Archive for the ‘TARP’ Category
Is Paul Volcker Looking For a Job?
I know Ben Benanke has already been confirmed as fed chief again, but when I read Paul Volcker’s article in The New York Times, he really dances around the concept of “too big to fail”. He really doesn’t, in my estimation, make a good case for bailing out banks, or any other private entity. Just that “Aggressive action by governments and central banks — really unprecedented in both magnitude and scope — has been necessary to revive and maintain market functions.” He really doesn’t disagree with Obama much, and doesn’t really offer a solution other than “protection against the outliers”. While we should limit the possible effect hedge markets have on banking, I do not see the need to bail the banks out in the future. They will have learned nothing from this experience. May be banking and hedge funds need to be separate entities, and have rules about what can be invested in hedge funds along with how and who. The hedge funds inversely leveraged the debt to the point of it being toxic to everyone. It’s like turning a stick of dynamite into a 50 megaton bomb.
What is missing here is a solution that the banks should have come up with as opposed to having their hand out. It wasn’t forthcoming. Volcker either is pitching for a future seat as chairman of the fed when Bernanke get the bus backed over him, or he’s trying to stay on the inside with Obama. Nothing really changes in either case. It’s more of the Wesley Mouch big government largesse to banks at our expense and detriment. We do not exist because of banks, but the reverse, and the same can be said of the government. It’s about time corporations and government recognize the proper relationship and realize they serve us, not themselves. We also have to take responsibility for voting in self-absorbed, self-agrandizing, and selfish politicians that pass acts like the CRA, and go after corporations because they will not operate outside of good business practices. Lest’s be clear here: The government enable people at large to borrow money they knew they could not pay back, and live beyond their means for a short while. The banks followed suit because of fear of being litigated against or in violation or the CRA. On top of this we had government lending institutions like freddie and fannie leading the way with bad lending practices, and then when the shit hit the fan, the bad loans were securitized into instruments the hedge funds tried to bury, there you have the stick of dynamite transmogrified into tsar bomba. To add to it, politicians like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd to mention only two, benefited with special preferential loans fro lending institutions. The only people left out in the cold to clean up afterwards were the american people not caught up in the mortgage bubble mania.
We don’t don’t need Paul Volcker or Ben Bernanke. We certainly don’t need Alan Greenspan. If Milton Friedman was alive, I’d say give him a shot, but he’s dead. If it were up to me, I’d have a sit down with Dr. Thomas Sowell and ask him what he thought. Too bad it isn’t up to me, because now we’ll have the FDR II show for the next 3 years. We remember how that went.
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What’s Next?
What’s next? What will Obama do since according to John Batchelor, he’s lost the political narrative? While John believes this is about who controls the fairy tale, I like to deal in reality. I do agree that Obama has lost the information battle at this point as people have responded the opposite of what he expected. How did this happen?
Chuck Grassley Is At It Again
Chuck Grassley, from now on known as The Chuckster, is at it again. He wants the bankers at AIG to commit seppuku, and at the very least bow deeply in apology before doing so. Where have we heard that before? Of course The Chuckster must be deeply honored for winning the IotW award, and is now shooting for the IotY award or at least a nomination. Chuck, I don’t know what planet you come from. I really don’t. You monkeys in congress invented this problem, you made it worse by passing TARP, you feckless pezzo di merda, and now you want the bankers to either kill themselves or apologize like a japanese executive would? You are out of touch. May be you would like to lead by example? The only people on the good ship lollipop that are more delusional than you are Chris Dodd and Barny Frank. I should throw in the vampiress Bella Pelosi. I guess it could be worse. We could have two senator Harkins here in Iowa, or may be Governor Mike Gronstal has designs on your job, but bud, you need to go. You still haven’t made a case for TARP, or ARRA, and you certainly haven’t acquitted yourself well, Mr. Earmark. Being a senator requires more than bringing home the bacon at any cost.
Stimulus?
Barack Hussein Obama has his bowels in an uproar over the fact that the republicans (and the American People) are holding back their support for this bill. Each party involved has their own priorities in this fiasco, so lets take a little closer look at them.
THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY: HERE COMES SOCIALISM
Published on TheHill.com on January 20, 2009
2009-2010 will rank with 1913-14, 1933-36, 1964-65 and 1981-82 as years that will permanently change our government, politics and lives. Just as the stars were aligned for Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson and Reagan, they are aligned for Obama. Simply put, we enter his administration as free-enterprise, market-dominated, laissez-faire America. We will shortly become like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, or Sweden — a socialist democracy in which the government dominates the economy, determines private-sector priorities and offers a vastly expanded range of services to many more people at much higher taxes.
Obama will accomplish his agenda of “reform” under the rubric of “recovery.” Using the electoral mandate bestowed on a Democratic Congress by restless voters and the economic power given his administration by terrified Americans, he will change our country fundamentally in the name of lifting the depression. His stimulus packages won’t do much to shorten the downturn — although they will make it less painful — but they will do a great deal to change our nation.
In implementing his agenda, Barack Obama will emulate the example of Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Not the liberal mythology of the New Deal, but the actuality of what it accomplished.) When FDR took office, he was enormously successful in averting a total collapse of the banking system and the economy. But his New Deal measures only succeeded in lowering the unemployment rate from 23 percent in 1933, when he took office, to 13 percent in the summer of 1937. It never went lower. And his policies of over-regulation generated such business uncertainty that they triggered a second-term recession. Unemployment in 1938 rose to 17 percent and, in 1940, on the verge of the war-driven recovery, stood at 15 percent. (These data and the real story of Hoover’s and Roosevelt’s missteps, uncolored by ideology, are available in The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes, copyright 2007.)
But in the name of a largely unsuccessful effort to end the Depression, Roosevelt passed crucial and permanent reforms that have dominated our lives ever since, including Social Security, the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, unionization under the Wagner Act, the federal minimum wage and a host of other fundamental changes.
Obama’s record will be similar, although less wise and more destructive. He will begin by passing every program for which liberals have lusted for decades, from alternative-energy sources to school renovations, infrastructure repairs and technology enhancements. These are all good programs, but they normally would be stretched out for years. But freed of any constraint on the deficit — indeed, empowered by a mandate to raise it as high as possible — Obama will do them all rather quickly.
But it is not his spending that will transform our political system, it is his tax and welfare policies. In the name of short-term stimulus, he will give every American family (who makes less than $200,000) a welfare check of $1,000 euphemistically called a refundable tax credit. And he will so sharply cut taxes on the middle class and the poor that the number of Americans who pay no federal income tax will rise from the current one-third of all households to more than half. In the process, he will create a permanent electoral majority that does not pay taxes, but counts on ever-expanding welfare checks from the government. The dependency on the dole, formerly limited in pre-Clinton days to 14 million women and children on Aid to Families with Dependent Children, will now grow to a clear majority of the American population.
Will he raise taxes? Why should he? With a congressional mandate to run the deficit up as high as need be, there is no reason to raise taxes now and risk aggravating the depression. Instead, Obama will follow the opposite of the Reagan strategy. Reagan cut taxes and increased the deficit so that liberals could not increase spending. Obama will raise spending and increase the deficit so that conservatives cannot cut taxes. And, when the economy is restored, he will raise taxes with impunity, since the only people who will have to pay them would be rich Republicans.
In the name of stabilizing the banking system, Obama will nationalize it. Using Troubled Asset Relief Program funds to write generous checks to needy financial institutions, his administration will demand preferred stock in exchange. Preferred stock gets dividends before common stockholders do. With the massive debt these companies will owe to the government, they will only be able to afford dividends for preferred stockholders — the government, not private investors. So who will buy common stock? And the government will demand that its bills be paid before any profits that might materialize are reinvested in the financial institution, so how will the value of the stocks ever grow? Devoid of private investors, these institutions will fall ever more under government control.
Obama will begin the process by limiting executive compensation. Then he will urge restructuring and lowering of home mortgages in danger of default (as the feds have already done with Citibank).
Then will come guidance on the loans to make and government instructions on the types of enterprises to favor. God grant that some Blagojevich type is not in charge of the program, using his power to line his pockets. The United States will find itself with an economic system comparable to that of Japan, where the all-powerful bureaucracy at MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) manages the economy, often making mistakes like giving mainframe computers priority over the development of laptops.
But it is the healthcare system that will experience the most dramatic and traumatic of changes. The current debate between erecting a Medicare-like governmental single payer or channeling coverage through private insurance misses the essential point. Without a lot more doctors, nurses, clinics, equipment and hospital beds, health resources will be strained to the breaking point. The people and equipment that now serve 250 million Americans and largely neglect all but the emergency needs of the other 50 million will now have to serve everyone. And, as government imposes ever more Draconian price controls and income limits on doctors, the supply of practitioners and equipment will decline as the demand escalates. Price increases will be out of the question, so the government will impose healthcare rationing, denying the older and sicker among us the care they need and even barring them from paying for it themselves. (Rationing based on income and price will be seen as immoral.)
And Obama will move to change permanently the partisan balance in America. He will move quickly to legalize all those who have been in America for five years, albeit illegally, and to smooth their paths to citizenship and voting. He will weaken border controls in an attempt to hike the Latino vote as high as he can in order to make red states like Texas into blue states like California. By the time he is finished, Latinos and African-Americans will cast a combined 30 percent of the vote. If they go by top-heavy margins for the Democrats, as they did in 2008, it will assure Democratic domination (until they move up the economic ladder and become good Republicans).
And he will enact the check-off card system for determining labor union representation, repealing the secret ballot in union elections. The result will be to raise the proportion of the labor force in unions up to the high teens from the current level of about 12 percent.
Finally, he will use the expansive powers of the Federal Communications Commission to impose “local” control and ownership of radio stations and to impose the “fairness doctrine” on talk radio. The effect will be to drive talk radio to the Internet, fundamentally change its economics, and retard its growth for years hence.
But none of these changes will cure the depression. It will end when the private sector works through the high debt levels that triggered the collapse in the first place. And, then, the large stimulus package deficits will likely lead to rapid inflation, probably necessitating a second recession to cure it.
So Obama’s name will be mud by 2012 and probably by 2010 as well. And the Republican Party will make big gains and regain much of its lost power.
***COPYRIGHT EILEEN MCGANN AND DICK MORRIS 2009. REPRINTS WITH PERMISSION ONLY***
