of a crapolatization that fucks the entire world in every asshole on the planet up to and including all future assholes as-yet-unborn to every asshole already-born?”

YMMV.