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Politics : THE WHITE HOUSE -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (23212)	10/5/2008 3:12:29 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25737

Re: [but it is EVEN WORSE to have no 'cops on the beat' when there is a dire (and utterly predictable) NEED for them:] "Most definitely... but the so called cops were the very foxes in charge of the hen houses... barney frank was the ringleader who got all of us into this banking mess in the first place..." I would assign ex-Senator Phil Gramm the pride of place on the SKUNK LIST... since it was HE who (after getting the "Enron loophole" written into law, which PROHIBITED regulation of the energy trading markets and allowed fraud and abuse to run riot in electricity and natural gas trading, costing ratepayers and investors TENS OF BILLIONS)... then went on and wrote the PROHIBITION ON FEDERAL REGULATION OF 'OFF-EXCHANGES' PRIVATE FINANCIAL DERIVATIVE SECURITIES, such as the infamous Credit Default Swaps (which just collapsed the largest insurance company in the world: American Insurance Group, and several banks already far....) The face value of these totally unregulated financial derivatives (a Liar's Market if there ever was one, that has brought the world's credit markets to a freeze-up) vastly EXCEEDS all of America's sub-prime real estate securities put together... in fact, exceeds it by factors of 10 or more. The bad sub-prime loans made might be a triggering factor, but it is the MASSIVE SIZE of these unregulated financial securities with their contagious counter-party risks that is the real apocalyptic deal.... (The very same securities that Buffett warned the world against four or five years ago... writing in his annual letter to his shareholders that they were a "financial timebomb" and "weapons of mass financial destruction".) American sub-prime mortgage loans (made in the past two or three years) might be the 'fuse'... but the TENS OF TRILLIONS in totally unregulated financial derivatives around the globe are the keg of dynamite.... And, Phil Gramm --- (he of the 'American's are whiners' quote) --- is one of the main reasons that, just like with the Enron loophole, there were NO COPS ALLOWED ON THIS BEAT when the liar's market in financial derivative securities grew to a size large enough to put the entire world's financial systems at risk of collapse.