As we can see, the White House economic team, which is largely comprised of Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, is focused on keeping capitalism the way it currently is by focusing on restoring the lines of credit to our consumer debt-based society. They're afraid to nationalize the too-big-too-fail banks in fear of being tarred as socialists by the right-wing media pundits. President Obama seems to share in that fear as well in that nationalization represents the worst choice of any economic policies, when it might very well be the BEST choice for us American taxpayers.
President Obama has unfairly marginalized the view of the temporary nationalists such as Roubini, Stiglitz, Summers, Greenspan, Graham, and others by calling them "bloggers" in this quote below from Paul Krugman's editorial in the New York Times:
A real fix for the troubles of the banking system might help make up for the inadequate size of the stimulus plan, so it was good to hear that Mr. Obama spends at least an hour each day with his economic advisors, "talking through how we are approaching the financial markets." But he went on to dismiss calls for decisive action as coming from "blogs" (actually, they’re coming from many other places, including at least one president of a Federal Reserve bank), and suggested that critics want to "nationalize all the banks" (something nobody is proposing).
As I read it, this dismissal — together with the continuing failure to announce any broad plans for bank restructuring — means that the White House has decided to muddle through on the financial front, relying on economic recovery to rescue the banks rather than the other way around. And with the stimulus plan too small to deliver an economic recovery ... well, you get the picture.
It seems that no one in the economic team at the White House is focused on the actual problems that led to this present economic crisis---massive abuse by the credit card industry by burdening Americans with an untenable amount of debt, the overzealous mortgage lending by the banks, the stagnation of American wages, and overconsumption in general. This economy has shown that it can't be sustained on consumer debt alone. The White house economic team wants to keep the economic status quo the way it currently is.
We need a drastic economic change in this country. The question now becomes, can we change the very fabric of our economic system, and do we have the courage to change the status quo? I don't know whether we can do that, given the kind of timidity we've seen from the economic advisors in the Obama administration to change the status quo. How long do we have to suffer, and how much more does this country have to suffer before they realize the status quo is untenable?
We need change. We need courage for that change. This is the time to go big.