These are silly times indeed.
I just watched the first of the presidential election debates. Both Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama danced around the issues for 90 minutes without saying much we haven’t already heard.
We heard platitudes on the supposed financial crisis spawned by Wall Street and other entities in the U.S. financial system.
The candidates had little really to say other than the financial matter needs to be fixed, supposedly through the doling some $700 billion out to the miscreants who caused the mess in the first place.
Then there was the war or wars discussions. McCain, who loves war and definitely loves the ’surge’ last year did everything but dance around in an American flag as he lauded the accomplishments in Iraq of U.S. troops and their commanding general, David Patreus.
Obama continues to remind he was against the war at the beginning and remains against it now. With that in mind, we shift further eastward, to the simmering mess in Afghanistan. Both of these would-be presidents agree that more needs to be done there. Send more troops, spend more money, escalate the mayhem and hope for the best. Why anyone would believe the lukewarm approach to dealing with those pesky Afghanis will be any more successful than a decade of messing about by a determined Soviet Union beggars the imagination.
Reeling back to the ‘financial crisis’ one really has to sit back and ask questions. What else can we do? Most people can’t make any sense out of how the sophisticated American equities and banking markets could march lemming-like toward disaster for years without anyone doing anything about it until the entire system hovered near implosion.
I suppose there are those who would be asking now why Congress hasn’t just leapt onto the salvation bandwagon and thrown all those troubled millionaires/billionaires a massive life preserver at the expense of taxpayers. I suppose those people would believe just about anything.
But maybe, just maybe, there are some in the U.S. Congress who have some common sense after all. Imagine, these impudent bastards have actually questioned in some detail why their constituents should fund this massive bailout. Even as he is about to slither off into history, George Bush just can’t get any respect.
For a bit of perspective, the annual budget of the United States usually runs at least a couple of thousand finely typed pages of data and figures. The latest budget bill is on Capitol Hill right now and totals some $635 billion. Yet the Bush gang’s bailout bill for $700 billion plus contained just four pages of … well, pretty much nothing other than a ‘please give out the dough and piss off.’
Why anyone should have any real confidence that good will come of this ‘bailout’ is also a good question. There is nothing new in the mix that should begin rebuilding anyone’s confidence. The same regulatory machine that failed to prevent those in the banking and equities sectors is still in place without any changes having been made or even started to be made.
Neither of the two presidential candidates seem to be promising much change in regulating the greed and corruption that has brought America — and probably the rest of the world — to the brink of another massive depression.
After all, everyone sat by and watched the bankers and share sellers create this mess in the first place. Rather than try to give a damn about why things aren’t getting better, it may still be worth looking at a simplistic model of why things have gotten to this point.
Here’s the recipe for those who have brought us here:
-
Borrow money at below-market cost;
-
Lend it out as fast as possible to people who have no equity themselves in their real estate purchases (100 percent mortgages in many cases), folks who also have little likelihood of being able to repay their loans;
-
Continue financing real estate, mainly home building, at a rate far in excess of what the market could absorb;
-
Package up all this toxic debt and sell it as investments all over the planet;
-
Grab the loot and run;
-
Get out of the way and enjoy the fruits of your scheming as the system collapses.
The failed regulatory system that allowed this financial disaster to occur was the responsibility of the Bush regime. The failure in Afghanistan after nearly eight years is the responsibility of the Bush regime. The failure to deal honestly with the American people and take them into an illegal war in Iraq was a crime by the Bush regime.
The above list could be greatly lengthened. Notice a pattern?
Tags: Corruption, finance, politics, Wall Street
