Like a Dose of Salts

I sort of long for the days of Lyndon Johnson and his fondness for "jawboning", a kind of Texas arm-twisting, with people to get them to do what he wanted. Ol' Lyndon would get someone in his office or on the phone and say something like, "Your president needs you to do this, son, your country needs you!". Pretty soon the object of Lyndon's attentions would find himself with his arm twisted up behind him, his shoulder almost out of its socket, yet thinking he was patting himself on the back for doing something good for the country.

Now comes news, here, from Obama Senior Advisor David Axelrod, that the President-Elect wants the banks to stop pocketing the money they are receiving from the government for bail-out purposes, and to start getting credit flowing again. Said Axelrod on ABC's "This Week" today:

"I think he is going to have a strong message for the bankers. We want to see credit flowing again. We don't want them to sit on any money that they get from taxpayers,"

As you know, the banks have been using the money to buy other banks, or to put the government dollars onto their books to make their P/L statements look rosier than they are. What they are not doing is getting the money onto the street and into the pockets of lenders to start the economy.

I close my eyes and I can see it clearly. LBJ calls a summit meeting with all the top bankers."Now boys", he says, "Your country is in a desperate time and you have the power to make things right. We gave you boys billions of dollars to put on the street and you boys are just sitting on it. Now the way to solve this problem is to start making those loans that industry and people need so much to get folks back to work and buying things and we need to do it now! Today!It's your patriotic duty! And I'm sure you boys don't want to have to use a lot of your office space for all of those federal auditors and FBI agents that I can have placed in your banks in 24 hours, now do you?"

Pretty soon those banker types would be saying, "well yeah , it's for the good of the country", and LBJ would start slapping some backs and then there would be a news conference in the Rose Garden with the President and the bankers announcing that, yep, there was a problem and they were there to solve it, with smiles and handshakes all around.

President Obama needs to get a little LBJ in him, have a confab with the bankers to apply a dose of salts in the way of government enforcement actions and get those dollars moving through the system.