Michael Panzner’s choice of name for his blog, it turns out, could not be more apt.
Panzner points us in the direction of this post from Zero Hedge, which in turn links to an overlooked C span video of Democratic Representative Paul Kanjorski.
Now politicians can of course be prone to lying hyperbole – but we’d have thought someone like Kanjorski really couldn’t get away with making this stuff up. Admittedly some of the detail is sketchy, but still…
Here, anyway, is what Kanjorski said (emphasis ours). You can watch it yourself of course, two minutes 20 seconds in.
On Thursday (Sept 18), at 11am the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw-down of money market accounts in the U.S., to the tune of $550 billion was being drawn out in the matter of an hour or two. The Treasury opened up its window to help and pumped a $105 billion in the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn’t be further panic out there.If they had not done that, their estimation is that by 2pm that afternoon, $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money market system of the U.S., would have collapsed the entire economy of the U.S., and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it.