Fiorina: You're 'completely out of line'

In a "Political Connections" interview airing again today at 8 pm on Bay News 9, we wondered whether senior John McCain adviser and former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina thought she could have given Hewlett-Packard her all if she was CEO with five children, including an infant with Down's syndrome and a pregnant daughter.

"Completely out of line," she called the question. "Women juggle all kinds of things all the time, and we never ask that kind of question of a man." More here.

Comments

She is right! Mitt Romney has how many kids and no one ever questioned his ability to run a company? Obama has two young daughters and a working wife no one has questioned his ability to be a good father.

Liberals hate women who are not liberal and hate blacks who are not liberals. Liberals hate gays that are not liberal. They claim they want us to be all loving but the minute anyone has a different opinion they try to demonize you.

And conservatives hate liberals, women, African-Americans, homosexuals, lesbians, et al. even more.

So I guess I hate myself since I am a conservative black woman?

neither party has been great for African Americans. Neither party owns Black people although Dem act like the do. I think we can speak for ourselves without being told what to do.

[Warning were here---Greenspan ignored.]

Back in 2002, when his reputation as “The Man Who Saved the World” was at its peak, Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, came to Britain to pick up his knighthood. His biggest fan, Gordon Brown, now the UK prime minister, had ensured that the citation said it was being awarded for promoting “economic stability”.

During his trip, Mr Greenspan visited the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee. He told them the US financial system had been resilient amid the bursting of the internet bubble. Share prices had halved and there had been massive bond defaults, but no big bank collapses. Mr Greenspan lauded the fact that risk had been spread, using complex derivative instruments. One of the MPC members asked: how could this be? Someone must have lost all that money; who was it? A look of quiet satisfaction came across Mr Greenspan’s face as he answered: “European insurance companies.”

Six years later, AIG, the largest US insurance company, has in effect been nationalised to stop it blowing up the financial world. The US has nationalised the core of its mortgage industry and the government has become the arbiter of which financial companies should survive or die.

Financial markets have an enormous capacity for flexibility, but market participants need to be sure that there are rules, and a referee willing to impose them. Permanent damage has been done to the financial system, despite the extraordinary measures of Messrs Henry Paulson, the US Treasury secretary, and Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, to address the problems that stem from the actions of their predecessors. As Mr Paulson has suggested, he is playing a hand dealt by others.

Many blame the Greenspan Fed for this mess. They are right, but not for the reason often cited. It is unfair to say low interest rates are to blame. In the past decade, there is no evidence the US suffered from excessive growth leading to inflation. The economy needed low interest rates and a fiscal stimulus to avoid a severe recession. The Fed was right to do its bit.

Where Mr Greenspan bears responsibility is his role in ensuring that the era of cheap interest rates created a speculative bubble. He cannot claim he was not warned of the risks. Take two incidents from the 1990s. The first came before he made his 1996 speech referring to “irrational exuberance”. In a Federal Open Market Committee meeting, he conceded there was an equity bubble but declined to do anything about it. He admitted that proposals for tightening the margin requirement, which people need to hold against equity positions, would be effective: “I guarantee that if you want to get rid of the bubble, whatever it is, that will do it.” It seems odd that since then, in defending the Fed’s inaction, he has claimed in three speeches that tightening margins would not have worked.

The second incident stems from spring 1998 when the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission expressed concern about the massive increase in over-the-counter derivatives. These have been at the heart of the counter-party risk in the crisis. Mr Greenspan suggested new regulation risked disrupting the capital markets.

At the turn of the millennium, with no move to tighten margin requirements, a feedback loop sent share prices into orbit. As prices rose, more brokers were willing to lend to buy more shares. As share prices went up the buying continued, until the bubble burst. To create one bubble may be seen as a misfortune; to create two looks like carelessness. Yet that is exactly what the Greenspan Fed did.

Bruised by stock market losses, Americans bought houses. The mortgage industry used securitised bonds to ensure that the people who initiated the mortgage did not worry about getting paid back; risk was packaged and sold to others. This time Mr Greenspan did not just stand aside. He said repeatedly that housing was a safe investment because prices do not fall. Home owners could wait out any downturn. Is it any surprise that so many people thought if the world’s financial genius held this view it must be all right?

Even as things went completely wild, Mr Greenspan dismissed those who warned that a new bubble was emerging. It was just a case of a little “froth” in a few areas. Later, after waiting until 2007, two years after he left office, he conceded that “froth” had been his euphemism for “bubble”. “All the froth bubbles add up to an aggregate bubble,” he told the Financial Times.

This time, as with the equity bubble, the mistake was not to set interest rates too low; it was to stand back as wildly imprudent policies were pursued by mortgage lenders. Indeed, any lender would have been encouraged by his words in April 2005: “Where once more-marginal applicants would simply have been denied credit, lenders are now able to quite efficiently judge the risk posed by individual applicants and to price that risk appropriately. These improvements have led to rapid growth in subprime mortgage lending.” Well, he was right about the rapid growth in subprime lending.

Mr Greenspan was in charge of supervising and regulating much of the banking industry for two decades. The Fed says it is responsible for ensuring “safe and sound banking practices”. It is right that other regulators should have stepped in, too – the US regulatory structure has not kept pace with market changes . But given the Fed’s institutional importance and Mr Greenspan’s personal stature, does anyone doubt that the Fed could have used its limited powers to ensure a closer examination of what was going on?

Mr Greenspan realises that something big has happened and describes it as a “once in a hundred years” event. But then, you do not get Alan Greenspans coming along every day.

Is Obama the New Hitler?? Could very well be.

http://papundits.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/is-obama-the-new-hitler/

[Tom]

6:11, you're a freaking idiot! How old are you? I wonder how you were even intelligent enough to turn the computer on. Freakin' moron.

[Eskimo Bob]

The Democrats offer a new direction.

The Republicans offer a senile, old, adulterer, and warmonger... and a vindictive, adulteress, milfwannabe who thinks the Constitution is her morning mud drop.

… nuff said

What kind of direction did Democrat John Edwards offer?

No matter how many are in the seats, there will still be an empty suit introduced as Obama, talking.

All Obama does is talk.

And then the lights are turned off, the foam columns go back to the Hollywood set, and the American Flags go in the dumpster and Obama still hates the very system that he benefited from.

Perhaps he should've done a better job in Chicago...the projects are worse with his programs. Perhaps he shouldn't have taken all the money from Fannie and passed bills to regulate them.

All talk, no action. He's Obama first; not Country first.

Just to be clear, conservatives now believe there is no difference between the role of a mother and a father in bringing up children.

[Hussein]

http://tinyurl.com/3waeca

She's right. I wonder though, what specifically she'd cite as Palin's and McCain's inability to run a major corporation?

Many women in elected office have kids, as has been pointed endlessly, but how many have five, including an infant with Downs, and campaigned with that infant?
Don't even mention the men; you can talk about equality all you want, but everyone knows in the real world the mother bears the responsibility, in virtually all cases.

[Tom]

I never heard a man answer a question in that manner....Have you? Perhaps her girdle was too tight that day!

[Fiorina wants more foreign workers to take US jobs in the USA]

Doesn't Carly Fiorina support the epansion of the H1-B Visa program, which allows the importing of foreign workers to take high paying US jobs?

Shouldn't we be investing money in our own education system, rather than encouraging foreign governments to grow theirs?

Yet another person on the McCain campaign who will only help the rich, not the average American worker.

[Why do companies go overseas?]

Becasue democrats tax them at the second highest rate in the world. money is fluid yall.

[Because other countries treat their citizens like slaves]

With no healthcare, rampant pollution, and subsistence wages. Yes, let's follow the GOP and make 99% of our citizens live like the human cattle in China and India.