The recent attacks on the "greed of Wall Street" and on the Republican party are pitiful. The Democratic Party is a corrupt, willfully criminal organization, as it is run by the Pelosi, Frank, Reid, and Dodd gang. The assorted media is inept and incompetent.
I'm not college educated. I'm not an economist. But, even I had enough common sense and knowledge of history, to know that programs put into place to prevent another depression, MAY HAVE BEEN PUT THERE FOR A REASON! I predicted this would happen when Clinton and Co. (and there were some GOP members involved, too.) removed the separation of the regular and investment banks. And I predicted it again when the government forced the banking industry to liberalize their loans requirements to "provide loans to poor people....". Affordable housing, my butt. Buying votes is more like it.
Newsbusters.org has the truth:
Bill Clinton on Thursday told ABC's Chris Cuomo that Democrats for years have been "resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was President to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac"...
And from the same article, an interview on Fox, with Brit Hume:ANGLE: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, backed by the federal government, buy mortgage loans from the lenders who make them. But four years ago, both were in trouble over shoddy accounting. Fannie Mae Chief Franklin Raines, President Clinton's former budget director, was fired. To placate those in Congress who watched over them, Fannie and Freddie promised to do more to help poor people get mortgages. That led them to buy riskier and riskier home loans from private lenders creating incentives for everyone to make shakier loans.PETER WALLISON, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE: The problem is that they encouraged very bad mortgages to be made by banks and other institutions, because Fannie and Freddie would buy them.
ANGLE: Eventually, they bought trillions of dollars worth of mortgages, a substantial portion of them based on poor credit, then resold many of them to financial institutions who thought they were safe because the federal government was behind them.
WALLISON: As a result of this appearance that they were backed by the government, people never paid very much attention to the assets they were acquiring or the risks they were taking.
ANGLE: And so shaky mortgages spread throughout the system. But in 2005, the Senate Banking Committee, then chaired by Republican Richard Shelby, tried to rein in the two organizations bypassing some strong new regulations.
WALLISON: Which would have prevented Fannie and Freddie from acquiring this bad -- these bad mortgages. It actually gave a new regulator for Fannie and Freddie the kinds of powers that a bank regulator had.
ANGLE: All the Republicans voted for it. All the Democrats, including the current chairman, Senator Chris Dodd, voted against it, and that was after Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan had issued a stark warning to senators that Fannie and Freddie were playing with fire. Greenspan said without stronger regulations, "We increase the possibility of insolvency and crisis. Without restrictions on the size of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, we put at risk our ability to preserve safe and sound financial markets in the United States."
And then there was....US. I notice that A WHOLE BUNCHA PEOPLE refinanced over the last few years......Yep, no complaining about a bubble then....
We are the ones at fault. For voting in these idiots and keeping them there. For buying the newspapers and watching the shows of those "news" media that continue to support them.
But we don't have to compound the problem by allowing these crooks in Congress to steal us blind and ruin the economy just so that THEY don't have to admit culpability.
Will the economy crash if there is no "bail out"? I don't know. But I do know that the Democrats don't act like this is an emergency. They had the votes to pass whatever is needed to fix the emergency. The original bill was
3 PAGES LONG! APPARENTLY THAT'S TOO COMPLICATED! They added another 107 pages of crap!The corrupt leadership of Congress needed to stick their fingers in the pie before they were willing to support anything. They needed their share of the loot. Down where I come from, in New Orleans, we recognize that as corruption. And then they blamed the whole thing on the GOP. While asking for their votes.....votes that aren't necessary, since the Dems are the majority. Cowards. If the bill was for the good of the country, why not vote and take ALL THE CREDIT?
Today the vote failed with
40% OF THE DEMOCRATS VOTING AGAINST IT.Some emergency.
The Pelosi gang insists that there needs to be more "oversight", which, in her world, means more bribes for Democrats....
It was the the willful disregard of existing protections by Dodd and Franks that caused this mess. And now they have the nerve to blame everyone else.......
Jerry Bowyer, at TCS Daily, has a great analogy:
Think of the analogy of a 'bail out': someone knocks a hole in a boat and the water rushes in. The crew bails water out of the boat to keep it from sinking. If things are really bad, another boat comes and helps. This analogy points to the real problem: the hole! If you patch the hole early, no bailing is needed. If you patch it very late, the whole ship needs to go into dry dock. But the bailing out only makes sense in the context of patching the original problem. The worst thing to do would be to allow the ship to sink to make some kind of populist political point. No, revise that:
The worst thing to do would be to take the left's view and say "too much water in the boat, let's knock more holes into it so the water can get out.Here's how you fix the hole in the boat:
The best thing to do is to patch the holes. Here they are: Some are talking about putting a hold on the mark to market regulations. That's a start but not enough. Don't suspend mark to market, abolish it. It's part of the whole Sarbox, Spitzer, FAS 157 wave of punitive regulation after Enron. It makes no sense to impose and universalize temporary downturns, especially during panics.
Abolish the Bank Holding Company Act. It's a remnant of the 1920s before branch banking. Its only current effect is to keep private equity from buying majority stakes in troubled banks. Goldman's decision yesterday just illustrates the problem. They had to change structure in order to buy up other banks. This is nuts. Get rid of this dinosaur and private equity will start the capital infusions.
Abolish the Community Reinvestment Act. Forcing banks to make minority loans is the original sin out of which came the Subprime mortgage industry. Let banks decide where to loan; that's their job. Leave identity politics out of our credit system.
Do all of the above and I'm not at all sure that any bailout would still be needed. Before we subsidize these institutions, let's stop the things we are already doing to collapse them. Back to Hippocrates: First of all, do no harm.
Labels: Bailout, Democratic corruption, Dodd, Franks, pelosi, Reid
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