The AIG bailout
The Feds decided that sometimes there can be too much tough love, and so a creative loan was cobbled together for failing AIG. Even most fiscal conservatives seem to think AIG was too big to let sink; it could have dragged us all down with it.
That leaves the basic problems still in place, and much of Congress still in the pockets of the banking and real estate industries. Campaign promises, shmomises.
Will events of recent days act as a wake-up call? And can we trust anyone to know the remedies? If few saw this coming, how much faith can we have in their ability to fix it?
Well, let’s see: McCain seems to have been prescient about Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac. But his now-adviser Phil Gramm appears to have been part of the problem back then.
And speaking of “part of the problem,” the Dems and even Obama (who hasn’t even been in Congress all that long) have dirty hands, too. (See also see this and this. The latter contains a nice rundown of some of the major players on both sides).
[NOTE: For some historical perspective: in the 1929 Crash the market fell 30% in six days, most of it in the first two days. But by July 1932 it had gone down about 90% from its pre-crash level. That’s why that depression is called “Great,” and it’s not a compliment.
On “Black Monday” of October 1987, the market fell about 22% and then down to 30% the next day. The intervention of the Federal Reserve in that case limited the severity and duration of the fallout.
And this is quite fascinating—a list and description of the ten greatest stock market crashes of the twentieth century.]
nice post!!! data rich… and definitely helps those listening to obama call this the depression or crash of 2008, realize how ridiculous that sounds at this point.
here is a fox news piece on fannie and ginnie and the democrat machine… and obama is finally not shown in a good light.
http://www.foxnews.com/video/index.html?playerId=videolandingpage&streamingFormat=FLASH&referralObject=3092776&referralPlaylistId=playlist
on another note, i wanted to ask you if you have noticed leftists posing as conservatives popping up?
turns out that obamas basement corps have been astroturfing… (creating a false sense of grass roots… basically doing what the soviets said. making history, not reacting to it).
Turns out that one of obama’s main people David Axelrod was dubbed by business week as the “master of astroturfing”. http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/mar2008/db20080314_121054.htm
from wiki:
Astroturfers attempt to orchestrate the actions of apparently diverse and geographically distributed individuals, by both overt (“outreach”, “awareness”, etc.) and covert (disinformation) means.
so basically you have covert operations who go out and pretend to be natural situations. (think of the few masked people in a crowd of protestors. think of people crashing blogs to inject messages, and on and on).
such methods were originally the kinds of things that the soviets specialized in. and obama being surrounded by communists (ayers, dhorn, etc) and following their advice (axelrod, alinsky, etc)..
out of curiousity… i decided to do a bit of fact checking…. on axelrod…
turns out that he sells politicos not on their market policies or issues, but specializes on selling them as “personalities”. which is why obama has come off as he has. [its how he got deval patrick in mass governorship… which has been a “train wreck”]
and sure as the sun will rise tomorrow… another communist operative red diaper baby thing. its like you cant shake an obama bush without all the red berries falling out.
Myril Axelrod was formerly a writer for PM, a leftist tabloid newspaper published from 1940 to 1948 in New York City. [city journal piece on it: http://www.city-journal.org/article02.php?aid=1480 ]
The paper was founded by Ralph McAllister Ingersoll, a liberal who thought he could use Communists on his staff to help with the circulation of the paper. The Communists, however, used the paper for their own purposes and he lost influence over the magazine after entering the Army.
In fact, in 1946 five of the staff members of PM’s Washington, DC bureau resigned in protest over the high level of Communist influence within the newspaper. The five resigned after three other members of the staff were fired. According to the five who resigned:
Although not himself a Communist, he [Ralph Ingersoll] has continuously yielded to Communist pressure and has denounced as factionalists those staff members who have tried to keep the party line out of the paper. He has destroyed the confidence of those who believe that PM should be as realistic and critical of Russian foreign policy as in its evaluation of the foreign policy of our own government. (New York Times, June 15, 1946)
The staff was comprised of both Communists and non-Communist liberals. The paper was overtly political and the writers didn’t hide their political biases in their writings. Ingersoll refused to carry advertising because he didn’t want the paper to be influenced by advertisers. City Journal writer Roger Starr noted: “Although every member of PM’s staff was profoundly anti-Hitler, the staff was divided into two cliques: the liberals who regarded the Soviet Union as a slave state, devoid of individual rights, and the liberals who regarded the Soviet Union as a living demonstration of a truly humane society.”
For example, Leo Huberman, a Communist sympathizer, was the labor news editor. I.F. Stone was the Washington, DC correspondent for PM. In the 1980s, a KGB agent fingered Stone as a willing participant in Soviet intelligence operations in the U.S.
The paper, however, was never a financial success without advertising. It received funding from Marshall Field III, a leftist millionaire who kept the paper running for eight years. Field also funded the Industrial Areas Foundation, a training school for radical leftist organizers, which was headed by Saul Alinsky. (Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were trained by Alinsky radicals in Chicago).
Former Communist Eugene Lyons, writing in The Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America, noted that PM’s staff included a former editor of the Daily Worker; another was former editor of The Communist; and a third was a leader of the Communist Youth League; a fourth was a Soviet government official; and a fifth was the former staff cartoonist for the Daily Worker, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, USA.
is it any wonder then that the corp of the problems were all resulting on policies of leftists and left communists over the past decades? fannie and ginnie being a democratic cash cow, and political force…
is it any wonder that the more i dig, i keep finding the trail lines going back to the same things… clintons through fullbright… obama through the chicago machine… terrorists… operatives… etc
once could almost imagine that they are stuck in a bad spy movie…
want to see how connected this is?
well axelrod is handling obamas campaign.
his mother wrote for PM a rag taken over by communists…
the staff writers are a who’s who of people and include the likes of stone..
the writers were linked to another leftist rag called the negro story “[the] Negro Story’s editorial stance, rather than “non-political,” was in many ways close to that of black and white Communists, socialists, and internationalists, whose wartime positions combined pro-labor, pro-black, anti-fascist sentiment in equal measure…”
and the punch line?
“Among those writing for Negro Story was Frank Marshall Davis, the Communist Party member who became Barack Obama’s mentor when Obama was living in Hawaii in the 1970s. ”
so obama was already connected with axelrod through their parents and parents friends.
its like boys from brazil meets kafka and odessa with a bit of clancy in it…
Waiting to see how the networks are going to spin the latest drop of the DJA. It’s not as low as in 2003 but that of course will not stop comparisons to 1929. Obama and Mccain are both flogging the usual suspects: those greedy robber barons on Wall St and thus far not touching the third rail: subprime mortgages grew out of an attempt by our government to encourage home ownership for all as a means of atonement for alleged discriminatory lending practices in the past. Talk about unintended consequences!
It turns out i may have been a wiser person in how i handled the 1973-1974 crash. I rode my bike all the time and played with friends in tree houses. Apparently one helluva strategy since i don’t recall there even being a crash!
“on another note, i wanted to ask you if you have noticed leftists posing as conservatives popping up?”
OH yeah I noticed this. I go to Alan Colmes site to counter his lies and run into people like that.. even today. Here’s an example
http://www.alan.com/2008/09/17/precious-and-few/
“For most of my adult life, I’ve considered myself a conservative Republican. Earlier this year, I realized I couldn’t vote for the Republican candidate for president that was being offered and found myself listening to, and agreeing with, Barack Obama. We put his sign up in our yard and helped make it close in the primary, although Senator Clinton did win the state.
Anyway – up until this year, I didn’t pay much attention to Democrats or anyone who identified themselves as Liberal, with one exception. I found I could always listen to you. Even when I agreed with what Sean Hannity was saying, many times I couldn’t stand to hear him say it. Watching your show on Fox (and until this year, Fox was the ONLY news channel I watched), I would cringe as he interrupted and shouted and wish that you were on my side politically, because you were so much more civil and polite.”
and s/he kept going on and on , so i replied with
I love all these “conservatives” who say they’re going to vote for a Marxist. Who falls for this stuff?
Posted by Vince P
September 17th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
I was asking my husband, a finance guy, about why this crisis was different from and worse than, say, the 1987 crash. (I’m inquisitive, but uneducated about economics.) His answer is that this crisis results in a tightening of credit – for everyone, not just big outfits – that didn’t occur in 1987. So I’m more concerned about this thing than the percentage drop in the Dow would seem to warrant.
On the other hand (she says from the depths of her ignorance), doesn’t a tight-money situation translate to downward pressure on inflation? (Is this even a tight-money situation?)
Right before election time there are *tons* of “converts” pop up – the closer to the election the more. They will also claim that Obama is now channeling Reagan and is (by far) the most conservative candidate on the ticket. It always happens.
Back to AIG, been trying to get my retirement out of a few places and into my IRA. Never really payed much attention but, alas, it turns out my remaining money is managed by AIG. Since mine was one of the standard state employee retirement programs I guess quite a few of us in Tennessee are in the same boat. I guess I’m not getting my money out any time soon (and my removal has/had nothing to do with this but a change in employment).
*shrug* I guess I’ll keep filing the paper work – since it is in stock that are supposedly *mine* and they do not return the money until they are sold they should still give it back to me. However I have no idea what the laws are there.
strcpy: your pension assets are perfectly safe at AIG. The value of those assets depends on what they are; if you’re in stocks, well…
There is a saying that the only difference between failure and success is that the former means living on tomorrow income, while the latter – on yesterday income. May be, it is time for Americans to abandon their habit to spend money not yet earned? That will be tremendously healthy both for individuals and the nation as a whole. Japans do just that, and this seems do not hinder their progress.