Politics
Out of context: Reply #5678
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- ukit0
"To understand the dilemma facing Mr. Geithner and the Obama Administration, you could do a lot worse than read Catch-22 (something I have also found to be true of life in general.) Because unfortunately, Heller’s chocolate-covered cotton metaphor rather precisely describes the estimated $2 or $3 trillion in "legacy" assets – to use the administration’s preferred euphemism – clogging the arteries of the global financial system.
Except that while chocolate-covered cotton at least has some novelty value, most -- if not all -- of Big Shitpile (to use Atrios’s favorite euphemism, and mine) has none.
This, in turn, means it would literally be easier to square a circle, or maybe invent a perpetual motion machine, than to devise a plan that a.) lifts Big Shitpile off the balance sheets of the banks, while at the same time leaving them b.) solvent and c.) in the hands of private investors, without d.) constituting a flat-out transfer of wealth from taxpayers to bank shareholders."