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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
"Taxes are not there to "Play Robin Hood" they are there to pay the bills and improve what your country has."
Exactly. I'm agreeing with you.
But that old Robin Hood line kinda tells me you didn't exactly _read_ what I'd written. What's up with that?
FDR did not end the Depression. Hitler did. I grew up in the Depression. It was no fun and neither was Hitler's fix.
Note that President Clinton continued the deregulation. Vote for Hillary? No way. Vote for McCain? Slightly better.
These are the two that Hillary says have experience.
The sky is falling! The sky is faling! Woe is me! What shall I do? What shall I do? How about quit depending on the government to "take care" of you and start taking care of yourself? This dependency on the government lifestyle is going to destroy this country. But what about the disparity between the rich and everyone else? Wah! Get over it. The rich folks are the ones providing the rest of us with jobs...ever think about that? Start "doing" for yourselves you liberal cry babies!
I work on the front lines in the financial services sector and yesterday attended a meeting meant to bolster our belief that everything is "okay." This is the tried and true strategy whenever the wind turns direction.
Since the depression (a word not spoken in proper company) for every bad year in the stock market there have been roughly three good ones. The don't panic message has been spun into: "fortunes are made in down markets, not bull markets." and "emotional reactions are the mark of chicken shits."
The enforcers usually have long histories of knocking around in the industry, working their way up to gunslingers who will say anything for a price. Whether they are right or wrong is beside the point. The folks who write their checks are simply doing their jobs too.
They have a few problems with this one because the credit crunch is coming at the beginning of the turndown rather than the end. The fact that the chairman of Bear Stearns was on the talk shows assuring the markets they were doing just fine a few days before the company collapsed didn't help matters. They were eaten by their own kind. Everyone is on the edge of their seat to see what will happen next.
I don't think they know any more than the guy still camping out in New Orleans where he used to have a house, or the fellow in Detroit who planted a row of corn yesterday on the lot where my families home used to stand in Detroit.
It's probably no more responsible to predict gloom and doom than it is to pretend nothing has happened. More than likely, the same folks will gain and the same will lose who always do. Probably, for anything to be done on a "systemic" level it's going to have to get a whole lot worse.
Then somebody is going to have to be put in charge who at least knows the difference between lying and telling the truth. And that's always been a precious commodity.
Let us know what Limbaugh said about this article. I'm really interested. Also, let us know how that vicodin addiction is going?
K?
Buying and Selling Housing Accounts as a Commodity
What Greenspan (and Paulson) euphemistically call 'mis pricing risk' by the nation's financiers is more aptly described as their collective purchasing of 90% to 100% leveraged commodity accounts.
At the end of the day, homes are a commodity. There are laws regulating the purchase and financing of commodities; there are strict margin requirements and lots of bold print that purchasing a commodity carries a high degree of risk, to wit, you may lose your shirt.
Having thought about this for a moment, the question becomes who in their right mind would set out to purchase someone else's commodity position which had little or no equity, just the position holders' promise to pay interest on the borrowed funds?
If you are a bank that has access to buyers that accept the premise that housing always increases in value, then by all means, create or buy this type of commodity mortgage account, warehouse them and resell them. It's a business plan. I package and sell, you package and sell, just be mighty careful when the music stops because at that point the bankers own these crap assets that they intended to sell off to others. Merrill Lynch got caught and burned warehousing several billions.
Gold is a commodity which has the flavor of always going up but yet there are margin requirements. Housing, given that the number of buyers always increases and they ain't making any more land you know, seems a sure bet "over time." Near term however it's a commodity, subject to rises and falls due to interest rate changes, recessions, speculative fevers and inflation.
The banks, etc are idiots for placing their firms' equity in jeopardy by creating and holding no equity housing accounts. It's not wholly new however. The banks crashed with excess lending to REITs, Latin America and experienced some hemorrhaging from the tech bubble.
But. And this is a huge but as we head into an election year. Imagine if Mr. Bush had wooed America into placing social security assets into private accounts (because the stock market always goes up ye brethren.)
What would have occurred is that the housing speculation bubble would have lasted considerably longer as Wall St. packaged and sold retail strips of near worthless housing accounts to the nation's social security network.
At least recognize in this last greed driven market bubble or market fever fiasco that the finance industry has wiped out its net worth repeatedly over the last forty years. Keeping Wall Street's mitts off of Social Security should now perhaps be a subject for a constitutional amendment.
You can regulate or deregulate financial markets all you want, but none of that is going to change the fast-approaching Mega-Depression. The planets overall economy (not just its financial economy, but it's resource and environmental economy as well) is like a full bus powered by a worn-out lawnmower engine. Too many people being supported by limited and dwindling resources such as fossil fuels, fresh water, and commercially mineable minerals, added to an atmosphere damaged by greenhouse gas emissions and soot,is a sure formula for economic disaster.
Economists have traditionally made assumptions about the Earth having an unlimited supply of resources and an unlimited capacity for absorbing waste. Most of the letters here do not factor in the planet-wide stresses that threaten to knock the underpinnings out of any conventional economic management scheme. Until the connection of economic well-being to ecological well-being is made and drastic action is taken, I see little hope of averting the Mother Of All Depressions.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
Salon headlines in your mailbox
