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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Skywatcher who wrote (15556)	7/17/2009 7:13:31 PM
From: GROUND ZERO™	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 103300

We can address each item in turn, but you haven't answered my initial question yet, so here it is again: It was so important to get it approved, but none of it has been spent? You can't have it both ways, either it was a real emergency or a hoax, which was it? TIA GZ

To: Skywatcher who wrote (15556)	7/19/2009 1:36:31 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 103300

And Then There Was Leverage In the first few years of the G.W. Bush administration, the banking authorities decided it would be OK to allow five banks to increase their leverage from 12:1 up to 30:1. Which five banks, you ask? Bear Stearns, Lehman, Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs. How did that work out, just five years later? Three are gone and two survived with large dollops of taxpayer money. (Sidebar: Is it really any surprise that Goldman and JPMorgan are making record profits on the underwriting and trading side of the business? Hell, if I could eliminate 50% of my competition, my profits would grow too! JPMorgan's consumer credit, credit card, and other business groups are losing money big-time.) Thirty times leverage means that if you lose 3.3%, you wipe out all your capital. And we watched as banks too big to fail were bailed out with taxpayer dollars. Slowly, banks are buying time, writing down assets. Remember, this month is the second anniversary of the onset of the credit crisis. I wrote back then that the strategy would be to stretch this out as long as possible. Time heals a lot of bad debts, especially at a 0% Fed Funds rate.... Thoughts from the Frontline Weekly Newsletter Europe on the Brink by John Mauldin July 17, 2009