Sunday Morning Talk Show Thread 21 September 2008

Various driveby media television networks ^ | 21 September 2008 | Various Self-Serving Politicians and Big Media Screaming Faces

[Alas Babylon!]

The Talk Shows

Sunday, September 21st, 2008

Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows:

FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson; Sens. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.; Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, chair of the American Red Cross.

MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Paulson; New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

FACE THE NATION (CBS): Paulson; Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.; Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala.

THIS WEEK (ABC): Paulson; Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn.; Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio.

LATE EDITION (CNN) : Douglas Holtz Eakin, adviser to John McCain; Austan Goolsbee, adviser to Barack Obama; former Rep. Rob Portman, R-Ohio.; Gene Sperling, former Clinton administration economic adviser; Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas.

[BusterBear]

When the Republicans barely had the majority, or it was tied, wasn’t there some rule change that occurred that made it necessary to have a super majority to get anything passed? Who initiated that rule change?

I remember this, but I don't remember the details of the rule change. All I recall is that the Democrats just needed to threaten a filibuster, without having an actual filibuster, and that was enough to sink any legislation the Republican majority wanted.

Need to do some research on the details.

[Sunnyflorida]

Here are two concerns over the MER BAC deal.

While the insured assets of BAC operating company will not increase the likely hood there will be a call goes up. FDIC if thinking correctly will have to raise rates on everybody to cover the additional risk. FDIC should moratorium these combinations until everything else get sorted out.

Second MER is a house of cards fundamentally. Even without the current liquidity and derivative issues. If BAC wanted to get into the lines of business you see at a BD like MER they would be better off buying them piecemeal. But I would not recommend that for BAC share holders.

The repeal of Glass-Steagall permits this mergerm, but it should not grant an automatic approval. I am BTW in favor of repealing the repeal of Glass-Steagall. I have quite a bit of personal experience in this and it is an ugly outcome.

[snugs]

Yep that I would say that is true my experience. For some reason they considered those that were going onto Poly or Uni did not need to learn how to balance their budgets or read a gas meter. Short sighted I think and often leads to those in academia being far removed from the real world.

[mathluv]

Just got this off of another thread!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWpU8sX10_4

[Cold Heat]

When a bank or investment house creates a derivitive asset backed security, it tries to insure it. The securities have different ratings, or tranches as they call them, and companies who deal in insurance sell them a policy that more derivatives are created for. It's a weird financial device used to take risk and spread it out as far and wide as possible.

Anyway, AIG dealt in these swaps as they are a insurance company, as did many others world wide. These obligations are priced by the market and traded like money, and when the market froze up and they would not trade at any price, it froze trillions of dollars from moving through the system.

All this is stuff is backed initially by the mortgage market which as you know is in deep crap. We have to put a floor under it so that trader have confidence that there is value in these things, cuz right now the value is zero as they won't trade Zero is not a number, it's a sentiment, and the downward spiral of mortgage system must be stopped by the Fed's taking of this risk temporarily...(3-5 years or so)

This will free up the derivatives and there are trillions of dollars based on billions. This should settle it all back down, and even with this, there will be many failures of banks and financial institutions that are already too far gone to save but the majority will survive after heavy losses.

That's my best layman's summary with some technical stuff explained.

Does that help, or do I need to dig deeper for you?

[Fishtalk]

turned to doing up old run down properties mainly in the London area but it bought enough money in to finance 3 collage educations

Absolutely. It's a way Joe Sixpack could get a big bang for some elbow grease. It does require some brains, though, and a lot of work. Courage helps.

That lawyer I worked for, he tried to teach me how to pick up a good what he called a "rehab" house. Neighborhood is number one no matter how decrepit the house for rehab consideration might be. He showed me an awful house, terrible, terrible, just a shell. But the houses on each side were in good shape and it was right across the street from a school with a playground.

I was just seeing the house, he saw what it could be. The same amount of money spent on another house in a not so good neighborhood wouldn't bring near as big a return as the above example.

It's common sense, really. The little known truth is that many, very many, of these "foreclosed" homes are exactly that, homes purchased for flipping. I don't know the percentages but hey, I sure would like to know. Why can't this Cox guy require that particular statistic before doing all this? The Dems are having a field day with the talking point about people being forced from their homes when scuttlebutt is this is not the case at all.

Cause if that guy who bought a house for the purpose of flipping didn't get around to it, ran into problems with the rehab, or like Crystal the Stripper and her pimp, Pete, woke up one morning to discover they owned eight houses they'd bought while on a bender.

It seems to me a government wanting to do the right thing could get some answers. This assumes our legislators want to do the right thing but why so when so many are knee deep in this joke?

This whole thing makes me sick, seriously. They laff at us. They pee upon our feet and tell us it's raining.

And the drive-bys never ask one little question of Chris Dodd, such as why did he get interest free loans and money from Fannie Mae.

It's demoralyzing.

[Sunnyflorida]

I heard this called by somebody the Princeton-ing of Wall Street. You have to be extremely bright and connected or black to get into Princeton. About 25 years ago I did some programming for three of the graduates. I had no idea what they were talking about and neither did their customers (ERISA fund managers). But the charts and graphs and the math was amazing - amazingly complex. I about choked on my coffee when I heard the Princeton comment.

[Recovering Ex-hippie]

He now reminds me more of the passive aggressive stance of Colin Powell.

[Cedric]

This is a debacle, but not a surprise.

I told my super-awesome-action-babydoll-wife {42-24-34} this is exactly where we were headed the day after Jesse Jackson made the "establishment" blink, relative to red lining, which was he day after he made them blink regarding racial profiling.

[altura]

I was talking about ignoring ‘them’ on threads on Free Republic.

In person, I’m a mean momma.

[Sunnyflorida]

“First, the CRA did not force anyone to make dangerous loans. In fact, the original act specifies that it should “be consistent with the safe and sound operation of such institutions”.”

There were extreme subtile pressures and minority reports that created a dilemma for the lenders. You had to meet quota.

[STARWISE]

Snowbama’s wealthy campaign director, Penny Pritzker, heiress to the Hyatt Hotel fortune, also owns the credit reporting agency, TransUnion .. how many names do you think were added to their campaign list from there?

It’s no different than the Clinton buddy, Gupta, who owns InfoUSA.

BTW, most folks will qualify for the class action lawsuit award .. if you got a loan, credit card, etc. from 1987 to May 2008. Info here

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2086352/posts?page=41#41

[Morgan in Denver]

Its big enough that Rush will talk about it. He may not get into specifics but I think he’ll hit all the edges and contradictions.

[Cold Heat]

Sunny, the issue for the banks was not how to write down the assets, but how much, and Cox, nor anyone else could get a handle on a falling knife.

It mattered not if the reporting was accurate, as by the time the ink dried, things had all changed.

Cox, and the entire Fed could not advise anyone on what to do with the balance sheet, as there was no guideline or way to value it. The market could not determine it, and if they could not, then the value essentially was zero! But you can't put that on your balance sheet.

[ding_dong_daddy_from_dumas]

I wish MS would fix some of the Vista bugs.

This is really an XP bug that Vista inherited. Some USB external drives will not ever work with “safely remove hardware,” to the best of my knowledge. When I plug in one of those drives, I have to shut down to remove it safely.

The “shrink partition” feature in Disk Management does not shrink much because it refuses to move certain things around. I wanted to shrink a partition to 30G. I had to disable backup, delete a bunch of things manually, and then defrag. I finally got it down to 50G, that was the best I could do.

[paratrooper82]

Anyone want to make a bet? Will a single news investigator ask Barney (gender bender) Franks where more than a trillion dollars of the tax payers money went after he and his ilk (Kent Conrad and Chris Dudd) threatened to take civil action against any lending organization or company that did not give a mortgage to minorities without collateral, illegal aliens (no social security numbers), basically anyone who wanted a loan (Ninja mortgages) or the fact that mortgages where even given to a cat and a dog?

Will a single news investigator ask these crooks how more than five trillions dollars has been stolen by the government from one segment of Americans and given to another segment of America (the poor and minorities) in the last thirty years? Where in the hell did all that money go? Why has it not lifted the poor and minorities out of their perceived mess?

Any takers?

[9YearLurker]

Thanks, I’m with you.

It’s like they’re just trying to shove it back under the commercial bank carpet now that GS is repealed—as if THAT is the solution. It’s almost like one big, radioactive snowball that’s been rolling downhill, occasionally shoved a bit in one direction or another, for years now.

[snugs]

Sadly my friend's father never reaped the rewards of his hard work. He kept working physically on the projects for long hours often into the weekend and late evenings only allowing himself Sunday off.

He collapsed one Sunday afternoon with friends round and virtually died at the dinner table. I think it took the friends children quite a while to recover from the incident.

[CDB]

Fantastic post, BusterBear! If we still had awards, this post would be a clear winner in the “best post of the day” category.

Thanks, snugs, for the inspiration for my snugs-related tagline.

[Fishtalk]

You are just so exactly right.

This is the biggest right-in-our-face crime and they laff at us, they pee on our feet and tell us it’s raining, the media asks them nothing.

utterly amazing. They blatantly trot out their biggest crooks, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd....I saw them all on TV.

We live in a dictatorship headed by multiple dictators who keep their power by sticking together and denying us transparancy.

Amazing.