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, …
Tag: financial crisis
President McCain would have been worse.
McCain would have implemented the policies of financial ruin, national socialism, economic destruction, defeat and humiliation from the“centerâ€, and these policies would have been associated with Sarah Palin instead Bill Ayers and Reverend Wright.
Inflation looms
The bond market does not tell us what the smart money people think inflation will be. It tells us what those among the smart money people who do not expect very high levels of inflation think inflation will be.
In addition to an on budget deficit of ten percent or so, there is also a much larger off budget deficit, in the form of an ever growing pile of government guarantees, which there is no will to restrain. Put the two deficits together, crisis looms.
Trees do not grow to the sky. That which cannot continue, must stop
Creating the next crisis:
In a free market, financiers who take stupid risks lose money, and cease to be financiers. The core of the Obama Bush interventions is to ensure that financiers who take stupid risks continue in business and continue in charge of other people’s money. In the Washington Post, Obama’s chief financial advisers explain their program: In theory, securitization should serve to reduce credit risk by spreading it more widely. But by …
Trillion missing, top accountant dead
David Kellerman, the acting Chief Financial Officer and Senior VP at Freddie Mac, was found dead early this morning from at his home in Virginia. It is described as an apparent suicide. The press is rightly comparing this with the very similar “suicide†of Enron’s top accountant. When large sums of money disappear, the person who knows most about where the money went often, by an interesting coincidence, winds up …
Worshippers of the Obamessiah start to wake up
The New York Times almost gets it right: Obama’s Ersatz Capitalism What the Obama administration is doing is far worse than nationalization: it is ersatz capitalism, the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a “partnership†in which one partner robs the other. Close but no banana. It is crony capitalism, which at its more socialist extreme is fascism, the corporate state, where business and the citizen …
Smashing capitalism
President Barack Hussein Obama tells us: Your warranty will be safe. In fact, it will be safer than it has ever been. Because starting today, the United States will stand behind your warranty. This reads like something out of “Atlas Shruggedâ€. I predict fifty percent inflation or so over the next three or four years – and that is if we eventually turn back from this course, or at least …
Geithner’s plan explained
President Barack Hussein Obama tells us: Your warranty will be safe. In fact, it will be safer than it has ever been. Because starting today, the United States will stand behind your warranty. This reads like something out of “Atlas Shruggedâ€. I predict disturbing inflation or so over the next three or four years – and that is if we eventually turn back from this course, or at least stop …
The crisis explained
I have been seeing a lot of references to “a speculative bubble†Nope. They were not speculating. The crisis consisted of people, mostly members of protected minorities with nothing to lose, buying houses they could not afford with borrowed money in the expectation that they would go up, and if they went down, it was the bank’s problem. So the people who bought houses were taking no risk, since mostly …
The crisis has barely begun
“Naked capitalism†explains what has happened, and observes that the Bush-Obama policies caused it, are causing it, and are likely to cause a lot more of it. Government guarantees will be abused – and the broader the guarantees, and more chaotic the situation the more they will be abused. The solution is that existing guarantees must be reduced, and existing government initiatives curtailed or at least allowed to expire.  Extensive …