Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful

  I am going to say little here and let the most successful stock investor in American History say it for me.  This is an Op-Ed in today’s New York Times by Warren E. Buffett one of the two richest Americans.  He made his fortune by investing in the stock market.  He comes to the conclusion to buy American stocks now after many years of not buying any American stocks.  I really recognize the truth in his statement replicated as this posts title.  I’ll leave this post up as long that the New York Times does not object to my printing it in its entirety.  I’ll provide the link HERE 

      CAVEATS:  This bullish scenario may be well tempered by the unknow tax horizon.  The value of equities are based on investors best “after tax model” calculations.  Even those securities held by tax deferred accounts such as Pensions, IRA’s and 401-K’s are subject to this ultimate valuation model since the wall street traders trade even these stocks based on this valuation model.  Many extremely qualified market analysts already feel the anticipated increase in the cost of investment (increase in tax on Dividends and Capital Gains) and related impact on capital formation is taking its toll on the stock market.  Also, Buffett is a buy and hold (long-term) kind of guy and to him long-term can be an exceptionally long-term, but his view cannot be overestimated.  caveat emptor

Buy American. I Am.

By

WARREN E. BUFFETT, Omaha

     THE financial world is a mess, both in the United States and abroad. Its problems, moreover, have been leaking into the general economy, and the leaks are now turning into a gusher. In the near term, unemployment will rise, business activity will falter and headlines will continue to be scary.

     So … I’ve been buying American stocks. This is my personal account I’m talking about, in which I previously owned nothing but United States government bonds. (This description leaves aside my Berkshire Hathaway holdings, which are all committed to philanthropy.) If prices keep looking attractive, my non-Berkshire net worth will soon be 100 percent in United States equities.     Why?

     A simple rule dictates my buying: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. And most certainly, fear is now widespread, gripping even seasoned investors. To be sure, investors are right to be wary of highly leveraged entities or businesses in weak competitive positions. But fears regarding the long-term prosperity of the nation’s many sound companies make no sense. These businesses will indeed suffer earnings hiccups, as they always have. But most major companies will be setting new profit records 5, 10 and 20 years from now.

     Let me be clear on one point: I can’t predict the short-term movements of the stock market. I haven’t the faintest idea as to whether stocks will be higher or lower a month — or a year — from now. What is likely, however, is that the market will move higher, perhaps substantially so, well before either sentiment or the economy turns up. So if you wait for the robins, spring will be over.

     A little history here: During the Depression, the Dow hit its low, 41, on July 8, 1932. Economic conditions, though, kept deteriorating until Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933. By that time, the market had already advanced 30 percent. Or think back to the early days of World War II, when things were going badly for the United States in Europe and the Pacific. The market hit bottom in April 1942, well before Allied fortunes turned. Again, in the early 1980s, the time to buy stocks was when inflation raged and the economy was in the tank. In short, bad news is an investor’s best friend. It lets you buy a slice of America’s future at a marked-down price.

     Over the long term, the stock market news will be good. In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.

     You might think it would have been impossible for an investor to lose money during a century marked by such an extraordinary gain. But some investors did. The hapless ones bought stocks only when they felt comfort in doing so and then proceeded to sell when the headlines made them queasy.

     Today people who hold cash equivalents feel comfortable. They shouldn’t. They have opted for a terrible long-term asset, one that pays virtually nothing and is certain to depreciate in value. Indeed, the policies that government will follow in its efforts to alleviate the current crisis will probably prove inflationary and therefore accelerate declines in the real value of cash accounts.

     Equities will almost certainly outperform cash over the next decade, probably by a substantial degree. Those investors who cling now to cash are betting they can efficiently time their move away from it later. In waiting for the comfort of good news, they are ignoring Wayne Gretzky’s advice: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.”

     I don’t like to opine on the stock market, and again I emphasize that I have no idea what the market will do in the short term. Nevertheless, I’ll follow the lead of a restaurant that opened in an empty bank building and then advertised: “Put your mouth where your money was.” Today my money and my mouth both say equities. Warren E. Buffett is the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, a diversified holding company.

October 17, 2008 | Filed Under Economics | 1 Comment 

Your Daughters in Combat

     I remember when the “Equal Rights Amendment” was first out in the early 1980’s and Alan Alda was running around promoting it by reading its very simple language implying that nothing is wrong with this benign statement.  It basically came down to this one sentence section:

Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

     This was a time in history just after the discontinuation of the military draft by the United States, which was led by the anti-war (Vietnam) movement. 

     They felt that minorities were unfairly affected by the draft system since fewer of them went to college and enjoyed a college deferment and fewer yet of them had the political influence that the left claimed white America enjoyed to avoid conscription. (although it didn’t seem to help me much)  Anyway it was a political football.

     This was in the political soup soon after the Bakke decision by the Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) which bared “quota” systems in college admissions, referred to as “reverse discrimination.”  The case in question was related to the University of California’s policy of accepting Black (the term they used then) students into Medical School with a GPA of less than 2.5 while not accepting white students with averages that were often much higher than the 2.5.

     I realized from the Bakke case that as soon as the “Equal Rights Amendment” passed that the next time we had a shooting war of sufficient size that the “volunteer” don’t ask don’t tell army wouldn’t be adequate and that it would take one lower court level case of one draft resistor to force the conscription of women.  Of course idiots like Alan Alda went around wringing their hands sighing that such concern was ridiculous since there wasn’t a draft for men even, much less women.  What an idiot.  He didn’t have the acumen to project what every level headed person could figure out which was that the next “big one” would expose women to the draft with this amendment.  It will only take that one case to strike down any gender preferences and such strike down would carry equal weight as to job type, meaning combat.

     Do you want you daughters in Combat?  If so you want to vote for Barack Obama.  Obama has come out in favor, skipping the dicey game of the Court System (if there were an equal rights amendment) moving directly to his recommendation that the law be changed to require women to sign up for the stand-by draft like all males must do today upon turning the age 18.  Check out this news article from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette: 

Candidates differ on female draft

     Monday, October 13, 2008By Jerome L. Sherman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.     Even as the U.S. confronts two long wars, neither Sen. John McCain nor Sen. Barack Obama believes the country should take the politically perilous step of reviving the military draft.     But the two presidential candidates disagree on a key foundation of any future draft: Mr. Obama supports a requirement for both men and women to register with the Selective Service, while Mr. McCain doesn’t think women should have to register.

     Also, Mr. Obama would consider officially opening combat positions to women. Mr. McCain would not.

     “Women are already serving in combat [in Iraq and Afghanistan] and the current policy should be updated to reflect realities on the ground,” said Wendy Morigi, Mr. Obama’s national security spokeswoman. “Barack Obama would consult with military commanders to review the constraints that remain.”

     According to his campaign, Mr. McCain supports the current Department of Defense restrictions on women in combat units, including armor, field artillery and special forces.

     In 1980, President Jimmy Carter revived the Selective Service system, which compiles a list of nearly all men in the U.S. between 18 and 25 in case a crisis forces the government to undertake a massive expansion of the military.

     Both Congress and the Supreme Court have exempted women from registration because of the combat rules.

     For years, that position has rankled some women’s rights groups and men who face penalties for not registering — including loss of employment with the federal government — at a time when female soldiers regularly find themselves in dangerous situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, both conflicts without defined battlefields.

     Mr. McCain, a decorated former Navy pilot who spent five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, speaks often of how his military service has helped prepare him for the role of commander in chief and how his time as a captive in Hanoi reinforced his love of country.

     Yet he doesn’t want to see a return to mandatory service, for men or women, according to his presidential campaign.     “Sen. McCain strongly believes that an all-volunteer force is preferable to a conscripted force,” said Paul Lindsay, a spokesman for the campaign. “The tools available to recruiters have historically enabled the all-volunteer force to attract sufficient numbers of qualified recruits.”     His views are echoed by many high-ranking officers in the military, who prefer a force of motivated volunteers. But some of the same officers have also expressed concerns about the strains of more than six years of sustained combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, especially if the U.S. commitment in both countries doesn’t end in the near future.

     Mr. Obama has said repeatedly that he will draw down the U.S. military presence in Iraq if he becomes president, but he has also said he would increase the number of troops in Afghanistan, where Taliban forces have seen a resurgence in recent years.

     During a CNN/YouTube debate for Democratic presidential candidates last year, he said he doesn’t “agree” with the draft.

     But he did say women should be expected to register with the Selective Service, comparing the role of women to black soldiers and airmen who served during World War II, when the armed forces were still segregated.     “There was a time when African-Americans weren’t allowed to serve in combat,” Mr. Obama said. “And yet, when they did, not only did they perform brilliantly, but what also happened is they helped to change America, and they helped to underscore that we’re equal.     “And I think that if women are registered for service — not necessarily in combat roles, and I don’t agree with the draft — I think it will help to send a message to my two daughters that they’ve got obligations to this great country as well as boys do.”

     Elaine Donnelly, a former member of President Bill Clinton’s Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, dismissed Mr. Obama’s comparison of the roles of women and black soldiers, arguing that males and females, in general, aren’t equal on the battlefield.

     “There are differences between men and women where physical strength is an issue,” said Ms. Donnelly, who heads the nonpartisan Center for Military Readiness. “There are a lot of civilian feminists who are making unreasonable demands on the military.”

     Nancy Duff Campbell, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center, argues that women should have a chance to compete for any position in the armed forces.     “I hope a new president will revisit the restrictions,” she said.

October 13, 2008 | Filed Under American Left, Political Correctness, Presidential Politics | 9 Comments 

Money For Nothin -Global Warming

  You know the likes of Al Gore and others have been complaining about Global Warming and have been sending up those alarms for some time now.  And of course I have been so irreverent and callous to do nothing but make fun of them and their kinky theories but more importantly their draconian solutions (as profitable as they may be).  ……….but I have now come to realize that Global Warming is actually a much bigger problem than I thought and even a bigger problem than Al Gore or that “consensus” of Scientists has believed.  You see this problem isn’t related to just Earth, it is related to numerous other planets and moons in the Solar System.  Wow………just think if we could tap the carbon offset credit market on those planets.  So let’s summarize here:  What do Triton, Jupiter, Mars, Pluto, Venus and Earth have in common (besides the fact that they are all undergoing a phase of Global Warming)?   Are you smarter than a 5th Grader?

Sorry time’s up………………. the answer is:  The Sun…………….. Yep, they don’t have the internal combustion engine, nor coal fired power plants, nor incinerators, nor cows (flatulence), nor most importantly…. man (at least I don’t think so).   That ain’t workin that’s the way you do it Get your money for nothing get your chicks for free NOTE THE FINDINGS:

   28 Jun 1998 - NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and several ground-based instruments show that temperatures on Neptune’s largest moon have increased dramatically since the Voyager space probe in 1989. So much so, in fact, that Triton’s surface of frozen nitrogen is turning into gas, making its thin atmosphere denser by the day.“At least since 1989, Triton has been undergoing a period of global warming,” says astronomer James Elliot, professor of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Percentage-wise, it’s a very large increase.”Elliot and colleagues from the Lowell Observatory and Williams College reported their findings in the June 25 issue of Nature. Triton’s 5 percent increase in temperature from about -392 to -389 degrees F would be like the Earth experiencing a jump of some 22 degrees F in just nine years. CITATION  NOTE: Yahoo citation no longer on website.

04 May 06 - Jupiter is growing a new red spot and the Hubble Space Telescope is photographing the scene.“Red Spot Jr.” as it is being called, formed after three white oval-shaped storms—two of which were at least 90 years old—merged between 1998 and 2000.The study was led jointly by Imke de Pater and Philip Marcus of University of California, Berkeley.“The storm is growing in altitude,” de Pater said. “Before when they were just ovals they didn’t stick out above the clouds. Now they are rising.”This growth signals a temperature increase by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit in that region, she said. CITATION

28 Feb 07 - Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet’s recent climate changes have a natural—not human- induced—cause, says Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia.Earth is currently experiencing rapid warming, which the vast majority of climate scientists says is due to humans pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Mars, too, appears to be enjoying more mild and balmy temperatures.This Mars warming says Abdussamatov “is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun.”“The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars,” he said.“Abdussamatov believes that changes in the sun’s heat output can account for almost all the climate changes we see on both planets. (I agree.)Mars and Earth, for instance, have experienced periodic ice ages throughout their histories. “Man-made greenhouse warming has made a small contribution to the warming seen on Earth in recent years, but it cannot compete with the increase in solar irradiance,” Abdussamatov said.By studying fluctuations in the warmth of the sun, Abdussamatov believes he can see a pattern that fits with the ups and downs in climate we see on Earth and Mars.All planets experience a few wobbles as they make their journey around the sun. Earth’s wobbles are known as Milankovitch cycles and occur on time scales of between 20,000 and 100,000 years.These fluctuations change the tilt of Earth’s axis and its distance from the sun and are thought to be responsible for the waxing and waning of ice ages on Earth. (I agree. The Milankovitch cycle is called the “Pacemaker of the Ice Ages.”)Abdussamatov also dismisses the greenhouse effect, in which atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide help keep heat trapped near the planet’s surface.He claims that carbon dioxide has only a small influence on Earth’s climate and virtually no influence on Mars. (I agree.)Abdussamatov suggests that the sun holds something quite different in store.“The solar irradiance began to drop in the 1990s, and a minimum will be reached by approximately 2040,” Abdussamatov said. “It will cause a steep cooling of the climate on Earth in 15 to 20 years.” (I agree.)“Abdussamatov’s work has not been well received by other climate scientists.” CITATION  

9 Oct 02 - Astronomers today said Pluto is undergoing global warming in its thin atmosphere even as it moves farther from the Sun on its long, odd-shaped orbit.Pluto’s atmospheric pressure has tripled over the past 14 years, indicating a stark temperature rise, the researchers said. The change is likely a seasonal event, much as seasons on Earth change as the hemispheres alter their inclination to the Sun during the planet’s annual orbit.They suspect the average surface temperature increased about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit, or slightly less than 2 degrees Celsius.Pluto remains a mysterious world whose secrets are no so easily explained, however. The warming could be fueled by some sort of eruptive activity on the small planet, one astronomer speculated.Though Pluto was closest to the Sun in 1989, a warming trend 13 years later does not surprise David Tholen, a University of Hawaii astronomer involved in the discovery.“It takes time for materials to warm up and cool off, which is why the hottest part of the day on Earth is usually around 2 or 3 p.m. rather than local noon,” Tholen said. “This warming trend on Pluto could easily last for another 13 years.  CITATION

29 Nov 07 - Once styled as Earth’s twin, Venus was transformed from a haven for water to a fiery hell by an unstoppable greenhouse effect, according to an investigation by the first space probe to visit our closest neighbor in more than a decade Like peas in a cosmic pod, the second and third rocks from the Sun came into being 4.5 billion years ago with nearly the same radius, mass, density and chemical composition.But only one, Earth, developed an atmosphere conducive to life. The other, named with unwitting irony after the Roman goddess of love, is an inferno of carbon dioxide (CO2), its surface hot enough to melt steel.But this was not always so, says Hakan Svedhem, an ESA scientist. Venus, he believes, may have been partially covered with water before it became doomed by global warming.  CITATION  NOTE: Yahoo citation no longer on website.

October 9, 2008 | Filed Under Global Warming, Political Correctness, The Left | Leave a Comment 

Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (a white paper)

     The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA) which was designed to offer mortgage credit though all areas not just wealthy areas was passed during the Carter Administration and subsequently managed by Jack Kemp during the Regan Administration.  It was not designed to insure credit was made available to unqualified borrowers.  It wasn’t until 1994 during the Clinton Administration that this Act of Congress became a useful tool for activist organizations like Acorn (which is facing criminal investigation in many states) and Community Organizer Lawyers like Barack Obama to leverage it to the advantage of their political and activist goals.  Janet Reno staked out the new policy of the Clinton Administration which was to be a policy of rigorous enforcement: 

“No loan is exempt, no bank is immune,” warned then-Attorney General Janet Reno. “For those who thumb their nose at us, I promise vigorous enforcement.”     

     The way the law was implemented was to deny banks the ability to grow or buy out other banks unless they were in deemed to be in “compliance” with the CRA and individual ad hoc groups were authorized and encouraged to bring legal action against the banks to enforce this action.  The lawsuits that were filed against the banks could literally bring all plans to a “standstill” on mergers or expanding their capital base.  The litigious nature of these groups caused many banks to “play ball” with them and approved very questionable loans and to concede to financial contributions in the multi-millions of dollars to organizations like Acorn to keep peace.  It was in reality a sort of a “protection” plan administered by the activist groups (especially Acorn) much like the Jesse’s Jackson’s Operation Push shakedown.  You had to pay up or they would drag you through the coals and label you as a racist.  In short the shoddy loan practices of the banks were forced upon them through this process, not corporate greed as advertised.

     In 1994 a Lawsuit against CitiBank was brought by Acorn (and soon to come association with activist Chicago lawyer named Barack Obama) in: 

Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Fed. Sav. Bank Fair Housing/Lending/InsuranceDocket / Court 94 C 4094 (N.D. Ill.) FH-IL-0011 State/Territory Illinois,

and in 1995 such suit was granted “class action” status and Barack Obama joined the suit with his own clients in the following three Illinois cases he was personally representing against CitiBank and remained as a page one named attorney in the class action suit representing ACORN, et al.:

FH-IL-0011-7500 | FH-IL-0011-7501 | FH-IL-0011-9000.

     This case was to force CitiBank to abandon their loan policy of not making loans in risky markets and to risky creditors.  The political pejorative for this was Red Lining.

     In 1997 CitiBank “settled” out of court after the Democrats in Congress at the behest of Acorn forced a reduction in mortgage loan standards for banks through coercion on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and then began “donating” large sums of money to ACORN and reversing their practice of “red lining” districts and borrowers that were not qualified for loans.  Enter James Johnson.

     James Johnson was the Chairman and CEO of Fannie Mae after previous political activity as serving as the Campaign Chairman of Walter Mondale’s failed 1984 Presidential bid.  It was during his tenure that the goals of Acorn and many activists in Congress such as Maxine Walters, Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank we’re supported by Fannie Mae by providing the ultimate backstop for Citibank’s agreement to issue what were risky loans by agreeing to guarantee those loans and in fact purchase the loans in many circumstances from CitiBank.  (We know now that  those loan guarantee and purchases resulted in the ultimate demise and conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2008.)

     During this time (1991-1998) that Johnson was Chairman and CEO of the quasi Public organization (Fannie) he and Fannie reported that he was paid $6-7 million (wow for a quasi public corporation) but it was discovered by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) in 2004 that Fannie Mae had deferred $200 million in expenses in 1998 through the accounting techniques identical to that of Enron and WorldCom (I can say this being an accountant) to enhance the appearance of profits.  Since the current crowd of operators initiated a “bonus” program that was based on profits, millions of dollars of fraudulent bonuses were made available to Johnson, his successor Franklin Raines and Raines’ ultimate deputy Jamie Gorelick (Both Raines and Gorelick were Clinton appointees).  OFHEO also found that Johnson had misrepresented Johnson’s compensation as $6-7 million after the audit and found that it was actually $21 million (talk about Public Servants).  Johnson (along with Chris Dodd D-CT Chairman of the powerful Senate Banking Committee who originally said he didn’t know Angelo Mozilo, CEO of Countrywide Financial) received special “below market” loan approval on a private personal loan directly from Mozilo of Countrywide who was the first major domino to fall in the Sub-Prime housing market.  It was found that Mozilo had a personal list of people under his direct authority for obtaining special loan approval.  It was called his VIP list.

     It should be noted that Johnson subsequently served as Chairman of the John Kerry Vice President selection committee and was providing similar advice to Barack Obama after he secured the Democratic Presidential nomination.

     When Johnson left Fannie Mae in 1998  Franklin Raines was appointed by Bill Clinton as Chairman and CEO and took the financial scam to new heights.  He appointed as his deputy a loyalist from the Clinton Administration that had not one minute of financial education or experience Jamie Gorelick (the author of the Clinton policy of the “absolute wall of separation” between U.S. intelligence organizations which had substantial impact on the proverbial left hand not knowing what the right had is doing issue leading up to our intelligence gaffs on bin Laden and 911.  The US Government was not allowed to share intelligence information between the CIA, FBI and other intelligence gathers………….think about it and how devastating that result was.)

     With the settlement of the Class Action Lawsuit against CitiBank (the largest in the USA) and Fannie & Freddie taking all the loans you can present, banks like Citi and others based on these precedents wrote zillions in mortgages to unqualified buyers knowing that the Federal Government would “guarantee” re-payment and even purchase the loans.  Purchasing the loans became the game of the day at these quasi federal agencies since Raines had taken his remuneration package to the Board to have it tweaked to the number of loans that were written with the sweetener to obtain agreement by the Board of Directors was an offer of increase in their pay.  As a result during Raines tenure he was able to take out $90 million in bonuses and Jamie Gorelick (deputy) took out and additional $25 million.  Raines later settled out of court on a civil case for “cooking the books” but most of the settlement (about $3 million) was paid for by an insurance policy (paid for by Fannie) and a few hundred thousand dollars of other costs while allowing him to keep nearly all the $90 million.  [It is time for criminal charges to be pursued.]  You should know that Raines is today a financial consultant to the Obama campaign though after initially bragging about it they now deny it.

     The purpose of this “White Paper” is to shed light on what really was the template for the ultimate collapse of the mortgage industry in this country since thousand upon thousands of these unqualified loans were written.

     Barack Obama is still going around blaming Wall Street greed for the financial fiasco while the truth is that Wall Street bought into this program through the pressure of Freddie and Fannie when Freddie and Fannie took packages of these loans and turned them into “securities” that they could market to Wall Street.  This was all the result of a series of events of which Barack Obama played a significant role early on.  Wall Street (i.e. the investment banking community) bought into the commercial banking products because they had been pressured and they were told they were “riskless” by Franklin Raines (I heard the tape where he told the Congressional Banking Committee when asked about the degree of risk they represented he answered “riskless”).  The more they could securitize and push to the investment banking community the more cash they would have to buy more loans from the lenders and increase “bonuses.”  And I should add that Obama was the second largest recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae, only being topped by Christopher Dodd (Democrat-CT) Chairman of the powerful Senate Banking Committee.

      During House Financial Services Committee hearings in 2003 when the BUSH administration was becoming aware through OFHEO there were real problems with Fannie and Freddie and proposed regulatory legislation, a major row occurred in the House Committee by the minority leadership Barney Frank where he read the administration the riot act and as reported at that time by the New York Times (9-11-2003) the following statement:

Bush today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.  Significant details must still be worked out before Congress can approve a bill.  Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders (of course) and the Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies. 

And in the direct quotable words of Barney Frank (ranking Democrat-MA on the Financial Services Committee)

“These two entities—Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—are not facing any kind of financial crisis,”  “The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.” 

     Don’t you find it interesting that Barney Frank and his cohorts in the House and the Senate are blaming the Bush administration for “lack of regulation?”  It didn’t start there nor end there.  In January of 2005 the Senate introduced a bill titled “Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005 S. Bill 190.  This bill could well have brought the practices of Freddie and Fannie into check and regulation.  This bill had 3 Republican sponsors including John McCain and zero Democratic sponsors, but in the Senate you need 60 votes to move legislation and the Democrats made it clear (on party lines) that they would not support this legislation. [But of course the lie being told is that it was Bush, McCain and the Republicans that resisted regulation of the financial industry.  They only need to repeat this lie 29 more days to where it won’t matter so much when the truth finally comes out.     It is time for the Republicans to get with it and start to defend their conduct over the past 10 years on this issue and illustrate that it was nearly a 100% operation of the Democrats to thwart regulation which is directly opposite of what they are saying now.  There are many other instances where the administration attempted to bring these matters under control and were thwarted by the Democrats.

     This financial disaster is the direct and proximate result of the bastardization of the Community Reinvestment Act by the Democrats in the 1990’s in order to extend their “social engineering” to the financial markets.

     Please serve as a counter force to the largest and most sinister scam, in my opinion, that is being thrust on the American public.  Share this narrative about the “bailout” (which I supported) as a direct result of the Democratic meddling in the mortgage community and Congressional Oversight role for the past 10 years.  They would have you believe they are trying to help out Bush after his financial policies failed.  The biggest financial problem we have ever had since the Great Depression is a direct result of socially engineered housing policies of Clinton and Banking Oversight Policies of the Democrats in Congress…………..period.  The Democrats are flat out lying about this every day and it needs correction.  And I’ll tell you that any body that knows what actually went on will not want to debate this issue.

October 5, 2008 | Filed Under American Left, Economics, Fiscal Policy, Politics, Presidential Politics, The Left | 16 Comments 

The Stalinists are Lecturing the U.S.A.

  Don’t you just love it when the idiots that structured nearly every failed financial system in the world in the past century are lecturing the U.S. on economics?  Russia has pronounced that the Credit Crisis marks the end of U.S. economic domination in the World,……ouch.  Their economically expert leadership is declaring that the crisis in the United States should be taken as a sign that America’s Global Economic Leadership is drawing to a close.  The Russian President, Dimitri Medvedev (Putin’s Puppet) said concerning the credit crisis, “the times when one economy and one country dominated [sic] are gone for good.”  Not so fast Demo…….are you aware of the numbers? 

Economic Powerhouses of the World (GDP): 1)  U.S.A. $13.8 trillion,   2)  Japan $4.3 trillion,   3)  Germany $3.7 trillion,   4)  China $3.3 trillion,   5)  United Kingdom $2.8 trillion,   6)  France $2.5 trillion,   7)  Italy $2.1 trillion,   8)  Spain $1.4 trillion,   9)  Canada $1.4 trillion,   10)  Brazil $1.3 trillion,   11)  Russia $1.3 trillion.

     These numbers are expressed in U.S. dollars and based on 2007 performance and were calculated when the value of the U.S. Dollar in international exchange was valued at nearly its’ lowest.  If these same statistics were recalculated at today’s increased value of the Dollar the differentials would be substantially more dramatic.  Did you notice that the economy of Russia with a substantially greater population than the U.S.A. is less than 1/10th of the US even based on a “cheap dollar” calculation earlier this year.

     It is just during this time of economic financial crisis that the Dollar has rallied because the “markets” see that the U.S. Dollar and U.S. Treasury Bills are the safest “economic” harbor in the World, exactly the opposite of what Demo’s thesis would be even if he understood his own words.  Need I say that the U.S. Stock Market at this time is down about 22% +/- THIS YEAR depending on your index approach while the Russian Market was down 50% LAST WEEK. So even though the socialist world would have you believe the opposite, Capitalism is still the best place to be and if we had keep the “social architects” out of the legislation and regulation for “affordable housing” you would have not even seen this credit crisis gather such steam.  [You have an opportunity on November 4th to see that they (BHO and his crowd) don’t get back in office]  It was the emphasis and mandate of these social engineers that created the vacuum for the Banks to fill with their own greed as it was then handed off to the Quasi Public agencies such as Freddie and Fannie (which was financially corrupted through Clinton/Democratic cronyism) which in turn securitized them and also handed them off to the Investment Banking Community (worldwide).

     I might add that during even this past week $52 Billion in Net Private Capital left Russia with most finding it’s way to U.S. Treasuries (comparably that would be equivalent to $520 billion leaving the USA in one week).  So Demo…………you get an F on your economic acumen.  You should thank God (I know that is sort of an oxymoron for your type) that you guys can remain in power because you control most the guns.  For the complete story on this post from the New York Times “International Herald Tribune” check HERE.

October 4, 2008 | Filed Under Economics, Marxism, Politics, Presidential Politics, Russian Resurgence | Leave a Comment