There is very little direct connection presented with regards to the electorate, and what is presented is in a brief, fear-oriented snippet: "factories would shut down, people would lose their jobs."
By framing the article from the perspective of regulators, the article portrays the Wall Street bailout as economic necessity. The public is being asked to sympathize with the regulators, who are portrayed as working hard to stabilize a difficult situation. The article does not carry a strong political perspective in its subtext. What it does carry, however, is a view favorable to Wall Street, the Journal's target audience. The Journal is, however, an influential paper likely to hold sway with voters, who want to see Congress and the regulators managing the stability of the economy effectively. At the time, the chaos of the recession was not portrayed as a given, indicating that such action as taken by the regulators would likely salvage the economy.
This article is not a column or blog, so the tone is more even-handed than the Krugman piece, but the choice of people to quote, and the way that the argument was framed, clearly lend sympathy to the role of the regulators. They are portrayed as defenders of the economy, rather than as agents of the government willing to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayers' dollars on Wall Street. Indeed, the framing of the article is geared away from Wall Street and towards the overall economy.
For the reader, the Wall Street Journal piece takes on a more sober-minded tone, but this can easily attributed to the fact that there is less of an implicit call to action in the article. Krugman as a blogger has more license to make emotional appeals than do the authors of the WSJ piece. Yet those authors do make use of emotional appeal. They portray crisis and impending doom in almost every sentence. Accompanying the...
Bailouts The current recession was precipitated in large part by Wall Street, which fuelled an asset bubble in the housing market and repackaged bad loans as good ones. One of the initial consequences of the bursting of that bubble was that the banking system became unstable. This situation led to the first Wall Street bailout in September, 2008. This bailout was priced at $700 billion and was intended to stabilize the
S. economy, the major firms operating out of Detroit have struggled in the shadow of their own critical mismanagement. And with last year's major restructuring of the industry both on the American taxpayer's dollar and according to the priorities cited by the federal government, criticism both for the government and the industry have been considerable. With this week's article by the Wall Street Journal, the fire of public hostility will
Improving consumer protection is a less vital factor in the reform package. It focuses on ancillary issues such as predatory lending and credit card interest. Improving protections may help to reduce the incidence of consumer bankruptcy, but has two negative consequences. The first is that the illusion of protection can encourage increased risk-taking behavior among consumers. The second is that increasing consumer protection fails to address the underlying issue, which
When such biases enter into the decision-making process, they eliminate some potential courses of action. Related to bias is the illusion of validity. The biased parties envision an outcome that they would like to see and work backwards to justify their chosen course of action. That course of action may not lead to the outcome at all, but biases leave to the view that it does. Therefore, bias guides us
In some ways, the AIG bailout is viewed more favorably -- bonuses not withstanding -- in part because of the ownership stake. With a substantial, profitable business the taxpayers may yet break even on AIG. With the automakers, taxpayer ire is higher because there is little chance that this will happen. The government has less control over the automakers, and as a result there is less likelihood that the
What is less certain is the benefits of the bailout -- those can only flow from taking advantage of the bailout to restore credit markets and prevent a repeat of this financial crisis in the future. Works Cited: Baker, Dean. "Subprime Rescue Plans: Backdoor Bank Bailouts." (2008): 9 pages. EconLit. EBSCO. 10 May 2009 Mishkin, Frederic S. "How Big a Problem is Too Big to Fail?" (2006). 18 pages. Journal of
Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.
Get Started Now