I agree.. I’ll probably be throwing things at my radio when he comes on.. if I’m still awake.
I listened, and wanted so many times to call-in to show the lack of basic economic facts and understanding that the quest demonstrated.
He more than one way he tried to say that “excessive salaries and bonuses on ‘Wall Street’ were a CAUSE of the financial crisis”. And one of his “facts” concerning that was, along with (in the same time frame as) those “excessive salaries and bonuses” was a rise in the earnings gap, between the top 1-10% of earners and the bottom 50% of earners. Even claimed the “truth” of that claim was “demonstrated” by a similar earnings gap in 1929 before the stock market crash.
The man is an idiot. He believes that correlation (two different items of fact/data existing at the same time) equals causation (that one of the two items can said to be the cause of the other, just because they existed together); when science knows that correlation does not equal causation.
The market bubbles, the “excessive wage gap” and the “excessive salaries and bonuses” are, all three, not prime causes but each is a manifestation of the same cause - cheap money and excessive leverage made too less risky by cheap money. What/who caused that? Fed policy, not ‘Wall Street’.
The guest also attributed the higher income tax rates (top rate of 91% on income over $150K) of the 1950s to Eisenhower, personally, as if he had authored those rates, when in fact they had been in place since the mid-1940s and maybe the national debts piled up in the War was as good a reason (at the time) for even Ike not to demand they be lowered in the 1950s.
He - the quest also attributed those income tax rates to the national economic performance of the 1950s, ignoring the release of the pent-up domestic demand that, finally, with war-time restrictions lifted, was being answered by industry. No, to the “expert” guest, the high taxes and the less-extreme wage gap CAUSED the better economy.
The man, Les Leopold does not speak as if he has any degree or background in economics, besides possibly a professional political background in making assumptions about economics from a Marxist/and-or/leftist/and-or ‘progressive’ perspective. His current professional standing says he heads something called the “Labor Institute” (founded 1976) and the Public Health Institute, both of New York and neither of which could I find a web page for.
The only saving grace to his spiel is that he does ‘blame’ everyone; yet his knowledge gap excludes the Fed and its policies (that is except the ones who devalued the currency, printed the excess money and made excess leverage so cheap that risk valuations went down with the interest rates the Fed charged the banks).