Mark Levin, writing at the Corner, takes issue with NRO’s own editorial on the bailout, and on opinions like those expressed by, eg, Rich Lowry. Argues Levin:
From an economic perspective, if the problem is liquidity and credit, there simply is no need for the federal government to assume massive amounts of debt on its book by assuming loans in anticipation that their holders or borrowers will default. This seems to me like a brand new expanse of government power that is not justified (if it ever is) by the arguments made on its behalf. The government controls monetary policy through supply and interest rates, among other things. It can further ease money supply and credit, thereby increasing the flow of capital. The government controls tax policy. It can increase liquidity and the flow of new money into the economy both from within the country and from foreign sources by eliminating the corporate income tax and the capital gains tax even on a mid-term basis. No matter what is done, some financial institutions will fail, as they did in the 1981-82 recession and have since. And the Fed and Treasury and other instrumentalities of government will have to determine, on a case-by-case basis, whether to intervene and how to intervene. They will also have to determine whether other policies require modifying, such as the McCain proposal today, in which he suggests increasing federal insurance for individual depositors from $100,000 to $250,000. Other smart suggestions include modifying the mark-to-market rule requiring financial institutions to downgrade the valuation of assets. If the goal is to prevent panic in the economy by investors and depositors, then increase credit, liquidity, and the flow of capital, and deal with problem institutions that are significant enough in size that their demise could resonate to the wider economy. But the Soviet-style, top-down five year plan a la Paulson’s proposal, and to a significant extent the proposal that was voted down yesterday, could easily do more damage to both the economy and our governmental structure.[…]
Also, count me among those few here who want to thank the House Republicans for taking a bold stand against what had been a stampede on a scale I have never before witnessed on matters of huge consequence. Conservatism is more than a quaint belief-system to be embraced and debated over donuts at Starbucks. It is more than a list of talking points. It is the foundation of the civil society. The liberal uses crises, real or manufactured, to expand the power of government at the expense of the individual and private property. He has spent, in earnest, 70 years evading the Constitution’s limits on governmental power. If conservatives don’t stand up to this, who will? If they don’t offer serious alternatives that address the current circumstances AND defend the founding principles, who will? The House Republicans have done both. And I, for one, thank them.
Incidentally, if you want to buy a home or car today you can. And if your credit is decent, you can get loans at a good rate. Last week we were told that if a deal was not struck by last Friday, our economy would collapse. It has not. That is not to say the evidence of economic troubles or worse should be ignored. It is to say that now is a time for reasoned decisions based on tried and true principles, not for abandoning them. I notice that the socialist, who, for the last 30 years, has insisted that private institutions make risky loans based on non-economic reasons, still has not abandoned his policies. Socialism does not work. We shouldn’t support more of it.
[My emphasis.]
Clearly, finance on this scale is not my strong suit — and quite frankly, I don’t know who I’m to believe in terms of whether or not these bail out proposals would provide either short term or long term relief (and, perhaps just as importantly, set up short term government expansions that will become long-term government encroachments on what should remain part of the private sector.)
I understand the fears of Paulson, et al., who seem to truly believe that without a bailout the economy could quite literally be plunged into depression. At the same time though, Levin — and, yesterday, John Berlau — seem to be suggesting that there are ways to fix the “crisis” that doesn’t involve the federal government taking over massive debts, even granting that they could, in fact, realize a tidy profit off those debts once prices are set and stabilized. Because let’s face it — should the federal government realize that it can legislate us into such collapses, then “save us” by recouping losses after swallowing up private industry they’ve previously hamstrung, what’s to stop them from viewing such an expansion of power as a feature and not a bug?
At the same time, however, yesterday’s trllion+ dollar loss is truly frightening and is affecting financial markets all over the world. And this gives rise to dire warnings like this one from the WSJ’s Brett Arends :
Cut everything.
Drop your cable package and TiVo. Say goodbye to Applebee’s and Starbucks. Cancel the ski trip.
Slash every single penny you possibly can from your household budgets and start building up cash.
Yes, I’m serious. The shocking collapse of the rescue package on Capitol Hill threatens a disaster on Main Street. Unless this gets reversed almost immediately, it could turn a slowdown into a slump, and a slump into a depression.
It’s hardly possible to make any sensible recommendations about investments or other financial matters until we get a better sense of what will happen next.
Ordinarily in a panic like this I’d be urging people to invest. My usual approach is that the worse people are panicking, the more aggressively you should buy. And that might still be the right thing to do.
But the political and financial situations right now are chaotic.
So you need to get an iron grip at least on one thing you can actually control: Your own personal budget.
Even saving $10 a day by making your own sandwiches and taking your own Super Grande Latte to work is a small victory.
This is now a financial war: You versus the economy. And most Americans are badly prepared. They have far too little cash on hand to cope with a major downturn.
(Obviously if you are rolling in money this doesn’t apply to you.)
Anyone who thinks this bill’s defeat implies some kind of punishment for bankers or the salvation of ordinary Americans from Washington bureaucrats needs a reality check.
This defeat stops the financial fire department from putting out a fire that was threatening to burn down half the city. Now all we can do is just pray it burns out by itself.
I thought this was why we had a fire department.
The amount wiped off the American stock market on Monday alone was $1,300 trillion. That’s almost twice as much as the theoretical price tag on the bill.
Worldwide, the damage is much bigger.
Ordinary Americans, through their mutual funds, lost at least $400 billion. That’s real value wiped off 401ks, IRAs, and 529 plans. That’s retirements delayed, and college plans re-evaluated.
And again, that’s just the losses suffered on Monday.
Even worse is the loss of confidence – in the future, in the financial system, and in America. All three are devastating casualties of this fiasco.
Businesses will now cancel investments. Overseas firms – and trading partners – will start making other plans.
As I pointed out on Friday, in a worst case scenario the Paulson plan would only have cost $42 billion a year for thirty years. That’s if Uncle Sam never got back a penny on that distressed subprime paper.
That’s 2% of our country’s annual tax bill. It’s less than a third of one percent of our annual economic output. And that was a worst case scenario.
I don’t necessarily agree with Arends that he’s thought through the “worst case scenario” — which in my mind would be the federal government figuring out that they can expand their powers by facilitating these kinds of crisis. In fact, some believe that the Democrats are in the process of doing this just now — awaiting a collapse that they can blame on Republicans, then swooping in to “save” us with massive government oversight and regulation, the kind that has put European markets into such a precarious position.
As Levin noted, “conservatism is more than a quaint belief-system to be embraced and debated over donuts at Starbucks. It is more than a list of talking points. It is the foundation of the civil society.” And as such, it cannot be “pragmatic” to the extent that it can, as a set of foundation principles, be bracketed every time a crisis arises, lest the law of unintended consequences begin to assert itself and severely weaken the conservative movement.
Sadly — and I think the treatment of Palin by Beltway conservatives is suggestive here — many of the conservative movement’s most prominent pundits are every bit as elitist as their liberal / progressive counterparts, and as such, they treat politics as a debate society and party game, one that they will put on hold, from the perspective of adherence to strict ideology, at the first sign of actual trouble.
Which is to say that they, too, for all their lip service to smaller government, etc., are only comfortable when the “experts” in the political class pull their minds together to hash out mushy compromises — that our political class do something to save us — and in that regard, they are different from their ideological opponents only insofar as they treat political philosophy as an inter-university debate.
I’ve made this observation before — specifically, when Bill Bennett was being blasted by conservatives for not having taking stronger precautions against being taken out of context. While conservatives should have been expounding upon agency and intent, they were too busy showing their “political acumen” by excoriating Bennett for not having foreseen that his attempts to talk about moral issues that related only tangentially to race (and that further argued precisely the opposite of what his accusers claimed) was politically tone deaf. The upshot being that conservatives argued that allowing others to own your words through cynical “interpretation” is the fault of the original agent — not a problem with a linguistic paradigm that relativizes meaning, and plays right into the hands of progressive totalitarianism.
I’m not sure, when all is said and done, what the proper response is to the current crisis. Part of my understands Paulson’s deep concerns and his desire to institute a stop gap. But the question is, can we slow things down and come up with remedy in which the “stop gap” does not provide the ammunition for later attempts to turn that stop gap into a permanent expansion of federal power?
I eagerly await your thoughts. And, if any of you are very wealthy and are able to do so, I eagerly await your sending me $50K so that, in the case of a depression, I am able to remain at least partially solvent.
Will you take it in O!bloons?
Problem 1: The folks putting together the “rescue” are the same ones who spent decades boring holes in the bottom of the boat. Pardon me if I mistrust their sincerity. Cynicism can become a habit.
Problem 2: Throwing good money after bad is usually the wrong thing to do, most especially when it’s the US Congress doing the tossing. They tend to favor their friends. Who got us into this in the first place.
Problem 3: I feel no need whatsoever to rescue people who TOOK bad loans because the money was easy to get. Idiots deserve what they get. Fuck ’em.
I’ll take mine in Quatloos.
I’m puzzled no end by the reluctance to get rid of mark-to-market, which is an insane thing to begin with. Getting rid of capital gains taxes and other junk would put the market to work healing the gaping wound that gubmint intervention tore open.
But too many in Washington see their role as Those Who Can Fix It All and have little concept of when to stand aside.
A 777 loss yesterday? Today, we’re up 260+.
Morons, all.
I barely make 50k a year so I am out for myself Jeff sorry. Currently in the process of buying a house at 195k so I am screwed. For some reason I am getting a nice 5.5% interest rate though.
>>I’m puzzled no end by the reluctance to get rid of mark-to-market, which is an insane thing to begin with.
Musing here: Supposing it can be taken in an intentionalist way? What conclusions might one be led to?
>>A 777 loss yesterday? Today, we’re up 260+.
This reflects bear strategies of investment. We’re not out of the water by any means. Taking a daily snapshot won’t reveal much, I think, but a 2 week look might do it.
Oh, mark-to-market was intended to prevent inflating your worth, ie lying.
“Because let’s face it  should the federal government realize that it can legislate us into such collapses, then “save us†by recouping losses after swallowing up private industry they’ve previously hamstrung, what’s to stop them from viewing such an expansion of power as a feature and not a bug?”
I have been convinced for some time now that this thought is the operating principle of those we elect to office. Another fine example of this is the health care industry. So many of the “problems” are “problems” created by government action, while at the same time more government action is held up as the solution to the “problems”. And thanks to the activist media, and a complacent public, the growth of government through these “solutions” is all but assured
I’m not a financial wizard either, and that is why I was taking the warnings of the Treasury seriously. The Democrats may be capable of manufacturing a financial crisis for political expedience, and the fact that many were willing to put their personal electoral prospects ahead of the country argues at least three things – either the crisis isn’t as bad as Treasury reports, they are as callow and self-centered as they appear, or a combination of both.
Predictions are perilous because no person has access to all facts, and the facts available may be seriously outdated, or wrongly interpreted. Despite party names, each representative in the House is an individual person and is making individual calculations – parties are not strong in the American system – and the Democrat’s House leadership has shown over the past year and a half to be particularly weak in controlling and persuading their own caucus.
So I really don’t know.
Paulson is a Democrat.
Until I see any interest in media or on the part of anybody in congress to honestly identify AND take action against which individuals and which party designed the monster that is currently eating our economic village, I’m not extending any trust toward any talk of bailouts.
For real you should cut your cable at least.
oh. Getting rid of capital gains is a ducky way to get rid of capital gains taxes I think. Thanks, Nancy!
I would gladly cast a vote for Cindy Sheehan over Pelosi.
Some advices FWLIW
Sometimes it seems to me that the most salient principle we ought to adopt is a steadfast insistence on the persistent gap between human ignorance and human underestimation of human ignorance.
Everybody everywhere seems to think they know a whole lot of stuff they don’t come within, to use a spatial metaphor for a cognitive condition, miles of knowing. This often seems to result in the adoption of measures of governance which have what are known as unintended consequences. Which misjudgments are immediately ignored, lessons unlearned, and brilliant!, new misjudgments are adopted to fix the results of the last set of misjudgments.
Isn’t there some means by which we can focus first on what we don’t know, as opposed to what we think (usually incorrectly) we do know?
As a practical matter, I think Ric’s rule #2: Markets Happen Anyway, might be a good place to start. What do we know? We know that we don’t know.
Oh, they are definitely at least as callow and self-centered as they appear. But I don’t know that I would feel confident ruling out “a combination of both.”
Sabotage for political gain is the proggs’ strongest suit. The worse things get before the election, the better (they believe) their electoral prospects, and if they can give things a nudge under cover of a collusive
mainstreammedia, they see no downside.I maybe could have floated you some, but now my monees are gone.
I have a lot of canned soups, though.
I’ll tell you what I know:
Barney, Nancy, Rom, Charles et al, are all travelling with their own golden parachute. They’ve got lifetime retirement that would pay the national debt. They’ve got no skin in the game. What I know, is that if any of these stiffs succeed in destroying our economy, bringing about another depression, it’s going to come down to an ass-kicking contest over the last loaf of bread. I like my chances. Even with Nancy.
No cable = no internets.
I think I’d miss that most of all.
I wish I’d bought that car I’d wanted. I probably could have traded it for firewood.
I wish I’d bought that car I’d wanted
That sentence has a bit of a Sudafed feel to it Sarah.
oh. My cable lets me just get internets. There isn’t a lot of good data out there on bundling from what I’ve seen. That’s a different conversation really. It’s time for a review of internet options anyway, but I’ll keep mine what I have right now til next year at least cause they will be doing their bandwidth limiting thingy around then and that will be the time to see what my options are, after I get the details.
I’m with mojo in that two of the senators who are most directly responsible for preventing regulation of FM&FM (Frank and Dodd) are currently two of the senators working on adjusting the bill to accomadate their political needs.
I will not support any type of bailout scheme unless these two idiots are sent to the back of the line. The fact that the senate is allowing these two to be involved in the neogtiations for the bailout package tells me all I need to know.
When you come home at night to find your house on fire, the last person you want helping you put the fire out is guy standing next to your house with a can of gas and a lighter.
We can always gather around a fire and sing songs.
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=TW9b0xr06qA
What am I doing about this?
I checked all my firearms and ammo stocks last night and will bring them up to “YIKES!†levels today. I am renting a moving van and going to Sam’s Club to fill that sucker up with non-perishable food items. Then I will unload into my house and make a sign reading: “GET OFF MY LAWN, NO WANRING SHOTS!†to stake out front. Then I will sit on my porch with my shotgun across my lap.
All these years of honing my “crazy old dude cackle†is finally gonna pay off!
Ditto, what Brett Arends said.
Almost all of what we buy is unnecessary. Most of it is purchased out of fashion and habit, not need. Which makes a lot of the Progressive’s advocacy for ‘poor’ people who have two cars and six cell-phones look really silly.
On credit, where’s the crisis?
I just took out a home equity loan with a small Southern bank last month – it was easy: they were hungry for the biz, and I only borrowed a fraction (less than 1/3) of the value of my home.
It’s absurd to think you can borrow 100 to 150% of your home’s value in today’s market (if it ever made sense at all). But, talking to others with HEloans you’d get the impression this was all the rage.
Americans have become used to unrestrained life-styles. Just like that guy at the End Up last week who was spasm-ing all over the dance floor and who hit my girlfriend in the jaw with his elbow: many of us need to dial-down our moves and get back to the base-beat.
either the crisis isn’t as bad as Treasury reports, they are as callow and self-centered as they appear, or a combination of both.
“Well, Alex, right now they’ve taken two days vacation in the face of this “crisis,” so I’ll go for callow and self-centered for $700 billion.”
My conservative Republican Congressman was one of the ones that voted against the $700 billion plan.
I sent him this this morning.
“I would like to thank you for your vote against the $700 billion plan that the Treasury Dept. wanted passed.
I believe that other measures can get the country through this crisis that the Democrats have manufactured by their encouragement of the “sub-prime” loans and the CDO’s that Fanny and Freddie spread as a toxin in the financial markets.
My own ideas would involve eliminating the “Mark to Market” accounting rule that has increased the volatility of banks reserves.
Increasing support for the FDIC.
A two or three year change in the tax code to make mortgage interest a refundable credit, up to some reasonable limit, instead of a deduction in order to help those struggling with the sub-prime loans who wish to remain in the home owning population.”
I know he already supports the first two.
I also withdrew enough cash from one account to get through 1 to 2 months expenses. Not because I think my 2 banks are vulnerable, they are a local credit union and a regional bank, but in case some political idiot declares a “bank holiday” or some other stupidity that cuts off withdrawals when I have bills due.
What strikes me as odd about how allegedly the U.S. is having a financial panic is, according to Bloomberg the dollar is still going way up and the euro continues to tank.
Which fits in, I suppose, with the idea that liquidity is diminishing, but if it were really as bad as the
mainstreammedia and the Democrats (but I repeat myself) are making it out to be, wouldn’t currency speculators be leery of buying up a currency whose country of origin is about to implode?Yeah I put in a bid for my house that is over 100 thousand below it’s tax assessed value. Some moron bought the thing in 2006 for well over 300 thousand and I will probably end up paying less than 195.
Happy,
Check out satellite internet. I use Hughes’ system – the same one the military uses.
It won’t transmit VoIP yet, but it is snappy and problem-free.
Also, the more people depend on satellites for their internet, the easier it is for the US government to lay claim to key orbits as “essential infrastructure.”
You know, just to keep the Chinese on notice as they screw around up there.
No proposed plan will do that, though a rhetorical show will be made of it, just to shut up the out-of-the-loop loudmouths. That money, if spent, will go to those borrowers’ “representatives,” e.g., ACORN. And ’round we go again.
Those “bad” loans are regarded by their holders (and rightly so regarded, according to their state-imposed and/or -sanctioned (same diff) accounting standards) as assets — the very ones whose non-value (unleveragability absent a “bailout”) is going to be artificially inflated to SAVE OUR TiVO.
The people who owe on those notes will still have to pay up, or they’ll lose their shit — which loss to them costs the economy nothing. The shit remains. And a lie on the market gets replaced by a fact. A large mass of such fact-insertions will, yes, restrict the flow of credit to those who can afford it — not only to get it, but to give it. That’s good for the economy, if not for what constitutes “the economy” according to the WSJ, to which it’s the present “crisis.”
WSJ guy is — as WSJ guys always are, when their area of expertise is the subject — talking 99.44% pure shit. Only the “too big to fail” are actually in any danger of it. Unless…
OMGWTF
Or, if you prefer not lying for political purposes, like maybe to cause some bank runs to sustain the illusion of a “crisis” outside a few friend-of-Washington institutions: $0
Because no one had it, and now no one has it, again. Only those who leveraged the illusion of that money’s former existence against actual capital have lost anything.
And that’s a good thing. They’re suckers and/or evil fucks.
Of course, if you’re invested in their fortunes, you too might be going down — in their place, after their government pals save them and not you (with some more of your own damn money, just to make it tasty).
But you’re probably a sucker and/or evil fuck, too. So…good.
Hughes net is horrible. I had them for over 3 years and every time I called them I was shipped over to a phonefarm in India where they would read off the same list. Also the phone waits were well over an hour. F Hughes net.
As far as cable, I’m keeping it. Three years ago in another city in order to get internet accounts for both my wife and I to be online at the same time and get phone calls required three phone lines and two separate internet accounts.
Now we both go through the same cable broadband account, use VOIP for the phone, have expanded cable package and two cellphones for less than just the phone and internet cost then. That’s the American Way.
It’s rather amazing that for ‘only’ 2 percent of the tax bill or 0.33% of the GNP, we could avert the mother of all depressions worldwide for the rest of our lives.
If we could only put such an energy equation into the gas tank.
#30 Mr. Pink:
How often are houses reassesed where you live? I ask because years ago Dearborn ran on the city tax on Ford Motor, and did not reasses house until they were sold. This lead to some great inbalances between what people were paying, and Ford finally sued to have that ended. Ford Motor did not want to be paying the full freight any longer. I remember how dad said a neighbor omplained about the tax hike. They had been in their house for about twenty years and were paying taxes on its assesed value from the 1950’s, and dad remarked on how much he was paying (we had moved in about five years before that). I don’t remember the amounts, but the difference was startling. Kind of ended that discussion.
They reasses it every year here in Northern VA.
A friend looked at Hughes a while back and it was for teh rich peoples then. But yay! We can start the Depression whenever cause the DHL man just brought the coffee. No, I do not understand why we get our coffee overnighted. That’s not really in the spirit of this Depression thing I don’t think.
But for real, when you buy cable you are actually handing a little check to all of the programmers – the channels – or most of them anyway, so you’re subsidizing a lot of shit that is not good shit. It is, in fact, harmful shit. I have links. But anyway, I’m glad psycho’s back.
Mikey NTH,
Dearborn sounds like my city in that respect. They had two large industrial concerns that paid almost all the property taxes needed to run the city. Then in the late 70’s they left. The city took a big hit but hung on and has recovered. Taxes are higher than they were for homeowners back then but not as bad as we had in the city we recently moved from to here.
[…] House Republican leaders reported yesterday that as many as a dozen of their colleagues changed their vote on the proposed “economic rescue plan” after Nancy Pelosi’s overly aggressive, hyper-partisan speech apparently forced their hands. But some experts say that the vote-changing may just be the beginning of the fallout from what many are calling Pelosi’s “Titanic of political diatribes.” […]
I have listened and read enough to believe nobody really understands the details of all this, but I heard somebody say today that what they are trying to do now is privatize profits while socializing loss. That seems like a good way of putting it.
“I wish I’d bought that car I’d wanted”
Yeah, sudafed. You should hear me actuall say it.
I do wish I had been stupider and had a shiny object instead of a sad announcement on a piece of paper.
A car won’t make you happy Sarah. Hope, change, and lifting up one another so we all can be great is what’s gonna give you those goose bumps.
there’s one now. brrrrr.
I’ve been around wall street for 18 yrs. and the fears over this becoming a contagion are simple but decently grounded.
that said, brett was having himself a little fun with rhetorical excess.
all you need to know is this:
the ne plus ultra concern of this debacle is that the short-term credit markets might freeze up.
why is this important? because major corporations and some sections of government (both federal and local) manage their short term liabilities via borrowing money in 2 week and 30-day increments.
they pay obligations (payroll is what you need to focus on here)and then repay them as cash flows in, either from payments or taxes.
the short-term money markets froze last night. banks, the biggest ones, are lending at nearly 7% on an OVERNIGHT basis. yes, annualized, that is about a healthy 2550% interest rate. That is symptomatic of a major problem.
the solution is exceptionally easy, which means that no elected genius will consider it, as well as having no discernable political angle, which means that no one will sponsor it.
Instead of an imaginary number like $700 billion, the USG should inject capital into the 10-15 banks that desperately need it. In return, they get an interest-deferred convertible preferred stock that the Treasury can hold for decades.
this allows key institutions to A) not collapse, B)give them time to make orderly asset sales to get back to normal leverage rations, C) allow the USG to install sensible regulations back into these companies as a condition of their loan acceptance.
it would be expensive, but much less so than $700bn. A large institution like wachovia could have scored $35bn or so; a smaller institution like National City would be squared away for a bit with $10 bn. More importantly, it would have avoided idiotically counter-productive actions like the de facto seizure of AIG, which needed only $30 bn or so stabilize it short-term.
the Tsy could, perhaps with more difficulty, suspend resets on Option ARMS, which are going to result in mortgage payments increasing by hundreds of percent. in turn, this will make delinquency rates spike and result in multiple billions of dollars worth of charge-offs.
but yes, something has to be done now, because in 15 days, without the short-term credit markets, the pissed off pitchforkers are going to be well screwed. And at that point, $700bn is the begining of the conversation.
“Bits is bits. Context is everything.”
See, me I figure it for real is a big big problem cause why else would President Bush want to be dealing with this shit in the last months of his term. Answer: he wouldn’t if it wasn’t a for real bad thing. Also, I trust him. He is a very good person I think.
#39 geoff(JARAIP):
Dearborn had to be experienced to be believed. Orville Hubbard – a little racist dictator was mayor from 1942 until about 1978. With the Ford Motor money a chimpanzee could have run the place – but Orvie was a cut above that. City services were to be delivered, without question. Any failure to do that was a very bad thing. When I worked out at Camp Dearborn (a city-owned park and campground thirty miles away in Milford Twp.), the city workers had a story that once a woman complained that her garbage had not been picked up (the city ran its own garbage trucks then). Mayor Hubbard went to her house and gave her some flowers and apologized as his driver loaded the garbage into the back of the car. The garbage ended up in the office of the department head for sanitation. The message was very clear – you may be my political friend and ally, but do not make me look bad or else.
The message is one many politicians miss and open holes for community organizers to exploit. First, you deliver the services you promised. You do that and you have no problems with the voters. I moved from Dearborn in 2003, and I have to say the city services were at a very high level.
Deliver first and keep the graft low, and every election is a done deal. I think G.W. Plunkett would have approved.
[…] insufficiently-informed, the current situation has brought out such character in so many writers. Jeff Goldstein’s Who’s Right? cites a very Conservative viewpoint and another column from one who seems to have lost his mind. […]
I am more convinced than ever that much more than a “financial catastrophe” this is simply a “gut check” time for true conservatives.
For years (dare I say decades?), pseudo-conservatives have used the same means as liberals (i.e. a sprawling and rapidly expanding federal government) to further their own agenda, to the point that the only difference between the two schools of thought have become which</b? agenda is being promoted.
Now, we’re confronted with the question of whether we truly believe that a capitalistic economy will, like water, find its own level, and whether we are willing to live at that level, rather than at the level promoted and produced by an overreaching federal government.
I, for one, am.
The entire credit mess we’re currently in, and all the feces-coated facets of it, can be traced directly back to the government taking upon itself the task of pushing citizens towards home ownership who had no means to sustain a home, while at the same time generating a credit-centric society in which people were taking out second mortgages on homes they could afford to get “toys” for which they weren’t willing to save. This ties directly into the created need for a “credit rating system” such that banks can demonstrate to the federal government how many “high risk” loans they had written (no codified racism there, eh?), and the push from those financial institutions for the credit reporting agencies to compete for the maximum amount of dirt they could cite on any given citizen’s record (for the obvious reasons of charging higher interest rates while inflating their “high risk” portfolio), an entire system that is entering an era of judicial review at this moment.
It’s time for the American people to get braced; we’ll take some really major lumps in the years to come over all this, but when the economy settles into a more natural state, we’ll all be better off, and we won’t be living under the shroud of Socialism.
“Gold pressed latinum” please, what do you mean it doesn’t exist. Isn’t Mr. Arend’s advice, a self fulfilling prophesy; if you follow that strategy
the economy will contract; which is exactly what he doesn’t want to have happen; right. It’s right up there with passing the Smoot Hawley bill, right after the ’29 crash, very stupid.
Yup, Pink,
I wound up talking to a “Jim” or “Paul” in Mumbai many a time, and it took a lot of patience to work through the cultural and language divide with them. This is Hughes’ weak spot.
But, once it’s working, it plugs along just fine. Other than them switching satellites last year without telling me so I could re-aim my dish, I’ve had no problems.
If you want to dump the landline, satellite’s the other option.
I’m going to comment on a bunch of stuff that hasn’t happened yet, so that I don’t have to worry about it.
Numeracy: not even for breakfast, anymore.
Apparently, anyway. But these reporters have editors, see, which makes them superior to bloggers. At least now they changed that 1,300 back to 1.3, where it belongs.
Mikey NTH,
Thanks for the history on Dearborn. I didn’t know any of that.
If my late father-in-law was still around he would probably know about it. He was a City Manager by profession. I first met my wife when her father ran my city. He retired in the late 80’s (IIRC) as City Manager of Oak Park over by you.
mcgruder @45:
Why would this problem spread so? Why would an established company with a history of creditworthiness have difficulties rolling its commercial paper?
Sticking to COnservative principals is important not because they are some abstract morally good thing to do, but because they WORK!! Government intervention in the market NEVER makes it better. At best it makes it no worse and more likely makes it much worse. There are a lot of mortgages going bad. They are going to go bad. Temporary liquidity can be useful but if it is needed for more that a couple of months at most, the problem is not fixable.
And today the market did…fuckall, really.
Keeps up like this for a week or so, we could be out of the rapids. Depends on what happens in the Senate today, though.