I second Professor Rappaport's motion below. The Paul Gigot piece he links to is a must read.
He's a little footnote on the Fannie and Fred corruption. When the government wastes millions of dollars, I can find it amusing. When it wastes billions, I get concerned. When you have trillions tied up in a financially unsound scheme that threatens the whole economy, and even has massive global implications, I get downright annoyed.
The combination of utter corruption on the backside, combined with liberal sanctimoniousness on the surface, a la Barney Frank et al., I find very difficult to bear. But it's important to remember the Republicans are up to their necks in this mess as well, with a few exceptions. I know Bush is a lame duck and all, but the White House has seemed pretty pathetic over the last few weeks on this issue. Given they are not up for reelection, couldn't they grow an insta-spine for a few months?
I'll just repeat my prediction that both Fan and Fred are insolvent as hell and we are going to end up picking up their tab in big way -- by we, I mean the United States. Their accounting is dubious at best, and it's hard to believe that with no oversight the rot goes no deeper than what came out during the last accounting scandals. And of course, the housing market is probably not finished softening, so parts of their balance sheets are going to begin stinking, like bodies buried in the cellar. I do not have a lot of confidence that an Obama administration will face down the lobbies and clean up the rot. Instead I predict we will get a lot of happy talk about the Joads being able to buy a home of their own (Ma! Look! An indoor privy!) while the dollar gets hammered and and those credit lines into the treasury turn into giant sucking machines. So while Republicans let the economy slide towards a cliff out of cowardice, the Democrats will push it along out of ideology, feeding us a bunch of New Deal bull along the way. This makes me sad.
Given the ascendancy of the left right now, the thing to do is just nationalize these entities, probably. That would be better than crony capitalism. It would be better to break them up into 20 pieces and privatize them, but politically that is not going to happen any time soon.
If I had money enough to be worrying about it, I would be selling dollars, buying gold, and not buying real estate, because this thing has a ways to go.
DICK ARMEY sounds right to me. This legislation looks close to the worst of all worlds. A bailout without accountability or any limits that I see to how big the bag is we end up holding.
Careful study of these photos suggests that Senator Pajama does not walk on water.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1038705/Pictured-Passersby-shock-Brown-Obama-turn-park.html
Posted by: dearieme | July 26, 2008 at 12:34 PM