Everyone on the Republican side is sucking up to the anti capitalist left – including Sarah Palin and Christine O’Donnel. None have the will to reverse the policies that are ruining the economy, making the middle class poor and insecure. So, when elected, will get the blame for the consequences of these policies. Since the supposedly hard core capitalism of the Republicans will not work, obviously the solution must be …
Category: economics
Elections do not matter.
The most extreme of the “right wing” candidates are proposing measures far too feeble to make a difference. Consider for example, the mortgage scandal. Where is the candidate that suggests that to fix our financial system, the bums (the entire financial sector of wall street and the regulators to which they are connected by a revolving door) need to be fired for incompetence and imprisoned for fraud? A lot of …
The whitewash proceeds
One of the bigger criminals in the mortgage scam was Former Countrywide CEO Mozilo. The SEC has made a symbolic settlement with him and a couple of his accomplices for seventy two million dollars, not a dime of which he has to pay personally, and which would be peanuts even if he had to pay it personally. As a part of the agreement, all potentially embarrassing details associated with his …
The enormous mortgage-bond scandal
Felix Salmon has found an interesting document in the financial crisis inquiry hearings. It seems the banks not only knew that the loans they were selling to investors generally failed to meet underwriting standards, they were so careless as to have documents lying around saying so in plain English. Seems like they were a bank of morons. When I was involved in criminal conspiracies, none of us would write in …
Foreclosure fraud chaos
Pines and Associates reports that: Most [mortgage] loans are securitized and most investors have filed class action suits. He finds those suits and joins them on behalf of clients as a “special interest†in the suit. This is Armageddon for the financial system. The underlying problem is that finance runs on trust, and these days they are all crooks, so the entire financial system has seized up. Any solution to …
Conspiracy
If you watch the reality show “survivorâ€, you will have noticed that in any power struggle, the winners usually have invisible connections – there is a group that conceals from outsiders that it is a group. Conspiracy tends to be a substantial part of any winning strategy. Conspiracies are therefore as common as cockroaches and crabgrass. Conspiracy theory has a deserved bad name because it tends to be invoked to …
The foreclosure scandal
It looks as if houses are being foreclosed to the benefit of those who merely hold the junior tranches and thus have no right to benefit by the foreclosure, or perhaps do not hold anything at all – it is difficult to tell, perhaps impossible to tell. It is also unclear how much money the people being foreclosed upon actually owe – again, it is difficult to tell, perhaps impossible to tell. When the scammers sold mortgages on to the next guy in line, they tended to pad up the mortgage, tended to exaggerate the amount of debt the borrower had promised to pay.
Falkenblog locates the guilty
Falkenblog has an interesting quote from Harvard, wherein in 2003, back before the financial crisis, Angello Mozilla gives politically correct bullshit justifying every bad thing the banks did to cause the financial crisis on the basis of race and affirmative action. That means there is currently a homeownership gap of over 25 points when comparing white households with African Americans and Hispanics. My friends, that gap is obviously far too …
Financial collapse still under way
The Market Ticker ® complains that the banks and the regulators are flagrantly and massively violating laws that are necessary for borrowing and lending to work – violating every step that is necessary for the trust to work along the chain, with the result that our entire financial system is massively disfunctional, and continues to leak huge amounts of money. He gives lots of interesting details of a multitude of …
The explosive expansion of the state
Government regulatory intervention in the economy is exploding, creating a multitude of invisible taxes, off budget expenditures, and opportunities for corrupt profits by semi private businesses, such Al Gore becoming a billionaire from carbon credits.