Oh cute - from Thomas Hoenig:

The current federal bailouts of big financial firms is distorting the economy and prolonging the crisis, said Kansas City Fed President Thomas Hoenig in testimony to Congress on Tuesday. The Troubled Asset Relief Program has not restored confidence in the banking system, he said. Banks that are well capitalized should be left alone. Banks that need just a little help should be required to raise more capital. Banks that are not viable should be liquidated, he said.

So where have you been during the last 18 months you jackass?

You're a Fed President and your boss has been presenting a "united front" through all of this bullshit, going back to August of 2007 with the original "surprise" discount rate cut.

He has also been "cheerleading" throughout claiming that firms are ok and there will be no recession, when the signs of the bubble bursting and the obvious debt-to-GDP ratio has been staring people in the face for twenty damn years!

NOW, when you're finally under oath and have to say what you really think, you come out with this?

Where the hell have you been Hoenig? I've been screaming about all of this - from the fraud onward - for more than two years. You've been oddly silent about the need to put the fraudsters into receivership and wipe them out, and then suddenly, today, you pop up with THIS?

Was that your conscience calling or did you finally realize that lying to the American People for the last two years has just made the situation worse and that we are now staring down the barrel of a full-on economic depression as a direct and proximate result of The Fed's bullshit machinations and games - and you will ultimately be held to account?

Here's what you said on October 13th 2008 you revisionist:

"We have to show the confidence that the plan will work and then begin to act accordingly if we are going to move through this crisis. The fact is that we have been crises before, we've managed through them and we will do it once again. I was involved in supervision and regulation during the banking crisis in the 1980s. During those trying times it seemed every bit as tense as the crisis we have now. But steps were taken, plans were implemented, we got through it and we were wiser for it."

Oh really? We were wiser for it? That's why The Fed was so wise as to remove reserve requirements through the 80s and 90s, including the most recent changes, it was so wise as to ignore leverage being cranked from the usual 10:1 upward of 30:1 or more, and instead of performing its regulatory function with firms that were making clearly unsound mortgages as well as packaging and selling them into the market as "AAA" securities when the sellers knew the borrowers had not documented income and assets The Fed did nothing?

Wiser eh? I call this willful blindness and I call your testimony today a snake-like attempt to slither off as you have finally come to realize what I and a few others have been saying for over two years - that the inevitable reality of failure in the path that just six months prior you not only supported but promoted is about to come home to roost and detonate in The Fed's FACE.

Not only that but it is clear from the above paragraph (and the entirety of the referenced document, which came AFTER the EESA/TARP proposal) that you were in full support of bailing out these institutions - and now you're trying to distance yourself from what you've finally realized is a mathematically-impossible plan that will not and cannot work.

Welcome to the Depression Mr. Hoenig; your place of accountability in being directly responsible for it happening has been reserved.