Leisurely Sunday drive without anything real to say... that counts as a good day in my book. My personal outlook for our nation's future continues to deteriorate on a steady basis, but I guess there ain't a whole lot I can do about that. Might as well enjoy the sunshine while It's still free and enjoy the day for what it's worth.
And this story, I don't care who you are, would have to make you chuckle at least a little bit.
I thought I would try and cheer you up a little on the future economic conditions of our country. J.M. Keynes would certainly extoll the position that our current administration has taken. We all have our doubts and suspicions. From welfare state to Socialism the discussions are wide and varied...But there is one fact that is not debateable. The people of this country love money. The people that run this country love money. That alone will drive the future economic conditions of this country. We had reached a point in our current economic trend where there was not much immediate monetary upside left to gain..Everything had gone up so fast so much there was no room left to grow....Everyone new that the fast rack was not sustainable...The media is obsest with negative press 8% to 10% unemployment.. dosent that really mean that 90% of people that can work and want to work do work. Is that 8% able to totally destroy our economic situation...I to tfeel the stress of all the negative economic press But with the stock market down, realestate prices falling there will be tremendous opportunity for upside somewhere in the not to distant future.. From a non-truckers perspective I was driving east on route 64 from Louisville to eastern West Virginia the other day and the roads where packed with trucks there were very few trucks sitting in the truck stops and rest areas. I took this as a positive. Freight was moving things were happening and the 90% needed supplies.....
ReplyDeleteEven Mr. Keynes, I suspect, would differentiate between economic stimulus and machine patronage, not to mention expanded entitlements. I'm from one of those families of Irish-American Democrats. I'm pretty sure that even my grandfather would gag if he saw what was happening right now, and he never met a union payoff that he didn't like.
ReplyDeleteJust for the record, unemployment doesn't worry me. Stock prices don't worry me. Housing prices, freight, etc., don't worry me. I live an easy life so I take it in stride for the most part. People will keep having sex and making babies and those babies will need goods and services sooner or later. Prices correct sooner or later, regardless of how much we try to keep them from doing so. Along those lines, I wouldn't even be overly concerned with a larded up spending bill or two, provided that there was some sense of order to what was being done. I wouldn't like it, but elections have consequences. 52.7% of the vote buys the right to dictate the agenda for 100% of us. I get it. You win some, you lose some.
Here's what bugs me. Whether it's due to the media or the schools or the breakdown of the family or the warmongering former president or {insert cause here}, I just get the impression that people have become resigned to the notion that they're a bunch of inept helpless souls in need of rescue. Our 50 sovereign states have become 50 colonies of the D.C. machine. The constitution seems like a forgotten relic. Mark my words - None of what is being done right now will be temporary.
I heard my home state's governor on the radio yesterday, groveling for as much Washington money as possible instead of railing against the unfunded mandates and entitlements that are bankrupting the states. The things in that new law will prove, like every other goody from Washington, virtually impossible to cut off at a later date. It really, really saddened me to hear the pathetic subservience of the woman that we elected twice. Just another colonial governor working for the king.
Today I heard from our dear leader that 'fiscal responsibility' would be restored. The annual deficit will be "cut" to $580 billion by the end of his first term. Before you add the TARP money, for which I will never excuse the former president, the largest deficit in history (under that same former president, incidentally) was $480 billion. The "inherited" deficit that is supposedly being cut over the next four years is the deficit including the spending that The One signed onto last week. Nobody in the press room questioned this logic. You can't make this stuff up.
So I guess that's what bugs me. The notion that I'll probably need a C-note to buy a stick of gum in ten years is pretty annoying.
Wow, now that was a post..I'll have to chew on that for awhile.....I do feel however that your statement " people are resigned to the fact that they are inept and helpless in need of rescue" to be a little off base. The American people have never been inept, helpless or entitled. How did we get to the point that you can use accounting fraud...take 50 million in bonuses run your company in the ground, destroy retirement for your workers and then ask the Government for a huge hand out, pass that money out in more bonuses and retire in comfort, to be an acceptable arrangement in corporate business.....Its not people entitlement that is killing America it is corporate entitlement that is killing America..And corporate entitlement only has a positive outcome for a very few........My problem is I cannot rationalize the seperation that has occured between the people and the government.....When they talk about tax dollars and 780 billion hand outs I don't see government money! I see my money, your money, my friends money, my neighbors money all of our money pooled together that is going to benefit some corporate slug as described earlier. So naturally if its my money and your money then I think it should be spent in shall we say a more socially acceptable way.....We could disagree forever on how that way is but for me trillion dollar overseas wars and corporate bailouts aint the way....I will admit that when they start talking about helthcare reform and infastructure investiture that it pulls at my heart strings. But given the current circumstances that would be the way I would chose.....
ReplyDeleteIf you're looking for someone to defend corporate fraud and the like, you have the wrong guy. That's an entirely separate issue though, as is the cost of war. Whether the corporation in question is Citibank, GM, Fannie Mae, or the NEA, the idea that the federal government gets to pick and choose the winners and losers is disturbing.
ReplyDeleteI have never found the American people to be inept. Entitled, yes, but not inept. Now they're told every day that they're inept and it seems to me that they're starting to believe it. Consider if you will the story of a random OTR truck driver...
My father lost his job in the 80's when I was a child. What did he do? He moved his family to Texas and went back to work. Can you honestly say that this is the commonly held mentality today? What I keep hearing is that we should extend unemployment benefits and then extend them some more and then some more and... Would people curl up in a corner and starve to death if you limited benefits to one month, or would they find a way to get by? I suppose the latter. Apparently I'm wrong.
I received competitive scholarships (I'm pretty sharp, believe it or not) to help pay for college, but my parents couldn't afford a dime to help with my expenses. What did I do? I worked two jobs while I went to school and I repaid my student loans on time. What I hear now is that it should be a taxpayer-funded right to go to college and the only 'work' required should be the academic element.
I suffered numerous injuries throughout my athletic career, with severe damage to my right ankle being the most prominent. I went to a foot doctor who treated me to weekly cortisone injections and ultrasound treatment. This mitigated the pain to some extent but my ankle never really healed. For his trouble, the doctor billed my father's insurance company $500 per week. The company paid him $150 for each week. My mother paid a $10 copay. Just the way the game is played. As such, with an aging population, insurance has predictably gotten expensive over the years. To me, it seems that a shot and an ultrasound should cost about thirty bucks. God forbid someone attack that angle though. The trial lawyers and the nurse's unions will have none of it. No, I'm told that it's a constitutional right to have health insurance and it's my duty to subsidize it if people can't pay their own way.
I am now 32 years old and I knew several years ago that I would probably make a career move at some point in the near future. I chose not to buy a house at the time, even though I could easily have qualified for a mortgage. I wasn't willing to take the chance that I may not have the income to pay the bill. As prices have come down, the idea of buying a place sounds more appealing. Now I hear that it's my duty as a taxpayer to subsidize people who have seen their home values fall. So, I get to pay people to stay in their homes and I get to prop up the price of real estate, essentially screwing myself whenever I decide to make a purchase.
This is turning into some kind of boring ideological diatribe so I guess I should go find something else to do. I guess the point is that I could concede that my own personal views are absolutely wrong on everything mentioned in this comment thread. I could concede that the politicians are acting in good faith and not trying to create a dependent class of voters. I could concede that the actions of HUD and the congress had no impact on the current state of affairs. Even if I concede every one of those points, the price tag remains the elephant in the room. We're told that a larger deficit than any that this country has ever seen will be "responsible"? The next omnibus spending bill in the House represents an 8% increase over last year?
For me it's annoying and disappointing. I can't even imagine what people with children and grandchildren must think.
(I guess we'll have to enjoy another nice chat when they pass an amnesty bill, won't we?)
Your a sharp dude. Give yourself some time and you will do well wherever.
ReplyDeleteFuture conversations are definatly in the works because I enjoy your viewpoints. Your to young to be cynical, you aint got enough worry lines yet... I do think your wrong in not thinking that the war is a non issue in the current economic climate. It's my contention that what we are suffering through now is a direct result of economic conditions that had to be created in order to come up with the dollars to subsidize the war...The number we are told is 3 trillion, I happen to believe it was probably double that. The economy had to be heated up to generate the type of dollars needed. What were we told to do by our leader after 9/11? Go to the malls and spend money wasen't it....I don't think he was thinking about our mental well being at that point. I think it was about generating the money.... I do have one question regarding the war.....Are we the first conquoring country on the planet to not share in the spoils...What happened to all the dollars that were being generated by Iraqui oil fields.. I know we gave it all back to the Iraqui people....Oh by the way I've got a nice piece of property in Florida you can build your new house on.........
I've seen liberal websites with counters showing $600 billion so far for the war. If there's another $2.4 trillion, that's news to me. Even setting that aside though, I think that the commonly held understanding is that the economy didn't generate the dollars to fund the war effort. This was one of the major factors in President Bush's budgetary incompetence. Ask Nancy Pelosi about the last seven budget deficits. George Bush is the budgetary antichrist, or something to that effect.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that we agree on at least one economic fundamental thus far though - overheating. More buying, borrowing, spending, and building took prices and equity values onto a track separate from reality. If I'm mischaracterizing your understanding, I'm sure you'll let me know.
So things got overheated. Here's how I would reverse-engineer the process and find very little connection to the war.
Today - credit markets are frozen, there is talk of bank nationalization, and traders are panicked. Many homeowners, after decades of rising property values and devil-may-care refinancing, have found themselves upside down. Those who have lost jobs in the same time frame are essentially up shit creek without a paddle. Businesses are afraid to expand, often unable to borrow, and stuck in a psychology of cutting back and preparing for the worst.
Back to the prior step then. How did the credit markets get frozen? In my opinion, this was the only possible outcome to be had from lending money and not being repaid. Republican viewpoint - bad regulations. Democrat viewpoint - unscrupulous lenders. My viewpoint - both of those two were important, as were borrowers who deserved exactly what they got if they didn't know any better. The idea that you should use a house as an ATM is ignorant. Maybe it's good that some people learn this lesson the hard way.
So we coupled these lending practices with a monetary policy embraced by President Bush to keep rates artificially low and stave off recession. Anything other than what actually happened would have been a shock to me. The only question was 'when.' The former president saw the way that his father was demonized for a very minor economic correction. The second President Bush used Emperor Greenspan and his successor to make sure that this wouldn't happen on his watch. Sure it was going to burst eventually, just like the tech bubble did for President Clinton, but Bush wanted to make it last to the end of his term. He almost made it.
The straw that broke the camel's back, it seems to me, was the flight of cash from the money market funds last fall. I put this squarely on Wall Street. The deregulation signed by President Clinton allowed for the creation of mortgage backed securities, but it sure as hell didn't require that anybody buy them. Once the whispers made their way around concerning just how much of this shit had spread throughout the financial sector, big money investors freaked out.
The rating agencies scored these securities as A-rated. They should go to prison for such a misdeed as far as I'm concerned. If you tagged the mid-level tranches as 'B' or 'C' securities, saving the 'A' rating for a clean basket with zero shaky loans, you would have had much more realistic asset pricing throughout the process. Of course, you also wouldn't have had the billions of dollars in profits and bonuses for Wall Street. There's where a lack of regulation screwed us.
So where do we go if we follow the lending and loose money back one more step? I, personally, go to Andrew Cuomo. The CRA was dumb, to be sure, but it was small potatoes. Republicans are taking the lazy road and pissing in the wind when they bring that up. Fannie and Freddie were the nitroglycerin just waiting to go off. While I'm sure you'll disagree, at least you'll see where I draw an arc completely separate from the war. The parting gift from the Clinton administration was bequeathed to us in 2000.
Mr. Cuomo raised the low and moderate-income requirement for the GSE's to 50% of their overall holdings. One of two things would have to happen in order to meet this requirement. Fannie and Freddie would buy fewer "safe" mortgages or they would buy more "risky" mortgages. Since their cash flow depended entirely on the resale market, the banks would have to stop lending money to people with good credit or they would have to start lending more to people with bad credit. The former would be the prudent (if less lucrative) business approach in the real world. In our world though, Fannie and Freddie were implicitly backed by the taxpayer. They couldn't fail. They would buy the loans with our backing, so the banks had zero risk in providing the shaky mortgages. I won't defend the executives who made the decisions, but I also won't fake indignation at their having done so. It was free money. There's where the presence of a regulation screwed us.
2000 was before President Bush took office, before the terrorist attacks, and before the start of either overseas war. Of course in my view the situation goes back far further than this, but discussions of the virtue of the creation of the Federal Reserve system won't resonate much with someone who lost a job in 2008. The idea that printing a piece of paper with a number on it somehow creates wealth and justifies the collection of interest violates every economic principle that I've ever learned.
I guess there is one more point on which we seem to agree. The oil fields should have belonged to us until such a time as the Iraqi people could provide for their own security. For years they were, in essence, a renegade American colony.
Now I'll give you one more chance to think that I'm misguided. This is probably not a politically correct viewpoint, but when you overthrow a hostile government and install a friendly one, you own that friendly government at least until they can stand on their own. I would give my left nut to see a politician try and make this case though. The "no blood for oil" crowd would have had a field day and people would have been hauled off to face war crimes charges. There is still talk of such charges in Congress right now, even though it seems to me that we fought the war with one arm tied behind our backs in order to be as just as possible. As cynical as I may be, I actually don't believe that we went to Iraq for oil. If Saddam's own generals believed that he had a WMD program, it doesn't seem so impossible to me that our intelligence community believed the same. If "failure" will be the end verdict on the ordeal, a stable friendly regime in the region with thousands of dead bad guys sounds like a pretty good failure to me.
Ok, I actually agree with almost everything that you said and that is exactly why I think that there was much more to this whole thing than just random fragments that you discussed....I don't believe in conspiracy but I do believe in BIG business practices. All of this was created for a pupose the purpose was war. Even back in Clintons day and G. H. W.'s day they all new this day was coming. Think about it, for the last 20 years Americen interests have been controlled by basically 2 administrations. The Clinton's and the Bush's..And I don't think I am to far from the truth when I say that the current administration is just a continuation of the Clinton administration.Starting to take on that appearance anyway.. So when Obama is done it could be 28 years of the same ole. No these guys are all 2 sides of the same apple and they new what they were doing(to some extent). Washington, Boston, maryland, New York, California are just filled with Govt think tanks that put out scenarios and theories on a regular basis.. This banking thing is just a repeat of a situation from 15 to 20 years ago....It was what the OTC then??....I'll leave on that...we will exchange views again soon I hope....
ReplyDeleteI tried to resist but I can't...
ReplyDeleteWas it the Jews?
(I'm pretty sure that my counterpart here knows this, but for everyone else - Yes, that was a joke.)
Man your to funny..I have to think hard sometimes to keep up with you.......Where is Mel Gibson when you need him???
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