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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (29924)	11/26/2008 2:25:11 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 71588

Re: "Since the countries that think substandard medical care is oky doky IF government provides it are the majority in the WTO they have ruled that you are wrong. There is no competitive advantage. We need to apply a tariff to all goods from these countries. Of course that would probably ignite a world wide tariff war and have the same effect on te world economy that Smoot Hawley did." I can't even begin to decipher what you were trying to say above since none of it seems to be connected to the rest of your statement. NOTE: My one point (which seems indisputable from an economic point-of-view, and the effect very well quantified from NUMEROUS SOURCES, both government and private) is that in AMERICA large business carry the financial burden of the health care benefits that they provide to their employees (thus adding to their cost of doing business, their overhead expenses)... while in the vast majority of peer advanced economies, our main-line commercial competition, the expenses of health care are born by the total society, not directly by the companies. My SECONDARY NOTE was that per capita health care expenses are also significantly LOWER in all of our competing 'First World' economies... and that the United States has the highest per capita health care costs in the world. I made NO 'value judgment', ground no political axe... I simply noted the TWO SIMPLE STATISTICS about which there is no disagreement. Re: [I'm pretty sure that PRAGMATISM will out in due course.] "From a partisan hack like Obama wo surrounds himself with yes hacks?" Facts not in evidence, Peter. (My personal opinion is that the late Bush administration was populated with FAR MORE 'yes men' than it seems the new Obama administration will be. It seems Obama is picking Republicans, Democrats, etc., with less of a focus on partisanship, and more a requirement for EXPERIENCE and BRAINS than either the Bush II or Clinton teams of the recent past. But, I freely admit that is a value judgment, and all administrations must be compared on a sliding scale in this regard.) Re: "explained in my previous post that there was no fraud just manipulation of accounting rules. Fraud is wat Fannie and Freddie did " There has been a veritable AVALANCHE of fraud throughout the global financial system (but I made no mention of "accounting rules"....) I was mostly referring to the $50 TRILLION or so in unregulated, non-standardized deriviatives such as the notorious Credit Default Swaps --- often manufactured and sold by little-know offshore domiciled Hedge Funds and the like (AIG's London financial trading team is another well known example), with no or little collateral put aside in reserve to back these insurance contracts that they sold. They just wrote paper, sold it, then went merrily on their way, thinking that they would never be called on to make good on the insurance contracts they wrote. That is FRAUD. The sums at play in these markets VASTLY DWARF all of America's subprime mortgage lending of the past few years by MORE THAN 100-T0-ONE, (while Fannie and Freddie would not even be much of a factor in that much smaller subprime mortgage market anyway... since they are not direct mortgage lenders, but rather are buyers. And they only buy qualifying paper.) Fannie and Freddie's main problem was that they were allowed (as most of the entire financial system was allowed to, all the non-bank lenders, all the Investment Banks, etc., etc.) to operate at TOO HIGH A GEARING RATIO. (It's always the excessive leverage that kills you... but 'Fannie and Freddie' are but a small speck on the side of all the fraudulent activity that has been going on....)