I didn't hear about having an empty chair to represent the interview avoiding governor. That's hilarious!

In the coming week everyone is going to hear a lot about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Below is a link to a Politco article published earlier this year which outlines what everyone can expect from John McCain regarding the mortgage meltdown. It also provides some details on his close connection with Phil Gramm and quoting McCain saying that he would like to make Gramm Treasury Secretary:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0308/9246.html

Remember several weeks ago when Bush was at a Texas fundraiser and, thinking all cameras were off, told the crowd that "Wall Street got drunk and now it has a hangover"? That's indicative of how serious Bush was taking the bad economic news. John McCain is no better.

First, I goofed. In a previous post I referred to the Exxon Loophole rather than the Enron Loophole. Here is a link to an article about John McCain and Phil Gramm and the Enron Loophole:

http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/2008/051908Leopold.shtml

I pointed out in a previous post that John McCain had backed Phil Gramm in the 1996 presidential primary. What I failed to point out is that Phil Gramm backed George Bush over John McCain in the 2000 presidential primary.

Sorry for the bum steer...

I don't think anyone here needs to concern themselves too much with Sarah. If McCain is elected, you won't hear from her until the next election when they round up the usual suspects from the religious right.

Simply put, Sarah doesn't have any juice. She may be able to field dress a moose, but she'll be the one getting carved up if she gets in the way. She ain't part of the posse. Phil Gramm, Lindsey Graham, Tom Ridge, and Joe Lieberman are his sidekicks.

So don't worry about whether Sarah will have time to spend with her kids. There will be plenty of time for that.

Also, disabuse yourselves of the notion that John McCain will be that much better than Mrs. Palin as president. And neither one will be demonstrably different than Bush.

I'm not sure if you're referring to one of my posts regarding the government seizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. If so, I want to be clear that I'm not trying to make a case against a bail-out.

What I'm saying is that if regulation hadn't been relaxed, we wouldn't have experienced this wild market swing. When stated income loans (aka liar loans) were marketed to everybody, the result should have been obvious. Granted, I live in Arizona which has been pretty hard hit by the mortgage meltdown, so it may have been more apparent here than some other places, but when did people think the run up in housing prices was going to stop?

When my husband and I bought our place at the beginning of 2005, we qualified for what I thought was a ridiculous amount of money. Fortunately, we didn't max ourselves out.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac HAVE to be bailed out. But the idea that regulation does nothing but hold back a free market economy is bullshit and we're all getting ready to pay the price.

I understand that Fannie and Freddie are secondary markets and not the originators. (I've been posting so fast that sometimes I fail to clearly make my point - my apology.)

I realize that Liar loans have been around for some time, but my understanding is that they were usually used for the self-employed. It's also my understanding that interest only loans have been around for a while and were usually used by investors. The point I was trying to make in my previous post is that suddenly these products were being marketed to everybody and their monkey.

When I started hearing about interest-only loans combined with ARM's, I thought that surely the government would step in with increased oversight. The volume of B paper (and lower) saw a marked increase and, if it was obvious to me in mid-2005 that a train wreck was coming, it should have been apparent to a lot of people. (In retrospect, I think it was and they chose to overlook it.)

But to discover at the eleventh hour that government sponsored enterprise Fannie and Freddie were employing shoddy accounting practices speaks directly to the fiction that market regulation isn't desirable. This myth has been perpetuated primarily by Republicans since 1980 and there has to be some way to help the American people connect the dots on these issues so they can at least understand what has happened.

Personally, I find economics fascinating - it's a pedestrian interest. But I also realize that a lot of people don't find it as interesting as personality issues. I don't fault them for that because I think that factors into character, which, when I distill it all down, is the primary reason I'm voting for Obama.

One last thing, a local company called First Magnus wrote a lot of sub-prime paper of which Countrywide was the biggest buyer. When Countrywide stopped buying, First Magnus went belly up and thousands of people were suddenly without a job. They're already back in business (can't remember what they're calling themselves), while previous employees are still waiting for final paychecks.

How do you get people to understand that government oversight can be a good thing?