Now the electorate thinks Obama knows more about the ecomony.
Clearly, education has failed to teach people how to read.
Oh I DO blame them. And I curse them with words that are unprintable here.
"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency
This bill gets passed, the US is no longer a republic. Period. It becomes a monarchy run by Hank Paulson.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usvG-s_Ssb0
guess they can't see or hear too
The credit default swap component of the derivatives market was valued at around $900 million in 2001. It is now valued at about $45 trillion in 2008. A bunch of financal companies went "all in" with their greed.
The housing bubble being burst is just the fuse that has exploded the derivatives market. The governor of New York realizes the problem and has put measures in place to try to regulate it, but the U.S. government is hiding it from the American public.
This bill that they want to pass will not solve the problem and will create a harder fall in the end.
Congress is to blame? Couldn’t be.
The taxpayer soaking bail out hysterics have been claiming that it’s the fault of free enterprise and that “millions will starve to death in the streets” unless we impose super-socialism right now!
"I have you now...no one can withstand the dark side of the force..."
Does that include John McCain ? He seems to have forgotten the history of this and is blaming everyone and everything but the Democrats in Congress . This man is a Huge disappointment. I am afraid we are going to be let down Big time here folks and a Marxist is going to march into the White House because Of Incompetence of the McCain Campaign
“McCain tried to stop this financial mess; Obama did not.
Now the electorate thinks Obama knows more about the ecomony.
Clearly, education has failed to teach people how to read.”
$300,000,000,000.00 this summer. Now this. After this $700,000,000,000.00 is spent, what comes next?
Scanned from a Chinese newspaper today:
http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd138/jjf777_bucket/NYTimes.jpg
Somebody gets it.
My paraphrasing and re-casting of the excellent article (a must-read):
Our current mess can be tied directly to the Rats in Washington and the greed of Obamas campaign bigwigs (Jim Johnson, former chairman of Fannie Mae and Franklin Raines, former Fannie Mae CEO). The Rats propped up these two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) so their CEOs could reap multiple millions while lining the pockets of Obama and Dodd through massive campaign contributions and perks.
Fannie and Freddie as GSEs were viewed in the capital markets as government-backed buyers, thus they were able to borrow as much as they wanted at below market rates to buy junk mortgages and mortgage-backed securities.
Economists at the Federal Reserve and Congressional Budget Office had studied them in detail, and found that they did not significantly reduce mortgage interest rates despite their subsidized borrowing rates. If they were not making mortgages cheaper and were creating risks for the taxpayers and the economy, what value were they providing?
Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan became a powerful opponent and began to call for stricter regulation and limitations on the growth of their risky portfolios.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had accounting scandals in 2003 and 2004, so to avoid regulation and retain their government sponsored low-cost financing advantage, they re-committed to increased financing of “affordable housing.” They became the largest buyers of subprime (garbage) and Alt-A (mostly garbage) mortgages between 2004 and 2007, supercharging growth of junk mortgages, exposing taxpayers to $1 trillion, and substantially magnifying the costs of this collapse.
Beginning in 2004, their portfolios of subprime and Alt-A loans and securities began to explode from less than 8% of all mortgages in 2003 to over 20% in 2006. During this period it was clear that originators were scraping the bottom of the home-buyer barrel to pump-up Fannie and Freddie profits (i.e. CEO compensation and campaign contributions to Rats) since loan quality declined with low or no down payments and low adjustable initial rates.
Fannie and Freddie bought the support of Rats and were allowed to continue unrestrained. Barney Frank (Rat., Mass), the chair of the House Financial Services Committee, (wrongly, ignorantly, stupidly) described the arrangement with “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have played a very useful role in helping to make housing more affordable . . . a mission that this Congress has given them in return for some of the arrangements which are of some benefit to them to focus on affordable housing.”
Obama now criticizes Republicans and deregulation, but along with Rats Frank and Dodd, blocked the only reform proposed - causing and increasing the size of current crisis. Sen. McCain has been pointing to systemic risks and trying to do something about them for years. In contrast, Sen. Obama lined his pocket with their money and helped to block Republican and Fed regulation that would have stopped the insanity. Obama likes Fannie and Freddie so much, he hired their former CEOs who cooked the books and left us taxpayers with the bill while keeping their millions in compensation.
In 2005, the Senate Banking Committee, then under Republican control, adopted a strong reform bill. The bill was the most important piece of financial regulation before Congress in 2005 and 2006. All the Republicans on the Committee supported the bill, and all the Rats voted against it. Mr. McCain endorsed the legislation in a speech on the Senate floor. Mr. Obama, like all other Rats, remained silent.
Rats are blaming the financial crisis on “deregulation.” This is a canard. There has been deregulation in our economy that has produced innovation and lowered consumer prices. The primary “deregulation” in the financial world permitted banks to diversify their risks, which has kept banks relatively stable in this storm.
As a result, U.S. commercial banks have been able to attract more than $100 billion of new capital in the past year to replace most of their subprime-related write-downs.
Deregulation also made possible bank acquisition of Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch, saving billions in likely resolution costs for taxpayers.
If the Rats hadnt blocked the 2005 legislation, the huge growth in junk loans from Fannie and Freddie could not have occurred, and the scale of the meltdown would have been substantially less. The Rats who today blame Republicans on the lack of regulations were the ones who blocked the only legislative effort that could have stopped it. And the deregulation that did occur mitigated bank risk and positioned them to reduce the cost to taxpayers of this mess - caused by Rats.
B-U-M-P everyone’s accusing me
We wrote an article for the Journal of Economic History back in 1991 (actually, Charlie wrote most of it, I just piggybacked), and he's right here.
"Second, recent events highlight the absurdity of the attempt by several pundits to blame recent problems on "financial deregulation." That complaint was aimed at the Financial Modernization Act of 1999, which passed the House by a vote of 362-57 and the Senate by 90-8, yanking the last brick out of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act's regulatory wall between commercial banks and investment banks.
If it was somehow possible in today's world of global electronic finance to the rebuild such a wall, that would mean J.P. Morgan could not have bought Bear Stearns, Bank of America could not have bought Merrill Lynch, Barclays could not buy most of Lehman, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley could not become bank holding companies. It is hard to imagine how things would have worked out in that situation, but it surely would not have been an improvement.