Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Bankruptcy, not bailout, is the right answer
"Bankruptcy does not mean the company disappears; it is just owned by someone new (as has occurred with several airlines). Bankruptcy punishes those who took excessive risks while preserving those aspects of a businesses that remain profitable.
In contrast, a bailout transfers enormous wealth from taxpayers to those who knowingly engaged in risky subprime lending. Thus, the bailout encourages companies to take large, imprudent risks and count on getting bailed out by government. This "moral hazard" generates enormous distortions in an economy's allocation of its financial resources."
Commentary: Bankruptcy, not bailout, is the right answer - CNN.comMonday, September 29, 2008
Russia Giving Nuke Technology to Venezuela
Yeah, we can't have nukes in Iran cause they can hit Israel...
Bush is powerless to do anything because we're in a severe financial crisis caused by our attempt to keep nukes out of Iraq.
Can this get any more stupid?
The Housing Bubble in 4 Easy Steps
Please notice step 1 is the Federal Reserve's intervention in the market's interest rate mechanism, causing mispriced credit.
The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz
"The next president will have to deal with yet another crippling legacy of George W. Bush: the economy. A Nobel laureate, Joseph E. Stiglitz, sees a generation-long struggle to recoup."
The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush: Politics & Power: vanityfair.comHis culprits are a tax code that has become hideously biased in favor of the rich; a
national debt increased 70 percent; a record $850 billion trade
deficit; record oil prices; weak dollar...just like Ron Paul has been saying for years.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
The Royal Bank of SCOTLAND Will Be One of Biggest Beneficiaries of U.S. Taxpayer Bailout
planned $700 billion bail-out that comes courtesy of the American
tax-payer if the US Congress gives the financial rescue package the
go-ahead this weekend."
The Sunday Herald - Scotland's award-winning independent newspaper
Let's bailout the whole world! Then, maybe, they'll like us again!
A shattering moment in America's fall from power
"Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably. The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over.
You can see it in the way America's dominion has slipped away in its own backyard, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez taunting and ridiculing the superpower with impunity. Yet the setback of America's standing at the global level is even more striking... In a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet Union, an entire model of government and the economy has collapsed.
Ever since the end of the Cold War, successive American administrations have lectured other countries on the necessity of sound finance. Indonesia, Thailand, Argentina and several African states endured severe cuts in spending and deep recessions as the price of aid from the International Monetary Fund, which enforced the American orthodoxy. China in particular was
hectored relentlessly on the weakness of its banking system. But China's success has been based on its consistent contempt for Western advice and it is not Chinese banks that are currently going bust. How symbolic yesterday that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the
US Treasury Secretary is on his knees.
Despite incessantly urging other countries to adopt its way of doing business, America has always had one economic policy for itself and another for the rest of the world. Throughout the years in which the US was punishing countries that departed from fiscal prudence, it was borrowing on a colossal scale to finance tax cuts and fund its over-stretched military commitments. Now, with federal finances critically dependent on continuing large inflows of foreign capital, it will be the countries that spurned the American model of capitalism that will shape America's economic future."
John Gray: A shattering moment in America's fall from power | Comment is free | The ObserverThis writer assumes that the failures are due to lack of government intervention. This is wrong. The Fed is the ultimate in intervention. It affects every aspect of our economy. I post this because he DOES get right the hypocrisy of the U.S.'s say one thing, and do another economic foreign policy.
US House of Representatives approves Nasa buying Russian spacecraft
US House of Representatives approves Nasa buying Russian spacecraft | World news | guardian.co.uk
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Support for Bailout Down to 24%
"The more voters learn about the proposed $700-billion taxpayer-backed Wall Street rescue plan, the less they like it. Most voters remain largely unworried about their own money, too.
Just 24% of U.S. voters now favor the plan first proposed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson a week ago and the subject of very public negotiations on Capitol Hill ever since, according to a
Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey taken Friday night. Fifty percent (50%) oppose it, and 25% are undecided."
Friday, September 26, 2008
Ten Things You Should Know About Bush's Trillion Dollar Fleecing Plan
"9. Foreign Banks Can Cash in Too
Or perhaps the fact that U.S. tax-payers look like they might also end up bailing out foreign banks will end up being a fly in the ointment.
Now, the U.S. bailout looks as if it is going global, too, a move that could raise its cost and intensifyscrutiny by Congress and critics.
Foreign banks, which were initially excluded from the plan, lobbied successfully over the weekend to be able to sell the toxic U.S. mortgage debt owned by their American units to the Treasury, getting the same treatment as U.S. banks.
On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson indicated in a series of appearances on TV talk shows that an original proposal introduced Saturday had been widened. "It's a distinction without a difference whether it's a foreign or a U.S. one," he said in an interview with Fox News.
He's right, in a way. There are no U.S. or foreign mega-banks -- just multinational financial
institutions with headquarters at home or somewhere abroad. If one accepts the logic of the plan at all, it might as well extend to multinationals with foreign-sounding names. The rabbit hole is only so deep, and we're already way down it."
We're going to bail out Middle Eastern sheiks who invested in Citigroup! Cool! This gets better by the second!
Local Entities Want a Piece of the Bailout Action!
hundreds of millions of dollars in the financial crisis, are seeking
federal help for Medicaid and other programs, as economic woes work
their way through the system."
Local Officials Press for a Piece of the Rescue Plan - WSJ.com
WTF is going on?! Bernie Sanders against bailout, "free market" Larry Kudlow FOR it!
Sanders: Larry, I’m sure after all of the ranting and raving you have done against government intervention and the virtues of free market I know without saying that you are opposed to the bail out.
Kudlow: No, I’m in favor of it.
Sanders: Oh, you’ve become a Socialist overnight Larry, what happened?….I think your version of socialism is to bail out the rich. My concern is about the middle class and working families who are now asked to bail out the disaster caused by the incredibly greedy people on Wall Street who have fought for this deregulation which is now taking us over the cliff.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Bush: Sept. 15, "No More Bailouts!" Sept 23: "We Need $700 Billion."
Bush: Economy strong enough to handle turmoil - BostonHerald.com
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Brazil's President Mocking U.S. Investment Banks...He's Right
September 18, that he has watched with "sadness" the collapse of Wall
Street firms that made economic policy recommendations in emerging
markets "as if they were the super intelligent and we were the poor
souls."
"Important banks, very important banks, that spent their lives giving
advice about Brazil and what we should or shouldn't do are now broke,"
news agency EFE quoted Lula da Silva as saying in a speech in southern
Brazil."
Brazil - Brazzil Mag - Brazilian President Makes Fun of Wall Street's Super Brains
THIS Guy is our Fed Chair?!
"Bernanke's remarks, an unusual departure from his prepared
testimony, come as lawmakers and the Bush administration
negotiate a rescue plan aimed at easing the worst financial
crisis since the Great Depression. The Fed chief said paying
prices higher than the bad assets would fetch in the open market
would help ``unfreeze'' credit markets and aid the economy. "
Bloomberg.com: Economy
He wants us to pay MORE than what they're worth. This is his solution.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Saturday, September 20, 2008
No One Charged in Oil-Sex Scandal
Thursday for declining to prosecute the managers of an oil- and
gas-royalty program that's been tainted by allegations of illicit sex,
drug use and taking favors worth thousands of dollars."
McClatchy Washington Bureau | 09/18/2008 | Official: Why weren't managers charged in oil-sex scandal?
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
The Social Imperative of Sound Money
"This past week, the government announced that it would take Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the mortgage giants, under conservatorship, which is a nice way of saying that they will be nationalized.
We don't use the word nationalize any more. We can try an experiment and read the new term conservatorship" back into history. In fact, we might say that Stalin and Lenin put Russia's industries under a kind of conservatorship. Or we might say that Mao pushed a kind of land conservatorship, or that Hitler's policy was one of national conservatorship. Marx's little book could be re-titled: The Conservatorship Manifesto.
You see, the government keeps having to make up new names for these things because the old policies, which were not that different in content, failed so miserably. The old terms become discredited and new terms become necessary, in an effort to fool the public.
It's as if a restaurant served a shrimp dish that gave all the customers food poisoning, and so each night it decides to serve the same shrimp but name the dish something new: crangon cocktail, prawn pasta,
scampi salad, or what have you. But no matter what they call it, it is still poison.
The Social Imperative of Sound Money by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Bin Laden: Goal is to bankrupt U.S.
When you're sitting around pondering, "Who is winning the war?", keep this in mind.
Fannie, Freddie Takeover Diminishes Financing Options for Banks
decision to seize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may choke off the
biggest source of funding for financial companies suffering from
the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. "
...
"Paulson's ``decision has been devastating to the market,''
said Marilyn Cohen, President of Envision Capital Management in
Los Angeles, which oversees $200 million in fixed-income assets.
``We all thought they would never help exacerbate the banking
crisis and that's exactly what they did.'' "
Bloomberg.com: Exclusive
Gov't interventions don't help. They make it worse and distort the market's natural correction mechanisms.