https://vimeo.com/416194301 Democrats and Republicans fostered an environment with little accountability for finance and big corporations, says Thomas Ferguson on theAnalysis.news podcast with Paul Jay Transcript Tom Ferguson Podcast Interview for TheAnalysis.news Paul Jay: Hi, I'm Paul Jay, and welcome to the analysis podcast. Most economists believe we are heading into a deep global depression. Will the economic stimulus packages that are being announced, particularly the American one, which is the largest, deal with the depth of the crisis? Now joining me to talk about this is Tom Ferguson. Tom is a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Thanks for joining us Tom. Tom Ferguson: Hi. Thanks for having me. Look, the question here can be answered very straightforwardly. How big is the decline? And, not just in the US, but in Europe and the rest of the world? And the answer is, first of all, of course, that nobody knows. But secondly, that they're much deeper than most people anticipated as this sort of crisis really got rolling in, for example, in March. Yet, if you take a country, area by area, you get a much better sort of feel for what's going on, and how you can indeed be sliding into something like the scale of the Great Depression. I mean, in the US you have watched unemployment soar. It must be something like 20%. Now it's going to keep going. The US did, on the face of it, if you figured you need maybe a package equivalent to 10% of the GDP, to try to offset that - that's with some qualifications we can come back to. They only did it, as usual, about half that size in the end. I think the best analysis of the US package is Lance Taylor's for INET – it’s on the website there. Lance Taylor spells out those numbers. The fundamental thing is that there's, you know, a fair amount, maybe at the time, it seemed about five to six percent of GDP, might be being handed out in direct relief. That included the small business support program, which people quite mistakenly, took at its word, that it would support small business. We know now for sure, that it has been perverted by a string of things. Probably the intent of the treasury to begin with, but also the way it was handed out through banks, there's no doubt at all. You got good reporting by the intercept and the New York Times, on how the loan process has been abused and gone to large numbers of the rich. And so... Paul Jay: Lee Fang points out in The Intercept, specifically, good friends of Donald Trump, and he gives a bunch of examples in a recent article. Tom Ferguson: I wouldn't dispute that. Though, Trump's got a lot of friends, and so it's like… I always have problems with this type of inference. Until we can sort of see what the whole thing looks like, which we can't do. Now we may add, that's not an accident. Both the Democratic and the Republican leadership completely decided on this to go for broke. That is to say, hide in the dark. They took the old laws that were put up on regulation and reporting, for 2008 and 9, and made those even weaker and that's quite deliberate. In that sense, we're talking more money with even less accountability. And it's not a single party. It's just not the Republican party alone, on this. I mean, that bill is just ridiculous in that stuff, and I'm hardly alone in that. Let me come back to the sort of main thread. So here's where I come out. Let me just characterize it in qualitative terms. We've thrown a lot of money at the problem,
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