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POPSFannie & Freddie NOT included in Obama's Financial Regulations In analyzing the mortgage crisis, economist Walter E. Williams has written: “Starting with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, that was given more teeth during the Clinton administration, Congress started intimidating banks and other financial institutions into making loans, so-called sub-prime loans, to high-risk homebuyers and businesses. “The carrot offered was that these high-risk loans would be purchased by the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Anyone with an ounce of brains would have known that this was a prescription for disaster but there was a congressional chorus of denial,” he added. “The financial collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is not a failure of the free market because lending institutions in a free market would not have taken on the high-risk loans,” said Williams. “They were forced to by the heavy hand of government.”
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POPSIs the Economy Recovering? The Curious Case of 1920 vs. 1929
The basic questions we need to ask here are: 1. Why do economies recover? 2. Are we recovering? Q. Why do economies recover? A. They recover because bad investments made during the bubble are liquidated, valuable capital is no longer being wasted on them, new capital is formed from savings, and profitable enterprises attract new capital to expand. Low real interest rates caused by increased savings encourage borrowing, manufacturers use the capital to make new machines, producers of consumer goods buy them, cash goes through the system, consumers see things are getting better, more consumer goods are produced, and consumers buy them. It has to happen this way or the recovery will fail. The difficult part of a recovery is ugly. Bankrupt firms need to fail so that valuable capital resources are not wasted on their continuing activities. This means that unemployment rises (10.2% now) and business bankruptcies are high. Trillions of dollars of asset values are wiped out.
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POPSU.S.Troop Funds $2.6 Billion Taken From Guns and Ammunition For "Pet Projects" Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, called the transfer of funds from Pentagon operations and maintenance "a disgrace." "The Senate is putting favorable headlines back home above our men and women fighting on the front lines," he said in a statement. RELATED STORIES: • Michigan town lobbies for Gitmo transfers • Top Treasury posts stay empty in financial crisis • VA Dept. hospitals botched treatments Mr. Wheeler, who conducted the study, compared the Obama administration's requests for funds with the $636 billion spending bill that the Senate passed. He discovered that senators added $2.6 billion in pet projects while spending $4 billion less than the administration requested for fiscal 2010, which began Oct. 1. Mr. Wheeler said that senators took most of the cash for the projects from the "operations and maintenance" or O&M accounts. "These are the accounts that pay for troop training, repairs, spares and supplies for vehicles, weapons, ships and planes,
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POPS Podesta Says Value-Added Tax ‘More Plausible’ as Deficits Grow a Washington-based public policy group, is convening a meeting of economic policy experts Sept. 30 to discuss the long- term fiscal deficit. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in August that the budget deficit will be 11.2 percent of gross domestic product, the highest since World War II. Clinton, facing a deficit of 4.2 percent of GDP, pushed Congress to raise taxes on the wealthy to help trim the shortfall. “He passed it without a single Republican vote,” Podesta said. “It led to the longest period of growth in the United States history.” Ending Tax Cuts Podesta said Obama will begin by ending the upper-income tax cuts enacted under his predecessor, President George W. Bush. “Then you have to look at whether that gets you far enough of the way,” he said. On health care, Podesta expressed optimism that Congress will pass a health-care bill in the next couple of months even though so far none of the measures has won Republican support and Democrats . .
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POPS46 Of 50 States Could File Bankruptcy "If the Fed doesn’t bailout the States when their cash dries up and the banks don’t loan them money, then our States will be left in financial ruin. This would be a tragic and unprecedented event never experienced in the United States. We are on the brink of something far worse than the Great Depression. "
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POPSNew facts and new troubles for Mexico
The estimated million plus Mexicans returning to Mexico plus the many more who choose to stay home, when earlier they would have gone to the other side, means more pressure on the nation's development. In this situation the country's GDP shrunk nine percent in the first quarter and a bit over ten percent in the second one. Whatever fiscal and economic reforms the government has planned are still being planned. The president insists on using his power to fight a useless losing drug war and effectively sabotaged the economy by locking the nation down for a month so that we wouldn't get the flu. The country cannot provide opportunities to vast swaths of the population. Now there is another swath to add to the others: returning illegal immigrants and others. Vast numbers of young unemployed kids whose skills are mainly in how to break the law and profit by it somehow are swelling the populace of Mexico's provincial backwaters (where most illegal immigrants come from) quite outside the a
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POPS “We The People” Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is the “Special Advisor for Health Policy” for your administration. Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond individual human needs and consider “social justice.” Within his twisted mindset, it’s perfectly humane to suggest that doctors center their focus on hard, cold calculations that place more value on bureaucratically-defined budgets than people. The money could be better spent elsewhere, they are told. " View YouTube Presumptuously, Dr. Emanuel believes that communitarianism is above reproach. It should guide decisions on who gets care. Such detached opinions lead him to say that medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens. For example, he would not provide health services to patients with dementia and other serious mental challenges. Excerpts from The American Thinker: “Manufactured Healthcare Crisis,” by Jim Simpson "
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POPSRoubini Sees Increasing Risk of Double-Dip Recession: Update1 “There are risks associated with exit strategies from the massive monetary and fiscal easing,” Roubini wrote. “Policy makers are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.” Government and central bank officials may undermine the recovery and tip their economies back into “stagdeflation” if they raise taxes, cut spending and mop up excess liquidity in their systems to reduce fiscal deficits, Roubini says. He defines “stagdeflation” as recession and deflation. Market Vigilantes Those who maintain large budget deficits will be punished by bond market vigilantes, as inflationary expectations and yields on long-term government bonds rise and borrowing costs climb sharply, he wrote. That will in turn lead to stagflation, Roubini said. European Central Bank officials led by President Jean- Claude Trichet are suggesting they won’t rush to reverse their emergency stimulus amid mounting evidence of an economic recovery. The ECB has cut its benchmark interest rate
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POPSGrim Milestone... US Deficit Passes $1,000,000,000,000 For First Time Ever The country's soaring deficits are making Chinese and other foreign buyers of U.S. debt nervous, which could make them reluctant lenders down the road. It could force the Treasury Department to pay higher interest rates to make U.S. debt attractive longer-term. "These are mind boggling numbers," said Sung Won Sohn, an economist at the Smith School of Business at California State University. "Our foreign investors from China and elsewhere are starting to have concerns about not only the value of the dollar but how safe their investments will be in the long run." Fox News How about that Stimulus Bill? Obama will quadruple the US budget deficit his first year in office. And, he wants to spend trillions more for his Obamacare program. Related... Rep. Mike Pence said today that the Stimulus Bill is not working. Yeah, we know. Posted by Gateway Pundit
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POPSMedical bills cause most bankruptcies More: The study data, published online Thursday in The American Journal of Medicine, likely understate the full scope of the problem because the data were collected before the current economic crisis. In 2007, medical problems contributed to 62.1 percent of all bankruptcies. Between 2001 and 2007, the proportion of all bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by about 50 percent. “The U.S. health care financing system is broken, and not only for the poor and uninsured,” the study authors wrote. “Middle-class families frequently collapse under the strain of a health care system that treats physical wounds, but often inflicts fiscal ones.” The data on medical bankruptcy, compiled by researchers at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University, is based on a survey of 2,314 randomly selected bankruptcy filers during early 2007.
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POPS What Are They Buying? by Thomas Sowell Crises have long been seen as great opportunities to expand the federal government's power while the people are too scared to object and before any opposition can get organized. That is why there is such haste to do things that will take effect slowly. What are the Beltway politicians buying with all the hundreds of billions of dollars they are spending? They are buying what politicians are most interested in-- power. This administration and Congress are now in a position to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression of the 1930s-- use a crisis of the times to create new institutions that will last for generations. To this day, we are still subsidizing millionaires in agriculture because farmers were having a tough time in the 1930s. We have the Federal National Mortgage Association ("Fannie Mae") taking reckless chances in the housing market that have blown up in our faces today, because FDR decided to create a new federal housing agency in 1938.
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POPSTeabag or not teabag? cont'd, Even conservative economists such as Martin Feldstein, Ronald Reagan's chief economic adviser, agree government spending is necessary right now. But why let facts get in the way of a great tea party? Fortunately, the majority of the American people, just like the majority of voters last November, get it. In a recent New York Times/CBS News poll 63 percent of Americans think President Obama would be more likely to make the right decisions on the economy as opposed to 20 percent who favor the Republicans in Congress. Most Americans have learned the lessons of the Republicans' horrendous fiscal mismanagement. Turning to old Republican ideas on the economy is like seeking investment advice from Bernie Madoff. It doesn't stop there. A brand new Gallup Poll finds 48 percent of Americans think the taxes they pay are 'about right' while 46 percent think they're too high. The 48 percent is the one of the highest scores in more than 50
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POPSGov. Hand-outs Bankrupting Arizona Another example of what happens when too many people look to government for give me's. They come to the state house with the hands out and not with their sleeves rolled up. Instead of offering to work to produce wealth they are asking that it be redistributed. This sounds much like GM to me. Workers come to management and say give me. Management gives in and gives until they can not give anymore. With the government passing laws that does not promote fiscal responsibility it only compounds the problem. But sooner or later it comes time to pay the piper. Watch out folks this same crisis is spreading across this land at an alarming rate. There is a wild fire burning out of control. A fire extinguisher is not going to stop this inferno.
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POPSBig PR push from the Pentagon is a BIG LIE! Don't be fooled by Gates gentle demeanor. While this cutting of some foolish programs might be a step in the right direction, the Pentagon is not going to give up their toys of destruction easily. This is a massive PR attempt to make us believe that the Democrat asshats are peace lovers. ...it just ain't true.
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POPSExperts: Financial crisis threatens US security House panel members also were concerned about how the government is devoting money to handle the crisis. President Barack Obama has proposed a 4 percent increase in defense spending to $534 billion during the next fiscal year. But with a $787 billion stimulus package, and billions being poured into propping up banks and other companies, many defense analysts believe that Pentagon budgets, one of the largest shares of government spending, are likely targets for cuts. That could include big programs like the Army's plans to modernize its forces, led by Boeing Co., and programs by Lockheed Martin Corp. to build new advanced fighter jets. Dov Zakheim, a Defense Department comptroller during the most recent Bush administration, said cuts in defense spending could create the perception of American weakness.
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POPSLack of ideas... The republican party has gotten "fiscally responsible" all of sudden. Where were they when THEY helped to create this mess?
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POPS Presidential Double-Talk The gap between Obama rhetoric and Obama reality is not confined to the budget. Nor are the consequences. Since the start of 2009, the stock market has declined 23.68 percent (through March 6), a paper loss of $2.6 trillion, says Wilshire Associates. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page attributes all the decline to Obama's policies. That's unfair; the economy's continuing deterioration explains much of the fall. Still, Obama isn't blameless. Obama says he's focused singlemindedly on reviving the economy, but he's also using the crisis as a vehicle to advance an ambitious long-term agenda to reengineer the U.S. economy. The two sometimes collide. Many of these extended projects (high-speed rail, computerized medical records) can't be accomplished quickly. When Congress debates Obama's sweeping health-care and energy proposals, industries, regions and governmental philosophies will clash. Will this improve confidence? Reduce uncertainty? by Robert J. Samuelson
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POPSDoes this mean the troops cpme home? I certainly hope they do. I believe this economic crisis is caused by the war. Why should us tax payers pay to kill innocent women and children plus think of all the local men and women who have lost loved ones over Bushes "warlord" needs. Bring em home Obama!
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POPSHarry Reid Predicts the Future with Uncanny Accuracy I hate to admit it, but Democrats really are better for the economy! Just ask them. Twenty-seven of the Dow's 30 stocks ended in the red. The exceptions were Citi, which rose 9.7% to $2.14 a share, and Bank of America, another target of frequent nationalization speculation that managed a 3.2% gain to end at $3.91. General Motors shares ended flat. ...The S&P 500 dropped 26.72 points, or 3.5%, to 743.33, its lowest close since April 11, 1997. All of its sectors swooned, paced by a 6.1% decline in its basic-materials sector. The energy sector fell 4.7% and the technology sector dropped 4.6%. The financials, which were the best-performing market through much of the session, ended trading down 3.5%. They'll be happy to explain it to you. New Crisis Lows for Dow, S&P 500 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123538987022847373.html Reid: "The Iraq War is lost." YouTube video (1:10) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYZEGot-xU4 Good, lets cancel the porka-palooza Har
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POPSBarack Obama's High-Risk Financial Agenda for the US After last October's $700billion rescue package for Wall Street, and Mr Obama's $787billion economic stimulus package that he signed into law last week, many predicted that the President would be forced to shelve much of his domestic agenda. Analysts said that it would be too costly at a time when the national deficit is projected to reach $1.5 trillion this year. At the same time, in a White House “fiscal responsibility summit” tomorrow, he will lay out plans to cut back the deficit to $533 billion by 2013. That prediction comes despite the hundreds of billions of dollars already borrowed to stimulate the economy, stabilise the banks, tackle the home repossession crisis and rescue the car industry from collapse. The scale and ambition of the overall agenda is so enormous that some economists said yesterday that it was simply unrealistic, . . . Global markets have thus far reacted with significant scepticism to Mr Obama's plans to revive the US economy, . . .
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POPSObama to Unveil an Ambitious Budget Plan I wonder if this will do anything to quell the voices on the right who spent 8 years pretending that deficits don't matter and have suddenly remembered that the GOP used to pretend to be fiscally responsible? Naaaah...
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POPSOh, the Ironies Well, well, well. Look who sounds like the socialists now. The Republicans. The irony notwithstanding, they might be correct.
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POPSKrugman: GOP Econ. Rhetoric 'Has Bordered on the Deranged'
Not that Obama gets off the hook here. "The Congressional Budget Office, not usually given to hyperbole, predicts that over the next three years there will be a $2.9 trillion gap between what the economy could produce and what it will actually produce," Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugamn writes. "And $800 billion, while it sounds like a lot of money, isn’t nearly enough to bridge that chasm." The stimulus as it stands now, writes Krugman, will only "kick the can down the road." "So far the Obama administration’s response to the economic crisis is all too reminiscent of Japan in the 1990s: a fiscal expansion large enough to avert the worst, but not enough to kick-start recovery; support for the banking system, but a reluctance to force banks to face up to their losses," he tells us. "It’s early days yet, but we’re falling behind the curve." Obama's going to have to go back to the well and we can probably count on Republicans to be just as "deranged" the next time.
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