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Wednesday February 11, 2009 01:34 |
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 From last night's (2/9/09) first press conference with President Obama:
Obama: "The Federal government is the only entity left with the resources to get the economy going again."
*The federal government doesn't have the resources! It is going to borrow and print money in a futile attempt to create the "resources". This will make things even worse. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that government debt is not the solution. It was private sector job growth that got us out of the recessions of the late 70s and 80s.Â
Obama: "You have some people, very sincere, who philosophically just think the govt has no business interfering in the marketplace. And in fact there are several who suggested that FDR was wrong to intervene in the New Deal. They're fighting battles that I thought were resolved a pretty long time ago."
*The Democratic "solution" is unfortunately based on something that was tired and failed nearly 80 years ago - in the 1930s! That Depression lasted 15 years. More recently, Reagan did the exact opposite in 1981 when he came into office with an even worse recession than the one we have now. He slashed government spending. Froze government programs and gave substantial tax breaks to businesses and workers.Â
*The Democrats are doing the exact opposite. They're drastically increasing government spending and debt, while letting tax breaks expire (next year). This can only have the opposite result of Reagan's success in the 1980s.Â
*The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says the spending package will actually lower GDP by .1 - .3 percent. "Do nothing" according to the CBO and it would result in less debt and higher growth.Â
*Wall Street may not understand history, but it understands economics and the Dow plummeted more than 4.5% today (nearly 400 points) after Obama detailed his economic plan in a press conference last night. They are wholly underwhelmed.Â
OBAMA: "Most economists almost unanimously recognize... that government is an important element of introducing some additional demand into the economy." |
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Saturday October 04, 2008 13:05 |
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 Stanley Kurtz - Sept. 29, 2008
What exactly does a "community organizer" do? Barack Obama's rise has left many Americans asking themselves that question. Here's a big part of the answer: Community organizers intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to customers with poor credit.
In the name of fairness to minorities, community organizers occupy private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and confront executives at their homes - and thereby force financial institutions to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers.
In other words, community organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it.
The seeds of today's financial meltdown lie in the Community Reinvestment Act - a law passed in 1977 and made riskier by unwise amendments and regulatory rulings in later decades.
CRA was meant to encourage banks to make loans to high-risk borrowers, often minorities living in unstable neighborhoods. That has provided an opening to radical groups like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to abuse the law by forcing banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in "subprime" loans to often uncreditworthy poor and minority customers.
Any bank that wants to expand or merge with another has to show it has complied with CRA - and approval can be held up by complaints filed by groups like ACORN.
In fact, intimidation tactics, public charges of racism and threats to use CRA to block business expansion have enabled ACORN to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contributions from America's financial institutions. |
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Saturday September 27, 2008 02:19 |
Wall Street Journal
SEPTEMBER 23, 2008
Many monumental errors and misjudgments contributed to the acute financial turmoil in which we now find ourselves. Nevertheless, the vast accumulation of toxic mortgage debt that poisoned the global financial system was driven by the aggressive buying of subprime and Alt-A mortgages, and mortgage-backed securities, by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The poor choices of these two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) -- and their sponsors in Washington -- are largely to blame for our current mess. How did we get here? Let's review: In order to curry congressional support after their accounting scandals in 2003 and 2004, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac committed to increased financing of "affordable housing." They became the largest buyers of subprime and Alt-A mortgages between 2004 and 2007, with total GSE exposure eventually exceeding $1 trillion. In doing so, they stimulated the growth of the subpar mortgage market and substantially magnified the costs of its collapse. |
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