The US budget proposes that by 2020, debt service on federal debt will be ten percent of GDP. This is politically impossible. The interest will be paid by borrowing more money.
Category: economics
Where the money went
The government has been shuffling the money around to obfuscate who stole it. It lends money, and then announces that there is no problem, the money has been paid back. But after much fiddling, the money has mostly come to rest, in that the government is now the proud owner of about one trillion dollars of mortgage backed securities guaranteed by Fannie, Freddie, and the FHA, plus some Fannie, Freddy, and FHA debt. The first graph in the above link …
Affirmative action and the mortgage crisis
Four hundred firemen died attempting to rescue people on 9/11. Not one “firefighter†died, for women do not fight fires. It is not in their physique, nor their psychological nature to do so. Obama and his wife are typical affirmative action blacks. Michelle’s Princeton thesis is a whine about racial prejudice and is full of spelling and grammatical errors.  Obama got a degree from Columbia without even showing up. Obama can read from a teleprompter very nicely – except when …
The cause of the crisis 5
The green room has a wonderful summary of the economic crisis in the form of a children’s book. They neglect, however, to mention George Bush’s role in making the CRA even worse than it already was.
Animal spirits
Everyone knew that things were going to collapse, but wanted to stay in till the last minute because there was money to be made, so it was not animal spirits, but people trying to rationally judge when to run to the exits.
Obama lashes out at the innocent to protect the guilty
Immediately after losing a senate seat to a Republican populist, Obama the next day proceeded to go populist. He, is, he tells us, going to punish those unregulated wall street fat cats who caused the crisis. He is going to tax the banks, and restrict proprietary trading by banks. But proprietary trading had little to do with the crisis. All the things that caused the crisis are still going: the continuing misbehavior of Fannie, Freddie, and the FHA, the continuing …
What the election of Scott Brown means
Notice Scott Brown’s old pick up truck. Partly, of course, it is simply a massive swing against the Democrats. The economy is collapsing, people blame the party in power. But it also means more important and more interesting things: Scott Brown was campaigning as the anti elitist candidate, brandishing a working class and underclass identity, such as his old truck and his conviction for shoplifting. The elite is unpopular, not just one party of the elite. This was a populist …
Google censors Google censorship
Recursive censorship: Typing climategate booker into bing four of the first five hits are about Google censoring Booker’s climategate article. The Booker Climategate Article – Scandal or Indexing Problem … Climategate: Googlegate? – Telegraph Blogs Of Climategate, Googlegate & When Stories Get Too Long Mimsy: Climategate crashes Google? Typing climategate booker into google, none the first four hits are about Google censoring Booker’s climategate article – the same hits are all there, one of them at rank five, and they …
What the Tea Party stands for
There is a risk that the Tea Party movement is sufficiently vague and unspecific to enable everyone to read into what they want, so that people with fundamentally irreconcilable views believe they’re part of the same movement, which is a good way to get people into power so that they can start scooping up some of the gravy, and a bad way to accomplish any political objective. The original Tea Party was a violent eruption against British Mercantilism. They threw …
Unemployment
Officially, unemployment has fallen to the curiously round number of ten percent. Are you feeling more prosperous? Yes, strange to report, zero hedge observes that the money paid to the unemployed has risen substantially, and risen a lot in the last two months. While there are officially nine and half million unemployed, there appear to be fourteen million receiving unemployment benefits. Funny thing that.