Max Sawicky reads garbage so the rest of us don't have to:
MaxSpeak, You Listen!: IT'S NOT THE DEFICIT, IT'S THE JEWS: Insight on the News, a website affiliated with anti-semite homophobe Reverend Moon's Washington Times, runs an article suggesting that Jewish financier George Soros could deliberately cause a stock market meltdown that would cause George Bush to lose the election. The article begins with "The idea was floated first by former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, now the chairman of Citigroup. Unless Congress scales back the Bush tax cuts, he argues in a new study, U.S. government budget deficits could lead to a crisis of confidence in the dollar and the stock market and potentially staggering losses for investors."
Of course, Rubin's "idea" is that Bush budget deficits could cause turmoil in financial markets, not that some cabal ought to deliberately instigate such turmoil. The chief source for the article is Donald Luskin. Ordinarily I don't read him, since he is a galloping ignoramus and vicious partisan...
Max doesn't quote the worst parts. For example:
To conservative economist Bruce Bartlett, Rubin was "laying the groundwork for a political assault on President George W. Bush over his budget policies, hope[ing] to give the Democratic presidential candidate an issue to run on that could propel him into the White House." But Wall Street sources say Rubin may have had other designs as well. A consummate insider who talked the market up when he was working for Bill Clinton, Rubin today could be trying to talk the market down. "This market is thin enough that if you made a big move all of a sudden you could move it," Bartlett tells Insight. "At some point, something could happen on its own, and then someone like George Soros could turn a minor blip into something else...
And:
Soros believes that if he can force the market down, he will have an effect in the real world," Luskin says. "If it happens on Oct. 31, people might go into the voting booth with fear in their hearts."... Luskin believes Soros could choose to sell stock index-future contracts massively... driving the market down and keeping it down for several days or more, then his early trades would make a profit.... [If] Howard Dean gets elected president in a panic, [Soros's] doomsday trading could become a self-fulfilling prophecy as U.S. financial markets collapse. And that would leave Soros even richer than he is today. "In the end, it could be a pure financial play, not a political play," Luskin says...
Sinister financiers with magical powers...
They possess the ability to hypnotize markets...
They can--somehow, by using their devious wits--use a less than $10 billion capital base to move the prices of $10 trillion worth of financial assets...
These sinister financiers are going to use their magical powers to bankrupt honest Americans...
And it is also part of a plot to help the "radicals" seize power...
And, of course, the only financiers mentioned happen to be Jewish.
Posted by DeLong at January 24, 2004 01:10 PM | TrackBack