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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (48341)	4/9/2009 1:17:05 PM
From: Canuck Dave	Respond to of 217873

So B of A makes a huge whack. If only I could; 1. Get the government to bail me out of my bad trades. 2. Let me mark my "underwater holdings" to what I think they should be worth, rather than what that nasty old stock exchange will give me for them. I could go to Revenue Canada with really, REALLY good news about my solvency and what I owed them. I've read in a number of places that commercial real estate is the next shoe to drop. Also, was in Copenhagen recently and the number of bank buildings there is daunting. And lots of them are starting to look a little run down. CD

To: TobagoJack who wrote (48341)	4/9/2009 5:29:48 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 217873

Message 25559697

To: TobagoJack who wrote (48341)	4/9/2009 5:32:29 PM
From: carranza2	Respond to of 217873

Like I told my wife last night, not a dime's worth of difference between Congressional Democrats and Republicans when it comes to financial issues: both are mostly pigs at a trough. Some are brown pigs, some are pink pigs but they are all pigs. tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com Some Replies and Some Politics By Kevin Phillips - April 9, 2009, 11:35AM I do agree with Paul Krugman's view that the crisis is one of insolvency, not liquidity, also describable as one of impossibility to value assets rather than liquidity. Yes as well to William Black's analysis voiced on Moyers that Obama is continuing the failed approach of the Bush bail-out. Let me add that I agree with the Congressional Oversight group's Tuesday contention that failed banks should be liquidated and some, at least, of the failed bank top executives fired. Lastly, I would agree that Sheila Bair, another hold-over from the Bush-Paulson bailout, is jeopardizing the FDIC by her own rising taste for grandiosity. Now let me turn to the politics raised by a few respondents. In the new sections added to this post-election edition of Bad Money, I allocated the financialization - or bubble and bail-out -- political blame over the last quarter century as 70% Republican, 30% Democrat. The 30% mostly came from Clinton - from Bob Rubin, Larry Summers, Geithner et al. This allocation was as of of Obama's inauguration in January. As of April 8, I would increase the Democratic party's national culpability quotient to 34% and drop the GOP to 66% based on the first seventy days of the Obama administration and the new president's perpetuation of a failing and miscalculated bail-out. My own November vote was cast for Obama in considerable measure because of revulsion with the bail-out and the coddling of Wall Street. So I am not a happy watcher. But let me try to put Obama's continuation of this approach in historical and 2010 midterm election context. Question one: Did FDR ever put his personal imprimatur on a 1933 continuation of Hooverism by coddling Wall Street and putting a Geithner into the Treasury? Of course not. Did he keep on the Hoover economic team at treasury? Did he happily co-exist with having Hoover's former chief economic adviser-- Ben Bernanke was chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers -- running the Fed and bailing out the Wall Street's worst excesses with trillions of dollars in commitments? Of course not. It all seems mind-boggling. So my political calculus is that the Democratic blameworthiness quotient should tentatively be increased four points until Obama makes a sharp change in policy and begins to sound more like Andrew Jackson and less like Geithner, Summers and Bernanke. Worse, if Obama keeps on coddling and the economy remains mired in political failure to take a blowtorch to a failed financial system, there is a possibility that the political blame would approach 50-50. If so, it will be the Democrats' warmed-over Clintonian appointees and Geithnerian hand-outs to the financial sector (including the incredible PPIP) that will be freshest in voters' minds. Some Democrats will say that voters will keep blaming the Republicans in 2010 because the mess developed on their watch. Yes,but in 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office, he inherited an economy that had turned into a stagflationary slump under Democrat Jimmy Carter. Neverthless, when the economy and unemployment were worse in 1982, Reagan was blamed enough that the GOP lost two dozen Congressional seats in the 1982 midterms. To add to the parallel, a lot of angry voters blamed Reagan and the Republicans for the unpopular monetary and interest-rate policies of the Federal Reserve even thought the Fed Chairman, Paul Volcker, was a Democrat who had been appointed by Carter. In my tentative calculus of increasing the Democrats' long-term culpability share from 30% to 34% because of Obama's 2009 initial bail-out complicity, I added six percentage points because of Obama, Summers, Geithner and company, but subtracted two points for evidence of better perception in the Democratic Congress, not least the actions of the oversight group in lambasting the bail-out. And November 2010 is still eighteen months away.