People are starting to realize wonder where all the money was pissed away to. The answer, of course, is that most of it was pissed away on affirmative action loans to members of protected minorities. Whose fault is this? Steve Sailer blames primarily Karl Rove and George Bush There is much truth in this, but I would primarily blame Basel. Under Basel, what matters to a financial institution is not whether its assets are safely invested, but whether they are …
Category: economics
Mission accomplished
Paychecks from private business shrank to their smallest share of personal income in U.S. history during the first quarter of this year At the same time, government-provided benefits — from Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps and other programs — rose to a record high during the first three months of 2010. But has everything goes to hell in a handbasket, it will all be blamed on free markets, despite what Brutally Honest calls “change some continue to believe inâ€. …
How to fix the financial crisis
Proposed reforms, both left and right, are unlikely to have any effect on the continuing massive misappropriation from the financial system. It is absurd that people are discussing obscure details of the credit swap market. To fix the financial crisis, we have to revoke, or at least denounce and denigrate, Marie Curie’s Nobel prize. When they gave a Nobel prize to Marie Curie for being female, that did not hurt anyone except more deserving potential Nobel prize winners. But handing …
Yale Harvard and Basel style Free Enterprise
Basel II is tens of thousands of pages of regulations, no one knows how vast it is, because not all the regulations can be found in any one place, but it could all be replaced by two simple rules: Politically correct victim groups shall always find it easy to borrow money, regardless of their ability or intention to pay it back, and politically well connected businesses shall always make money, regardless of whether they are competently run or not.
Official statistics smell of official truth
Mandel points out that there is something mighty funny about official US economic statistics.
China catching up
The NYT reports Liang Huoqiao, a 22-year-old plastics worker, joined a small group of men and women studying a 40-foot-wide list of companies seeking workers. “You can walk into any factory and get a job,†he said. … He expected his pay to double in the next five years and added that he already had set his priorities. “For sure, I want to buy a car,†he said. “Car first, then maybe marriage later.â€
Wishing for a chinese crash
Their beliefs about China are incoherent, internally inconsistent, and mutually contradictory, showing that they don’t really believe what they believe. I suspect that what they really believe is that basing a society on self interest is morally wrong, and therefore must surely be punished by the heavens.
Tough on wall street
To show how tough they are, congressmen summoned Goldman and Sach’s executives to Washington, and harshly ranted at them for selling their customers securities based on mortgages that they knew or should have known were $##%, while at the same time continuing to pour great gobs of taxpayer money all over Goldman and Sach
The crisis explained
Substantial parts of this article are pillaged wholesale from Ryan Barne’s excellent account of the crisis, and Mortgage Guarantee Insurance’s colorful account of the crisis. I steal from the best. And thanks to the commenters that pointed out numerous errors. In 2001, the Federal Reserve began cutting rates dramatically, dropping to 1% in 2003, in order to stimulate the economy. This produced a boom, and especially a housing boom, in 2002. A housing boom was a rational and appropriate response …
Basel II and the destruction of civilization as we know it.
Thus the decision as to what is a safe loan is moved to politics and the government bureaucracy, far far away from anyone who knows the borrower or has actually seen the assets.