But will anyone else call him on it?
Deception at Core of Obama Plans
Read the whole thing. President Obama is trying to say that part of the reason this recession is happening - and is worsening - is because of health care costs and global warming. Whether or not you choose to be decieved is your own trouble. I'm not buying what he's selling.
This recession is happening because beurocrats forced banks to offer loans to unhealthy risks. Seeing this untapped market (and betting housing prices would always go up their standard 5% year over year) banks got greedy. Then Wall Street wanted a piece. And they got greedy. Packaging these crazy loans into securities that were traded like baseball cards; no one really knew what they were worth.
Banks offered risky loans, on funnily appraised property, and then everyone got busted because when those crazy loans reset, people couldn't make the payments, they went defunct, housing prices hit the floor, and now a note on a house appraised in 2004 at $700,000 is only worth ... what? Maybe $300,000?
So bad credit markets dried up. Bad credit? No loan. For anything. Banks were carrying so much bad loan that they couldn't take on any more risks. Not even moderate ones. Folks with reasonable credit were turned down.
Businesses that bank on credit to get them through dry seasons to cover pay roll? Well banks had no confidence that the money could be paid back. Bye Circuit City.
This shakes consumers. Consumers worry. Consumers don't buy as much junk over Christmas. This sends manufacturers into SPD - surround, protect, defend. They cut costs predicting low profits, they have layoffs, etc. etc.
But this mess was started by a housing bubble that burst and bad credit practices. It has nothing to do with health care. He is USING this crisis to further his agenda.
And think about it ... our 52 week high right now is 13,191.49 on the DOW. So sometime in the last two years, we were hovering around 13,000. And before that even we hit 14,000. In less than 6 months, we've cut the DOW in half. Today we are at 6,501.49, down 92.95 points. If the stock market can be looked at as an indicator (and as I said before WSJ research says it can - though they say 20% chance of Depression and USNewsWorld says 40% - yikes!) we are going to lose a heck of a lot more jobs this year, and government money spending programs aren't going to encourage businesses to put more money out there.
But cut in half. It's crazy.
WASHINGTON -- Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.
Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.
...
At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.
The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.
Read the whole thing. President Obama is trying to say that part of the reason this recession is happening - and is worsening - is because of health care costs and global warming. Whether or not you choose to be decieved is your own trouble. I'm not buying what he's selling.
This recession is happening because beurocrats forced banks to offer loans to unhealthy risks. Seeing this untapped market (and betting housing prices would always go up their standard 5% year over year) banks got greedy. Then Wall Street wanted a piece. And they got greedy. Packaging these crazy loans into securities that were traded like baseball cards; no one really knew what they were worth.
Banks offered risky loans, on funnily appraised property, and then everyone got busted because when those crazy loans reset, people couldn't make the payments, they went defunct, housing prices hit the floor, and now a note on a house appraised in 2004 at $700,000 is only worth ... what? Maybe $300,000?
So bad credit markets dried up. Bad credit? No loan. For anything. Banks were carrying so much bad loan that they couldn't take on any more risks. Not even moderate ones. Folks with reasonable credit were turned down.
Businesses that bank on credit to get them through dry seasons to cover pay roll? Well banks had no confidence that the money could be paid back. Bye Circuit City.
This shakes consumers. Consumers worry. Consumers don't buy as much junk over Christmas. This sends manufacturers into SPD - surround, protect, defend. They cut costs predicting low profits, they have layoffs, etc. etc.
But this mess was started by a housing bubble that burst and bad credit practices. It has nothing to do with health care. He is USING this crisis to further his agenda.
And think about it ... our 52 week high right now is 13,191.49 on the DOW. So sometime in the last two years, we were hovering around 13,000. And before that even we hit 14,000. In less than 6 months, we've cut the DOW in half. Today we are at 6,501.49, down 92.95 points. If the stock market can be looked at as an indicator (and as I said before WSJ research says it can - though they say 20% chance of Depression and USNewsWorld says 40% - yikes!) we are going to lose a heck of a lot more jobs this year, and government money spending programs aren't going to encourage businesses to put more money out there.
But cut in half. It's crazy.
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