Posted on 09/25/2008 9:45:36 PM PDT by joanie-f
Edited on 09/30/2008 5:17:29 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Thank YOU! I will send that out. It was awesome!!
I spent most of 15 years in the mortgage and mortgage related fields in the Houston area until around 1985. The time period during the early 80's was to be the genesis of much of modern day "creative financing". The story is too involved and would take too long to tell but I'll share this with you: It was quite a ride while it lasted!
Suffice it to say, a similar scenario is playing out today on a much larger scale. Similar path; similar results. The boom turned to bust. Many companies involved in the building, marketing and financing of real estate went out of business. Some, like my employer, cut back dramatically in their participation in Houston and other markets; at the same time releasing about half their sales force. I was one of the casualties.
Other similarities are there. For example, there were red flags being sent up back then by, amongst others, my company. The information re the impending crash was met with all manner of reaction, but for the most part the few that actually cared might ask, "Well, what can we do about it?" The answer leading up to the current crash is probably the same as back then: Not much.
There is apparently a point of no return, that is, a point at which the "bubble" has reached XX.XX proportions, when a crash, or at least a significant "adjustment", will occur. I don't know if these cycles can be avoided given the desire in many/most industries for a competitive advantage over one's competitors. It may be as natural as the sun coming up for all I know.
Well, I've rambled a bit and have not really added much to the conversation about what, if anything can be done at this point about the problem. Except maybe to make an observation and steal an old idea and put it in new clothes: Any government big enough to fix this mess is big enough to create the mess in the first place.
The states need to reclaim their rightful powers under the constitution.
P.S. It took about five years to recover, but recover it did! Houston and Texas not only survived the crash(es), but have since flourished, and may in fact be the better off for it.
Because of what we have viewed as a fragile economy, and a weakening dollar, my husband and I have moved much of our stock portfolio into cash over the past few months – placing that cash in a money market fund at our brokerage firm...........
NAV in our money market fund has fallen below $1, due, in part, to the decrease in value of debt securities issued by Lehman Brothers and held by the fund.........................
Long story short ... as a result, until our funds are redeemed by our brokerage, we will not have access to them for withdrawal or transactions. We were informed that this action is being taken in our best interest ‘in order to limit potential losses’.
//////////////////////////////////
25billion FORD GMC ..wasn’t enough, need more
30billion BEAR .....wasn’t enough, need more
85billion AIG .....wasn’t enough, need more
138billion LEHMAN...wasn’t enough, need more(they tried to hide that one)
200billion FANNIES...wasn’t enough, need more
770billion WHO ELSE? and no one will ask the question,” Will this be the last dollar we have to spend”? ....
...........Because it won’t be.
Spend $700 billion, 5 percent of our gross domestic product?
Take your money before your money is taken. This is the only language and power D.C. will understand.
I say beat them to the punch.
We must Run ON THE BANKS AND STOCKS.
A) When they stop the bailouts we stop our run.
B) When they put folks in jail, like they did Milken, then we start to reinvest.
C) They start bailouts again, OFF TO THE RACES AGAIN.
D) GO TO STEP A.
joanie-f nice work!
DC Chaptter - in case you just got back from the planet Mongo.
BTTT
. Financial institutions are “designated as financial agents of the Government." This is the New Deal to end all New Deals.
Communist countries operate this way, right?
. Then there’s this: “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.” Translation: the Secretary can buy up whatever junk debt he wants to, burden the American people with it, and be subject to no one in the process.
We cannot let this happen. No govt entity should be unsupervised. Even the IRS needs oversight!
Having said that, I do agree something needs to be done to save our economy but we need a better plan. Anytime the government "rushes" to fix something the middle class pays through the nose!!!!!
Sorry about the triple post
Kept getting a proxy error
When I reviewed on another tab it didn’t show up as posted.
I’ll have two taken out
Thank You and BTTT!
Great video but I can’t locate the embed code so I can post it on our blog. If you have it can you post it?
Excellent. Great job, joanie-f.
This is the BEST framing of this entire Subprime issue I have seen.
Take my word for it. The reasons for this are not that complicated, but there are people who WANT it to be complicated. People like Christopher Dodd, Barney Frank, Chuck Schumer, and yes, Barack Obama. While the mechanics of what we DO or DO NOT do and what the near and future effects of those actions might be are complicated to predict, the reasons we came to this point are very clear.
Take the time and watch this video. Don’t be distracted by the entertaining music (good soundtrack) or the slick editing. Pay attention to the sources and do your own research. I normally don’t send links via email like this to people I know, but the root causes of this issue are going to be obscured to Americans if the likes of Dodd, Frank, Schumer and Obama have anything at all to do with this. We certainly won’t see it from CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC the New York Times or the Boston Globe.
This video is very good because it covers the salient points, presents them in a logical way, and does it in an entertaining enough way to keep normal people watching and learning whose eyes might otherwise glaze over at the mention of the words “bubble”, “inflation” or “sub-prime”.
As a nation, we need to learn from this. We need people to learn, this is what happens with socialism. This is what happens when we go down that “Road to Serfdom”. This whole issue is saturated with dirty money that has saturated liberal greed under the cloak of providing unqualified people with the “right” to home ownership. And the people who are screaming the loudest that we need to fix it RIGHT NOW are the VERY SAME PEOPLE WHO CAUSED IT.
We need to fix this issue now, but not in the way Dodd, Frank, Schumer and Obama want us to fix it. We do it their way, and there are going to be more of these types of things in our immediate future.
Excellent. Great job, joanie-f.
This is the BEST framing of this entire Subprime issue I have seen.
Take my word for it. The reasons for this are not that complicated, but there are people who WANT it to be complicated. People like Christopher Dodd, Barney Frank, Chuck Schumer, and yes, Barack Obama. While the mechanics of what we DO or DO NOT do and what the near and future effects of those actions might be are complicated to predict, the reasons we came to this point are very clear.
Take the time and watch this video. Don’t be distracted by the entertaining music (good soundtrack) or the slick editing. Pay attention to the sources and do your own research. I normally don’t send links via email like this to people I know, but the root causes of this issue are going to be obscured to Americans if the likes of Dodd, Frank, Schumer and Obama have anything at all to do with this. We certainly won’t see it from CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC the New York Times or the Boston Globe.
This video is very good because it covers the salient points, presents them in a logical way, and does it in an entertaining enough way to keep normal people watching and learning whose eyes might otherwise glaze over at the mention of the words “bubble”, “inflation” or “sub-prime”.
As a nation, we need to learn from this. We need people to learn, this is what happens with socialism. This is what happens when we go down that “Road to Serfdom”. This whole issue is saturated with dirty money that has saturated liberal greed under the cloak of providing unqualified people with the “right” to home ownership. And the people who are screaming the loudest that we need to fix it RIGHT NOW are the VERY SAME PEOPLE WHO CAUSED IT.
We need to fix this issue now, but not in the way Dodd, Frank, Schumer and Obama want us to fix it. We do it their way, and there are going to be more of these types of things in our immediate future.
Bookmark.
But I use the term ‘crisis’ in quotes for a reason.
I don't think this is a true crisis, I believe it was manufactured.
Socialists in power always create monsters for the people, but they are never ordinary monsters, they are always Hydras. When they enact a plan, it never has a planned result of “If A then B” but always “If A then either B and/or C and/or D...” If the people cut one head off the monster, another grows back.
I believe when Jimmy Carter put his Community Reinvestment Act into play, and when Bill Clinton reinvested in that act with dividends, they knew that there would be at least two possibilities. 1. that low-income people would get their houses and they would be able to afford them and thus join the American dream with just a little boost up (right. And pigs would fly on that day, too). 2. that low-income people would get their homes and they would not be able to afford them. If they couldn't, they knew that Americans would never kick someone out of their ‘homes’ (which is why we need to refer to them as ‘houses’ not ‘homes’) and that if there were enough mortgages involved, the government would buy up the bad loans, a de facto shifting of wealth from those who ‘have’ to those who ‘have not.’
But there was a 3 snake head that popped up, too. Since it was a government agency that backed these bad loans, they knew that if there ever were a bailout, they could use the mistakes of that government agency to demand more government control over those agencies, and, by association, over the entire mortgage industry.
But Socialists are not that smart. No one can ever predict what an economic machine will do once you start flipping levers and spinning dials. And one thing that no one has mentioned in all this is the role that ‘house flippers’ played in this. While these high-risk, low-outlay mortgages focused primarily on low-income people, there will always be opportunists to take advantage of any offering. People who wee already financially comfortable and could afford a SECOND home used these high-risk mortgages to buy a second home, fix it up, and ‘flip’ it, sell it quickly at a profit. This also had a lot to do with the housing bubble and it was exactly what happened to real estate in the 1920’s right before the Depression. So many people were trading real estate that houses kept coming and going, the prices kept rising (out of pace with inflation) which gave the false impression of an imbalance between supply and demand. It's complicated, but supply and demand has to be thought of in terms of trade cycles. The ‘flipping’ gave a false impression of the supply of homes because they were being exchanged at a much faster rate than those who were actually looking for a house to live in as a primary home. This added to the bubble (it wasn't the cause, but it helped pump it up).
In discussing this issue, we need to use the terms ‘house’. No one wants to kick someone out of their ‘home.’ But before we bail out ANY bad mortgage, we need to determine the assets of those we are about to give a house to. If someone owns more than one house, they should NOT receive a bail out. If someone is on a house and defaulting on their mortgage, we need to determine whether they have other assets, like boats or investment properties. After all, once these people got a mortgage (sometimes without employment or identification verification), they could then use their home to get other loans to make other purchases.
We are rushing blindly into this bailout. And the left, (Barney Frank, Chuckie Schumer, Obama, Dodd, Pelosi) are using the smokescreen of a crisis to demand a headlong rush into the single biggest lurch toward socialism this country has ever made. And yes, this is bigger than what FDR did. FDR created agencies that were dependent upon future taxes to sustain. This bailout is taking a store of taxpayer funds to purchase a large portion of the free market — and it is not only the lending institutions that it is purchasing oversight of, this will trickle down into the stock market since there were so many leviathan trading houses involved in this scandal.
We need to call our representatives and DEMAND a congressional investigation into this.
The Democrats have long employed the October surprise — the revealing of a scandal involving their opponents right before an election. They are almost always manufactured. This scandal fell into the lap of the Republicans and it is not only a scandal, it is the result of Socialist economics. Obama likes to use his phrase “failed economic principles.” Well, there is no greater failed economic ideology than socialism and other forms of ‘central management.’
I do hope the McCain camp drives this nail into Obammie-the-Commie's political coffin.
President Bush had the opportunity to explain what this video explained. He took the national stage. President Reagan would have used that opportunity to drive a stake through he heart of Socialism. Though I've defended him aggressively for 8 years, I'm not surprised that President Bush is using this opportunity to reach another hand across the aisle to those who hate him and us and will never compromise with us. I don't know what he's going to do with those two nubs where his hands used to be, though.
The first link was no good.
Had to click this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5tZc8oH—o
My complaint would be the big words are on the screen a second too long, and the highlighted articles go by too fast and I couldn’t read them that fast.
oops!
Forgot one thing
BEFORE
Freddie/Fannie
there was the government sticking their nose into it by deciding we needed to have Freddie/Fannie to help the poor who couldn’t afford homes to get into homes they could not afford - instead of working and saving like the rest of the country.
Thanks joanie, I sent it out to the horde.
It explains things pretty well.
I still disagree with much of McCain’s Amnesty bit, but there can be no doubt at this point that he is emminently preferable to Obambambi.
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