Could the US' top economic officials be abandoning the colorless, cryptic language of "Fedspeak" in their descriptions of the state of the economy?
Well, it seemed that way at times during a Senate Banking Committee hearing last Thursday. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson talked about the challenges the country faces from a housing slump and credit crunch and what additional steps might be taken to bring about relief.
Bernanke spoke of "sluggish growth," a jobs market that is not "rip roaring," and a "virtual shutdown" in the market for subprime mortgages -- those made to people with tarnished credit or low incomes.
For his part, Paulson spoke with emotion about the troubles of record numbers of people plunged into foreclosure and others struggling to stay in their homes.
"I'll tell you, when you're there and you look at the abuses and you look at the predatory lending abuses and you look at some of the -- it's heartrending," the secretary said. "But what we're doing is trying to deal with it."
Lax credit standards during the housing boom was the spark that led to the current economic woes.
"We had a dry forest out there," Paulson said.
Paulson was equally vivid when talking about the Treasury Department's efforts to develop a regulatory blueprint for players in financial markets.
"If someone came down -- a man came down from Mars -- and you were trying to explain the regulatory structure and how this works, the way the markets -- you know, the regulatory structure has not evolved with the markets. And it's a patchwork quilt, in many ways," he said.
Bernanke didn't sugar-coat the economy's problems and used crystal-clear language, something his famously Delphic predecessor Alan Greenspan often was loathe to do publicly.
"The outlook for the economy has worsened in recent months," he told lawmakers.
People are tightening their belts and employers have slowed hiring.
"We are going through a retrenchment, and that's a painful retrenchment," Bernanke said.
The big worry is that people and businesses will cut back sharply, throwing the economy into a recession.
The odds of a recession have grown significantly over the last year. Some economists believe the economy, which nearly stalled in the final three months of last year, is shrinking now.
Many people -- 61 percent -- believe the US is in a recession, a recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll showed.
Bernanke and Paulson are hopeful the US can skirt a recession. They still believe the economy is growing -- but at a slower pace.
Even with the occasional unvarnished moments, both Bernanke and Paulson resisted one senator's efforts to pin them down on a description of the housing market.
"There's been a lot of descriptions about where we are in the housing sector, whether it's a crisis or whether this is a correction," said Republican Senator Bob Corker.
"I'm wondering if each of you might choose a word to describe where we are today," he said.
Replied Paulson, "I don't use loaded words, and so I've been using correction because it is a correction."
Senator Chris Dodd, a Democrat who is the committee's chairman, stepped in.
"It would be inappropriate for the secretary and the chairman to start putting a label" on the housing situation, he said.
"That could have its own self-fulfilling prophecy here," Dodd said.
"So we've got to be careful about language. Language has significance and implications," he said.
Apart from the first arms sales approval for Taiwan since US President Donald Trump took office, last month also witnessed another milestone for Taiwan-US relations. Trump signed the Taiwan Assurance Implementation Act into law on Tuesday. Its passing without objection in the US Senate underscores how bipartisan US support for Taiwan has evolved. The new law would further help normalize exchanges between Taiwanese and US government officials. We have already seen a flurry of visits to Washington earlier this summer, not only with Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍), but also delegations led by National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu
When the towers of Wang Fuk Court turned into a seven-building inferno on Wednesday last week, killing 128 people, including a firefighter, Hong Kong officials promised investigations, pledged to review regulations and within hours issued a plan to replace bamboo scaffolding with steel. It sounded decisive. It was not. The gestures are about political optics, not accountability. The tragedy was not caused by bamboo or by outdated laws. Flame-retardant netting is already required. Under Hong Kong’s Mandatory Building Inspection Scheme — which requires buildings more than 30 years old to undergo inspection every decade and compulsory repairs — the framework for
Ho Ying-lu (何鷹鷺), a Chinese spouse who was a member of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) Central Standing Committee, on Wednesday last week resigned from the KMT, accusing the party of failing to clarify its “one China” policy. In a video released in October, Ho, wearing a T-shirt featuring a portrait of Mao Zedong (毛澤東), said she hoped that Taiwan would “soon return to the embrace of the motherland” and “quickly unify — that is my purpose and my responsibility.” The KMT’s Disciplinary Committee on Nov. 19 announced that Ho had been suspended from her position on the committee, although she was
Two mayors have invited Japanese pop icon Ayumi Hamasaki to perform in their cities after her Shanghai concert was abruptly canceled on Saturday last week, a decision widely interpreted as fallout from the latest political spat between Japan and China. Organizers in Shanghai pulled Hamasaki’s show at the last minute, citing force majeure, a justification that convinced few. The cancelation came shortly after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi remarked that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could prompt a military response from Tokyo — comments that angered Beijing and triggered a series of retaliatory moves. Hamasaki received an immediate show of support from
RSS