The sweeping federal plan to shore up and bail out the financial markets doesn’t sound very small-government Republican. But so far it has helped reassure the stock market, which is up sharply. Many details of the plan will still need to be hammered out with Congress.
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67 Comments
Folks, this a pro-active plan.
If we do nothing, it will cost us more, in the long run.
FDIC and other deposit insurance programs WILL be at risk, if we do nothing.
SIPC and other government programs will be at risk, if we do nothing.
Federal tax revenues will tank, if our economy is damaged.
Nobody will be able to sell their homes, if credit dries up.
This problem was caused by liberals, in Congress, who thought that anyone with a pulse should qualify for a home loan.
Now, this toxic debt threatens all of us. There is still collaterol, for that debt: The HOMES Involved. However, if we let the financing system fail, the collterol, for that debt, will fall in value.
WE HAVE NO CHOICE!
However, we should avoid the impulse, in the future, to allow politics to trump financial reality.
thiss too will pass
repubs have us between a rock and a hard place.
perplexed by how with no regulative ability dems forced brokers to extend risky credit?
Country Wide = Democrat controlled
Lehman Brothers = Democrat controlled
Fannie Mae = Democrat controlled
Freddie Mac = Democrat controlled
Franklin= spacecadet.
Franklin- As a paid shill, do your rates go up the nearer the election becomes?
I asked because as that date approaches, the shriller you are becoming!
gster
Nothing at all shrill about what I post.
You just can’t handle the truth.
I notice you didn’t answer the first question- words too big, or too many?
Franklin
Posted September 19, 2008 at 1:58 pm | Permalink
gster
Nothing at all shrill about what I post.
You just can’t handle the truth.
=================================================
Unfortunately, you never post the truth, or fortunately, as the case may be.
Capitalism takes a back seat to communism, or how the Bush administration plans to buy the election. This is what it’s really about, and that’s the truth!:
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson proposed today, September 19, a scheme by which the government would relieve financial institutions of toxic mortgage assets. The stock market zoomed late Thursday and today. The scheme would cost taxpayers up to a trillion dollars. And it would kill any idea of free market capitalism. The government would also ban investors from betting that financial stocks will go down. This is a hoax. Paulson is trying to run up the stock market before the election. After that, the government will admit it doesn’t have the money to pull off this scam, and drop it.
http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/financial-crime-politics/2008/sep/19/paulsons-socialistic-plan-bail-out-wall-street-ele/
Country Wide = Democrat controlled
Lehman Brothers = Democrat controlled
Fannie Mae = Democrat controlled
Freddie Mac = Democrat controlled
UNDISPUTABLE POINT
Franklin = Shrill Shill
Another UNDISPUTABLE POINT.
“You just can’t handle the truth.”
Couple months back according to prophet Franklin we weren’t even close to a recession.
“Couple months back according to prophet Franklin we weren’t even close to a recession.”
Three, Two, One … Franklin will soon be posting something like: “We ARE NOT in a recession. If WE GO INTO ONE IT WILL BE THE FAULT OF THE DEMOCRATS!!!”
Some things in life are just too predictable.
All the fed has done is kick the can down the road and put the blame game in high gear.
What’s changed?
Are the big banks solvent? We don’t know nobody has a clear idea of what’s on their balance sheets.
Consumer is still tapped out.
This will probably sink the dollar and put inflation in high gear.
Which put’s us back to where we started. Rinse-Lather-Repeat
Steven. That 2:36 post just made my day. Thanks.
LOL
Let the recession happen. The crash will be sharp and short. Then we can get back to rebuilding our nations wealth.
We are just prolonging the inevitable.
Quit allowing them to prop up a bad system.
The last five years have seen a huge transfer of wealth in this country.
“While critics have long complained that the favorable association with the government gives these two an unfair competitive advantage vis-a-vis their straight private rivals and represents a classic example of institutions putting taxpayer dollars at risk by being “too big to fail” the system worked well enough for a long time to make home mortgages more available to borrowers by freeing up the capital needed from the local lender to make more loans. Both institutions were also known for their adherence to a strict “golden rule” (those with the gold make the rules) underwriting policy which in the old days demanded down payments of 20% to avoid private mortgage insurance for borrowers and income/debt ratios that stated borrowers could only have 33% of their monthly gross income going to their mortgage payment and no more than 26% of their monthly income otherwise devoted to installment debt.
But then in the early to mid 1990s things began to change. Point of origin banks had long been targeted by special interest groups for alleged “red-lining” of loans to poor and minority borrowers in which they either avoided some areas altogether or charged allegedly exorbitant interest rates to less credit worthy borrowers. This resulted in the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 which was supposed to force banks to devote a certain percentage of their lending to underserved or excluded communities and borrowers. Enforcement, however, was lax. So in the early 1990s the Clinton administration and HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros announced The National Homeownership Strategy: Partners in the American Dream:
. . .It promoted paper-thin downpayments and pushed for ways to get lenders to give mortgage loans to first-time buyers with shaky financing and incomes. It’s clear now that the erosion of lending standards pushed prices up by increasing demand, and later led to waves of defaults by people who never should have bought a home in the first place.
President Bush continued the practices because they dovetailed with his Ownership Society goals, and of course Congress was strongly behind the push. But Clinton and his administration must shoulder some of the blame.
The old underwriting standards at Fannie and Freddie flew out the window in a wave of exotic home mortgages like “interest-only” loans that teased in borrowers to buy more house than they could afford by offering lower initial payments which would reset to possibly higher payments later. Combined with low interest rates promulgated by the Federal Reserve under Chairman Alan Greenspan, ever rising home values in many densely populated markets like southern California and south Florida, speculators who were buying up houses hoping to flip them in short order for profits of as much as 25% in a year and the stage was set for the perfect financial storm as banks, Wall Street and foreign financial markets loaded up with these CDOs. Everyone was making tons of money so who was to worry? Well, some of us with long experience in real estate were but our voices were not heeded.
So in 2007 as inflation rose on the back of increased energy costs and the initial teaser rates for borrowers were set to reset at higher rates requiring higher payments the bubble began deflating with a vengeance. Borrowers already maxed out with debt saw falling property values leave them no hope to refinance their suddenly more expensive mortgages as they had no equity and then the wave of foreclosures began and financial institutions suddenly found that what they assumed to be the golden geese turned out to be pigs in a poke. Many had purchased these securities on credit themselves with little actual cash capital required and some like Bear Stearns found themselves technically insolvent virtually overnight.
So what’s the political angle in this for McCain you might ask? Well, Fannie Mae has long been the sinecure where Democratic Party functionaries have gone to get rich. The most well-known figures are former chairman Jim Johnson (once the head of Barack Obama’s vice presidential search committee before being replaced by Caroline Kennedy), 9/11 Commission member and former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick who served as Fannie Mae’s vice chairman from 1997 to 2003. But the most notorious former Democratic apparatchik in this respect is former Clinton OMB director Frank Raines. Under his leadership Fannie Mae was accused of cooking its books to boost the multi-million dollar bonuses paid to its top executives and Raines settled with regulators for the astonishing sum of $24.7 million. But the story doesn’t end there as we found out this last spring with the sweetheart loan deals offered to Democratic Senators Kent Conrad and Christopher Dodd by former Countrywide Home Loan chief Angelo Mozila in what was aptly title the “friends of Angelo” program.
This close Democratic connection puts Barack Obama into somewhat of an awkward position in that in order for him to match McCain’s call for the breakup and privatization of Fannie and Freddie he’s going to have to go against some of the most senior members of his own party in order to prove that he too is about standing up to these entrenched special interests. And if it’s one thing we know about Barack Obama it is that he has never taken such positions in his life.”
http://wharrison55.newsvine.com/_news/2008/09/08/1839009-fannie-mae-and-freddie-mac-takeover-gives-mccain-a-political-opening
annie
Have we had a quarter with negative economic growth?
We have toxic debt, encouraged by the Congressional Black Caucus, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank.
We have to deal with that problem.
However, we still have not had two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth.
Don’t know the ramifications of what I just heard on the CBS national radio news; the Democrats are pledging fast action on the plan (requesting more details to be sure) while the GOP has folks questioning the plan, and indicating resistance. Thus, the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve have spent soem time trying to convince them, from the report.
Another great video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vGzbtM4XU
“We have toxic debt, encouraged by the Congressional Black Caucus, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank.”
I wasn’t aware these 3 ran the country the last 8 years. Wow, what an education you’re giving us, Your Shillsterness!
John McCain warns us about Fannie and Freddie, years ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ROOriYvJM4&NR=1
gster
Dodd, Frank, and the Congressional Black Caucus had more to do with the current problems than any other politicians did. Liberals in Congress protected the mortgage industry from regulation. The mortgage industry gave jobs to many liberals. The Mortgage industry financed ACORN and other, corrupt, liberal causes.
“Lehman Brothers collapse is traced back to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two big mortgage banks that got a federal bailout a few weeks ago.
Freddie and Fannie used huge lobbying budgets and political contributions to keep regulators off their backs.
A group called the Center for Responsive Politics keeps track of which politicians get Fannie and Freddie political contributions. The top three U.S. senators getting big Fannie and Freddie political bucks were Democrats and No. 2 is Sen. Barack Obama.
Now remember, he’s only been in the Senate four years, but he still managed to grab the No. 2 spot ahead of John Kerry — decades in the Senate — and Chris Dodd, who is chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.
Fannie and Freddie have been creations of the congressional Democrats and the Clinton White House, designed to make mortgages available to more people and, as it turns out, some people who couldn’t afford them.
Fannie and Freddie have also been places for big Washington Democrats to go to work in the semi-private sector and pocket millions. The Clinton administration’s White House Budget Director Franklin Raines ran Fannie and collected $50 million. Jamie Gorelick — Clinton Justice Department official — worked for Fannie and took home $26 million. Big Democrat Jim Johnson, recently on Obama’s VP search committee, has hauled in millions from his Fannie Mae CEO job.
RelatedColumn Archive
Barack Obama’s Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac ConnectionDoudou Diene Can Go Home NowObama’s Iraq JamMad at HillaryBig Oil Meets Big PoliticsFull-page My Word Archive
Now remember: Obama’s ads and stump speeches attack McCain and Republican policies for the current financial turmoil. It is demonstrably not Republican policy and worse, it appears the man attacking McCain — Sen. Obama — was at the head of the line when the piggies lined up at the Fannie and Freddie trough for campaign bucks.
Sen. Barack Obama: No. 2 on the Fannie/Freddie list of favored politicians after just four short years in the Senate.
Next time you see that ad, you might notice he fails to mention that part of the Fannie and Freddie problem.”
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,423701,00.html
Franklin- I wonder, do your masters/minders give your a script to cut and paste, or merely a list of bullet comments they want addressed?
And what rank shillster are you? First-grade….??
Does your shill-meter run all the time, or only when your fingers meet the keyboard?
What happens after the election?
Just curious.
Franklin
Posted September 19, 2008 at 3:18 pm | Permalink
annie
Have we had a quarter with negative economic growth?
We have toxic debt, encouraged by the Congressional Black Caucus, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank.
We have to deal with that problem.
However, we still have not had two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth.
______________________________________________
Measure that in Canadian Dollars. We have negative GDP.
We are in a recession. We need to let it happen.
Franklin,
No one here cares about mainstream media, especially Fox news.
They only report what their masters tell them to.
Put some credible sources on here from now on.
Franklin,
Why did the cons allow brown people- a gay guy and a wimpy liberal to best them on their own turf? The rep’s had every advantage going for them–yet a few disadvantaged brown people a gay guy and a wimpy liberal stuck it too you. Truly masters of the universe.
Oh subtract 15% imaginary gdp from financials and you have your recession.
The Wall Street Journal says McCain doesn’t know what he is talking about. A Republican candidate vilified by the WSJ on his knowledge of the economy. It’s bad folks when the conservative bastion of matters economic is aware of how badly McCain is doing in addressing this serious matter.
———–
McCain’s Scapegoat
John McCain has made it clear this week he doesn’t understand what’s happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does. But on Thursday, he took his populist riffing up a notch and found his scapegoat for financial panic — Christopher Cox, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178318884054675.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
So in the early 1990s the Clinton administration and HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros announced The National Homeownership Strategy: Partners in the American Dream:
. . . It promoted paper-thin downpayments and pushed for ways to get lenders to give mortgage loans to first-time buyers with shaky financing and incomes. It’s clear now that the erosion of lending standards pushed prices up by increasing demand, and later led to waves of defaults by people who never should have bought a home in the first place.
Wow, Franklin, you must have really had to google your fingers to the bone to find someone who could seem to back up your assertion that “too much regulation” got us into this mess.
Here are the real facts–and notice that the conclusions are based on quantifiable evidence:
Studies by the Federal Reserve and Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, among others, have shown that CRA increased lending and homeownership in poor communities without undermining banks’ profitability.
But CRA has always had critics, and they now suggest that the law went too far in encouraging banks to lend in struggling communities. Rhetoric aside, the argument turns on a simple question: In the current mortgage meltdown, did lenders approve bad loans to comply with CRA, or to make money?
The evidence strongly suggests the latter. First, consider timing. CRA was enacted in 1977. The sub-prime lending at the heart of the current crisis exploded a full quarter century later. In the mid-1990s, new CRA regulations and a wave of mergers led to a flurry of CRA activity, but, as noted by the New America Foundation’s Ellen Seidman (and by Harvard’s Joint Center), that activity “largely came to an end by 2001.” In late 2004, the Bush administration announced plans to sharply weaken CRA regulations, pulling small and mid-sized banks out from under the law’s toughest standards. Yet sub-prime lending continued, and even intensified — at the very time when activity under CRA had slowed and the law had weakened.
Second, it is hard to blame CRA for the mortgage meltdown when CRA doesn’t even apply to most of the loans that are behind it. As the University of Michigan’s Michael Barr points out, half of sub-prime loans came from those mortgage companies beyond the reach of CRA. A further 25 to 30 percent came from bank subsidiaries and affiliates, which come under CRA to varying degrees but not as fully as banks themselves. (With affiliates, banks can choose whether to count the loans.) Perhaps one in four sub-prime loans were made by the institutions fully governed by CRA.
Most important, the lenders subject to CRA have engaged in less, not more, of the most dangerous lending. Janet Yellen, president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve, offers the killer statistic: Independent mortgage companies, which are not covered by CRA, made high-priced loans at more than twice the rate of the banks and thrifts. With this in mind, Yellen specifically rejects the “tendency to conflate the current problems in the sub-prime market with CRA-motivated lending.? CRA, Yellen says, “has increased the volume of responsible lending to low- and moderate-income households.”
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis (thanks to AVTolle for snagging this source)
Econ
>Fannie and Freddie have been creations of the congressional Democrats and the Clinton White House, designed to make mortgages available to more people and, as it turns out, some people who couldn’t afford them.
So that’s why Washington Mutual is on the auction block? Wachovia in trouble?
Your leaning on the assumption “low income” mortgages are the toxic problem when high end homes are the reason why this happened. The reach for $400,000 homes was too fast.
When John McCain helps Ohio lose 10,000 shipping jobs, people can’t pay their mortgages.
It’s a historical crash of Federal financial policies and buck stops on desk of President Bush.
You can’t spin the responsibility on this failure.
McCain wants to grow the government with his own new agency while blasting the Fed for what their attempting to do.
Remember he wants to keep Bush tax cuts permanent. That means executives on Wall Street pay less taxes and so do oil corporations.
McCain demanded Chris Cox of the SEC fired in middle of this financial battle. What a commander! Cox announced he was leaving when Bush term was up.
No matter who Bush hired for Federal jobs it was a bad choice, they have Republican values that Karl Rove liked.
Phew. I have to admit it, I was getting a little worried about our economy. But from reading this, I’m confident everthing is going great. We’re America and WE WILL GET CHANGE!!!!!!!!!!!!! Awesome.
Is it possible to speak in favor of two opposing actions still get elected President?
Barack Obama, who lamented Friday that “we have not managed our federal budget with any kind of discipline,” is nonetheless promising to spend $50 billion on a United Nations anti-poverty program that critics say will drive up American debt.
http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/09/19/obama-laments-debt-but-promises-billions-for-anti-poverty-program/
Obama’s Scapegoat
Everybody but him.
I see Franklin – Paulie is still doing that shrill routine for his 30 pieces of silver.
I’d actually feel sorry for him if I didn’t think he actually believed some of the crap he comes up with.
The market is “reassured?” 3-500pt daily swings in the Dow is not reassured, it’s extremely volatile, and no oracle can predict where it’s going to be even next week. It could stabilize or it could pull a ‘29 skidoo and see brokers jumping out windows, the rich in dire straits, and the rest of us even worse off for god knows how long.
The NYSE is simply the worlds largest floating crap game, with each of the big players attempting to load the dice in its own favor. How this all falls out is anybody’s guess. If you have anything at all in the market, now’s the time to cash out, sit back and watch. This latest wave of crises and bankruptcies isn’t over by a long shot!
Not being able to post today left me to be an observer. I am amazed at the lengths people will go to justify their positions.
We are where we are because we are greedy, we want everything we desire and we want it now. We want higher taxes according to all libs on this board and we can only be patriotic if we pay more taxes according to Biden. We want the market to tank so we can get on with business. We want to adopt the Global Warming argument and shape our world around it.
I say we deserve what we get and I will be voting for Obama. The libs constant attack on any conservative thought. Their insistence on only believing the news they hear from NBC or CNN. Bring on the next four years and let The One lead us. I won’t even say I hope he fails because this afterall is my country I am talking about.
After all how much damage can he do in 4 years?
Please don’t even say it.
“Is it possible to speak in favor of two opposing actions still get elected President?
”
You mean like being against an AIG bailout yesterday, and being for the massive bailout today? I think your answer is no.
Obama Laments Debt, But Promises Billions for Anti-Poverty Program
by FOXNews.com
Friday, September 19, 2008
Barack Obama speaks to reporters following a meeting with his top economic advisers Friday.
By Bill Sammon
Barack Obama, who lamented Friday that “we have not managed our federal budget with any kind of discipline,” is nonetheless promising to spend $50 billion on a United Nations anti-poverty program that critics say will drive up American debt.
“The short-term weakness in the capital market is a reflection of long-term problems that we have in our economy,” Obama told reporters in Florida. “We have been loading up enormous amounts of debt.”
Yet Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden, have pledged tens of billions in new spending on a U.N. program that promises cash to poor countries. The program is one of eight sweeping “Millennium Development Goals” the U.N. adopted in 2000.
“Obama and Biden will embrace the Millennium Development Goal of cutting extreme poverty around the world in half by 2015, and they will double our foreign assistance to $50 billion to achieve that goal,” the candidates vow in their campaign platform.
Johns Hopkins professor Steve Hanke said such spending would merely drive up American debt, while doing almost nothing for the world’s poor.
“It goes down a bureaucratic rat-hole, lining the pockets of people who are connected to the power structure,” said Hanke, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. “It’s basically a system to redistribute income from middle class people in the United States to rich people in poor countries. It never reaches those people who are living on a dollar a day.”
Hanke said such expenditures are especially unwise in the wake of significant expansions of government and spending during President Bush’s tenure.
“We’ve been spending like drunken sailors and making obligations into the future like drunken sailors,” he said. “We’re on an unsustainable path in terms of the fiscal situation in the United States because of massive spending growth and commitments.”
Obama said he wants to curtain at least one of those costly commitments.
“We have spent well over half a trillion dollars — soon to be a trillion dollars — on a war in Iraq, despite the fact that Iraqis are now running surpluses,” the Illinois senator said Friday. “We’re still spending $10 billion a month there.”
But in December, Obama also sponsored the Global Poverty Act which, if passed, would require the president to commit to cutting global poverty in half by 2015. Critics say that would cost American taxpayers $845 billion.
Susan Rice, one of Obama’s top foreign policy advisers, says the U.S. should give 0.7 percent of its Gross Domestic Product to developing nations.
Bill Sammon is Washington deputy managing editor for FOX News Channel.
Am,
Actually it’s simple. All he has to do is stop doling the Dept. of the Treasury out to Halliwell, Blackwater, AIG, Airbus, et cetera, Saudi Arabia and various other corrupt governments, corporations, rich bastards and ‘publican pork farmers, and we’ll have plenty of cash to provide justice, medical care, education and social security to the American people Bushco seems to have forgotten.
Franklin Posted September 19, 2008 at 1:33 pm |
“Country Wide = Democrat controlled
Lehman Brothers = Democrat controlled
Fannie Mae = Democrat controlled
Freddie Mac = Democrat controlled”
Franklin is absolutely correct…AND, McCain has warned about this happening for quite a longtime. At least with respect to Fannie and Freddie.
And you can take that to the bank…guarantied.
Obama said at a Florida news conference that given the gravity of the situation, he will refrain for now from presenting a more detailed blueprint.
That’s because he has no clue about what to do, just as he is clueless on most everything.
And, he has no one around him that knows anything either EXCEPT the same guys that ran Freddie and Fannie into the ground and are now costing the American taxpayer billions.
Republicans not taking responsibility for the GOP leadership now is appalling, myopic and dead spin. Bush is responsible for failures on the stock market at this time.
All these corporations failing on Wall Street had SEC approval. In 8 years Corporate profits skyrocketed now crashed.
The voice of deregulation on Wall Street was louder than ever says Historians.
McCain has said numerous times supporting deregulation THIS YEAR! He now adds Obama will raise taxes attack.
Shouldn’t executives on Wall Street pay more taxes with their high salaries jobs, they create complex fraud!
Corporate bail out on Wall Street is happening with taxpayer money! It’s over Republicans your financial ideology failed!
Vote for McCain, so what! He won’t be held responsible by you all anyway. Your not holding Bush responsible.
——
snip ( how this Wall Street meltdown began )
Johnathan Alter, Newsweek
I remember attending that year’s GOP Florida straw poll, where the scrambling for the 1996 presidential campaign was well underway. When I walked in the door, McCain was handing out Phil Gramm for President literature. I asked, Why aren’t you for Bob Dole? Fellow war hero, treasured Senate colleague.
McCain said that Gramm was an old friend and he liked his views on the economy. But he’s prickly, unappealing and obnoxious, I said, reflecting the conventional wisdom in Washington.
You can’t possibly think he’s the best person in the whole country to be president! (One of the great things about McCain was that until this year you could actually say stuff like that to him.)
McCain laughed but loyally stuck with Gramm, who spent millions going nowhere in the primaries.
Four years later, Gramm, in character, returned McCain’s loyalty by endorsing George W. Bush.
More important, Gramm slipped language into 1999 legislation that essentially deregulated all the fancy new Wall Street products that got us into this mess.
His wife, Wendy Gramm, used her position as chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission to legitimize the questionable trading practices that led to the Enron scandal.
Instead of recognizing that Gramm’s radical free-market views were out of step with the realities of the post-Enron world, McCain hired him as his top economic adviser in the 2008 campaign.
Had Gramm not said that the United States is “a nation of whiners” in a “mental recession” but facing serious economic difficulty, he would have likely been McCain’s secretary of the Treasury.
The gaffes meant Gramm had to resign his formal position with the campaign, but he has continued to informally advise McCain on the economy and would likely be rehabilitated in a McCain presidency.
The Palin-McCain Administration Sarah says.
Flip/flop/flip, mccain now saying govt. should quit bailouts. He’s getting as hard to keep up with as bush.
Shame is the responsible parties can’t be sent to jail as what they were doing was completely legal.
“Phantom” cites –
“Flip/flop/flip, mccain now sayin…”
You gotta wonder how the campaign of John S (for Senile) McCain the Third (from Shrub’s 3rd term) is preparing for the debates. All Obama needs to do is keep track of all the different positions McCoot has taken on just about every issue imaginable.*
* Albeit, keeping track of all of ‘em will take a prodigious memory.
McCodger has expressed five different opinions about the financial crisis in the past four days. He’s on record on both sides of Shrub’s tax policy. He’s proclaimed at least two different “principled” approaches to Iraq. Roe v. Wade? There’s videotape of both of his opinions. How do you feel about less regulation or more regulation? McC*nt has firmly agreed with you, regardless.
Phant,
The only reason why what the responsible parties did was legal was that the responsible parties paid lobbyists and contributed to campaigns so that their scams were made legal. That in itself should be illegal! Favorable legislation and regulation shouldn’t be for sale, and both buyers and sellers of the public trust ought to be jailed for at least as long as bank robbers.
Ummm, Econ….
Can you explain to me again, after this week, exactly how a free and uncontrolled market is best for the people? Just how does that work in our current world when the taxpayers (meaning government) have to buy large chunks of the banking and insurance industry to keep the market from falling apart, keep businesses from going bankrupt and keep citizens from losing their homes? Just where is the “competition” in the market and “benefits” to the average person when a few short sellers can cause panic and reek havoc in the entire market?
In short, exactly how much is this “free market” going to cost us? We expect winners and losers in the marketplace but will the “winners” be rewarded for their diligence and research, or will they be paid to keep their mouths shut, quietly step off their lofty thrones, and float to a cushy soft landing under their golden parachutes? Not to mention the losers…we know who they are. They are the people who have worked their fingers to the bone for 30 or 40 years to put together a nest egg, only to find that feathered nest plundered by…oh, yeah…The WINNERS of this little economic experiment!
gster
Posted September 19, 2008 at 3:25 pm | Permalink
“We have toxic debt, encouraged by the Congressional Black Caucus, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank.”
I wasn’t aware these 3 ran the country the last 8 years. Wow, what an education you’re giving us, Your Shillsterness
Well according to the Libs, President Bush has ran the country for the past 8 years and congress HAD nothing to do with anything.
Go into Afghanistan- Congress approved
Go into Iraq- Congress approved
Continue funding of Iraq- Congress approved
Make loans available to those who can’t afford it- Congress approved
Fannie and Freddie- Congress approved
Regulation/Deregulation- Congress approved
Dependence on foreign oil- Congress approved
4.50 a gallon gas- Congress shuts down
Financial crisis- Congress shuts down
Jed
Wake up!
The lobbyists spent MORE on Obama than on any other politician, in the last 3 years.
Obama got more mortgage industry money, in his 3 years in the Senate, than anyone but Chris Dodd, another Democrat.
Obama got more mortgage industry campaign money, in 3 years, 98 other Senators, many of whom had been in Congress for 8 years or longer.
Obama got more mortgage money, in his campaign, in 3 years, than most Congressman and Senators see in their entire careers!
Why?
Simple! Obama is part of the problem!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usvG-s_Ssb0
By the way, libs:
Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry both own HUGE chunks of AIG!
blackbeard
Strawman arguments.
We are in this mess due to horrible government actions, which encouraged the underwriting of bad loans.
Regardless of HOW this happened, we now have “fear itself” as a major problem.
If banks, insurance companies, and wall street firms do not trust each other, we are in big trouble. We need to get back our confidence.
Then? We need to investigate the Democrat Party, who used the mortage industry as their personal piggy bank!
Exactly how many trillions of dollars will sucked out of our wallets to pay for Wall Street socialism?
Enough! This crap makes the Chrysler bailout look like a friggin’ bar tab.
bush, wrinkles his forehead while saying, “Trust me.”
Hmmm. . . the de-facto “moderation” censorship of the Wordpress software is mystifying sometimes. I posted this article in its entirety:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-phillips/why-wall-street-socialism_b_96772.html
It’s about Wall Street Socialism.
Some money quotes:
“This has been going on for decades — a major reason why finance has grown and prospered so much compared with most other industries.”
“Big, fat and dumb financial institutions could count on being big, fat and bailed-out.”
“There was a time in the annals of American finance when this kind of practice would have been unacceptable — indeed, serious economists like Joseph Schumpeter recognized that “creative destruction” was part of a vital capitalism.”
“Will ordinary Americans pay much of the price? Almost certainly. Should they blame what happens on marketplace forces? No, because the historical operation of such forces has been stymied and suspended. Should they blame the political and financial proponents of Risk Socialism? Yes, because the longtime genius of American capitalism may be on its 21st century deathbed.”
Ironic isn’t it? The bush fix is socialism for Wall Street that might put capitalism on its deathbed.
More ironic. He still has supporters!
Worst. McCain plans to continue the bush economic policies.
Worst. McCain plans to continue the bush economic policies.
I suppose in an odd way we can be thankful that McCain chose someone so nakedly involved in this process and with such an uncontrollable mouth as Phil Gramm.
“Here’s what McCain has to say about the wonders of market-based health reform:
“Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”
So McCain, who now poses as the scourge of Wall Street, was praising financial deregulation like 10 seconds ago — and promising that if we marketize health care, it will perform as well as the financial industry!”
from Huffington Post
t if we marketize health care, it will perform as well as the financial industry!”
The financial industry, of course, have had their thumb on the scales for decades (call that the Philbama theory).
Marketized health care is death. Literally.
Pall,
“Jed
Wake up!
The lobbyists spent MORE on Obama than on any other politician, in the last 3 years.”
Well, of course they have! Lobbyists know a winner when they see one, and are trying to buy influence in the next administration. That doesn’t mean Obama’s selling it, merely accepting donations with no strings attached.
How’s that for the truth. Arrived in hong kong on a year. The New America Foundation’s was to catch the Clinton administration across such positions.