StumbleUpon | mr-damon's blog posts

http://mr-damon.stumbleupon.com/review/27715797/

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:37:33 -0800

http://mr-damon.stumbleupon.com/review/27449570/

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:37:50 -0800

http://mr-damon.stumbleupon.com/review/26022967/

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:09:41 -0700

Sarah Palin : A rash plan, I

In an interview broadcast Wednesday on the "CBS Evening News," the Republican vice presidential candidate cast herself as a federalist in explaining why she thought the court got it wrong on the landmark decision that legalized abortion.

"I think it should be a states issue not a federal government, mandated, mandating yes or no on such an important issue. I'm in that sense a federalist, where I believe that states should have more say in the laws of their lands and individual areas," said Palin.

Sigh. OK, Sarah (and the reporter who wrote this piece), let's have a lesson in American history:

"In general, the Federalists were those who supported the ratification of the Constitution and the creation of a stronger centralized government... The founder of this party was Alexander Hamilton, George Washington's Secretary of the Treasury during his first term as President... A major emphasis of most of Hamilton's policies and indeed the general outlook for the Federalist Party was that the federal government was to be dominant over the state governments.

"The Federalists were dominated by conservative businessmen and merchants in the major cities who supported a strong national government... Ideologically the controversy between (18th century) Republicans and Federalists stemmed from a difference of principle and style. In terms of style, the Federalists distrusted the public, thought the elite should be in charge, and favored national power over state power."

http://mr-damon.stumbleupon.com/review/26020936/

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:26:34 -0700

After large-scale financial disasters, the press is usually criticized -- often justly -- for ignoring the problem, but it's hard to make that case with the subprime mess. If no one saw this coming, they were not looking.

"This has been a very slow-moving train wreck," said Andrew Leckey, director of the center for business journalism at Arizona State University. "But it came wrapped in the warm feelings of home ownership while the executives behind it used obfuscation and a lack of transparency to lie about how deeply they were in the subprime business."

As Mr. Davidson and Mr. Blumberg showed, there's more than one way to get behind the lies. Using an ad they placed on Craigslist -- "Were you employed in the subprime mortgage industry?" -- the pair proceeded to assemble a remarkably likable rogues gallery of participants up and down the subprime food chain. One was Clarence Nathan, who sounded like a nice guy, but his house was in foreclosure, and he did not have full-time employment. He had no assets to speak of, and yet he received a loan for $450,000.

And then Mr. Blumberg asked Mr. Nathan the stupid question: "Would you have loaned you the money?"

Mr. Nathan answered: "I wouldn't have loaned me the money. And nobody I know would have loaned me the money. I know guys who are criminals who wouldn't loan me that, and they break kneecaps."

The pair suggested that an excess of global capital -- a doubling in available capital in just six years to $72 trillion -- left a "giant pool of money" in need of returns. Enter mortgage-backed securities. A lot of them.

One of the remarkable things about the report is the absence of evildoers, even though the cumulative effect of their behavior is now threatening to upend our nation. Early in the broadcast, we hear from Mike Francis, an executive director at the residential mortgage trading desk of Morgan Stanley. "From our standpoint it's like, there's a guy out there with a lot of money. We've got to find a way to be his sole provider of bonds to fill his appetite. And his appetite's massive."

The story then turns to another Mike, Mike Garner, a bartender in Nevada turned mortgage bundler. Mr. Garner said that market appetites for anything that resembled a mortgage pushed loan standards down: "No income, no asset. You don't have to state anything. Just have a credit score and a pulse." (Mr. Blumberg pointed out that the pulse thing was optional: 23 dead people in Ohio were also approved.)

http://mr-damon.stumbleupon.com/review/25837765/

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:35:26 -0700

When Congressional leaders and Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, the two major party presidential candidates, trooped to the White House on Thursday afternoon, most signs pointed toward a bipartisan agreement on a grand compromise that could be accepted by all sides and signed into law by the weekend. It was intended to pump billions of dollars into the financial system, restoring liquidity and keeping credit flowing to businesses and consumers.

"We're in a serious economic crisis," Mr. Bush told reporters as the meeting began shortly before 4 p.m. in the Cabinet Room, adding, "My hope is we can reach an agreement very shortly."

But once the doors closed, the smooth-talking House Republican leader, John A. Boehner of Ohio, surprised many in the room by declaring that his caucus could not support the plan to allow the government to buy distressed mortgage assets from ailing financial companies.

Mr. Boehner pressed an alternative that involved a smaller role for the government, and Mr. McCain, whose support of the deal is critical if fellow Republicans are to sign on, declined to take a stand.

The talks broke up in angry recriminations, according to accounts provided by a participant and others who were briefed on the session, and were followed by dueling news conferences and interviews rife with partisan finger-pointing.

Friday morning, on CBS's "The Early Show," Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the lead Democratic negotiator, said the bailout had been derailed by internal Republican politics.

"I didn't know I was going to be the referee for an internal G.O.P. ideological civil war," Mr. Frank said, according to The A.P.Thursday, in the Roosevelt Room after the session, the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., literally bent down on one knee as he pleaded with Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, not to "blow it up" by withdrawing her party's support for the package over what Ms. Pelosi derided as a Republican betrayal.

"I didn't know you were Catholic," Ms. Pelosi said, a wry reference to Mr. Paulson's kneeling, according to someone who observed the exchange. She went on: "It's not me blowing this up, it's the Republicans."

Mr. Paulson sighed. "I know. I know."

It was the very outcome the White House had said it intended to avoid, with partisan presidential politics appearing to trample what had been exceedingly delicate Congressional negotiations.

http://mr-damon.stumbleupon.com/review/25583373/

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 12:40:54 -0700

Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on the Senate banking committee, said in a television interview that cost to the government of purchasing bad debt could run to $1 trillion -- a potential warning sign since Mr. Shelby is a longtime skeptic of government intervention in the private market.

Until Mr. Shelby was interviewed on Friday morning, officials on Capitol Hill had been careful not to discuss specific figures, though the rescue envisioned by the Treasury Department clearly entails a government appropriation of hundreds of billions of dollars.

The federal government already has pledged more than $600 billion in the past year to bail out, or help bail out, some of the biggest names in American finance.

http://mr-damon.stumbleupon.com/review/25516496/

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:37:35 -0700

"People are basically saying that things are going on that they can't really justify," Sam Stovall, the chief investment strategist at Standard & Poor's, said. "And if you can't explain them away logically, logic says get out of the way."

With the Fed now saddled with billions of dollars in loans and collateral from troubled financial institutions, the Treasury said it would issue $40 billion in new government bonds to help the central bank.

In Washington, President Bush -- who for months had asserted that "the fundamentals of the economy are strong" -- offered a subtle but significant revision of that language on Wednesday. The White House served up a new formulation: "The economy has the strength to be able to deal with the shocks."

Dana Perino, the president's spokeswoman, suggested that the new language reflected not only the administration's sensitivity to the fall campaign but also a new reality on Wall Street.

"I think it reflects a realization that we have today, the market dealing with a lot of information that's coming its way," Ms. Perino said. "We believe in the strength of our -- and the resiliency of our system to be able to be flexible, to be able to handle that information, but it's just going to take us a few days, maybe longer, to see how that shakes out."

http://mr-damon.stumbleupon.com/review/24471135/

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 10:24:52 -0700

"On Sept. 7, 2006, Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University, stood before an audience of economists at the International Monetary Fund and announced that a crisis was brewing. In the coming months and years, he warned, the United States was likely to face a once-in-a-lifetime housing bust, an oil shock, sharply declining consumer confidence and, ultimately, a deep recession. He laid out a bleak sequence of events: homeowners defaulting on mortgages, trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities unraveling worldwide and the global financial system shuddering to a halt. These developments, he went on, could cripple or destroy hedge funds, investment banks and other major financial institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

"The audience seemed skeptical, even dismissive. As Roubini stepped down from the lectern after his talk, the moderator of the event quipped, "I think perhaps we will need a stiff drink after that." People laughed -- and not without reason. At the time, unemployment and inflation remained low, and the economy, while weak, was still growing, despite rising oil prices and a softening housing market. And then there was the espouser of doom himself: Roubini was known to be a perpetual pessimist, what economists call a "permabear." When the economist Anirvan Banerji delivered his response to Roubini's talk, he noted that Roubini's predictions did not make use of mathematical models and dismissed his hunches as those of a career naysayer.

"But Roubini was soon vindicated. In the year that followed, subprime lenders began entering bankruptcy, hedge funds began going under and the stock market plunged. There was declining employment, a deteriorating dollar, ever-increasing evidence of a huge housing bust and a growing air of panic in financial markets as the credit crisis deepened. By late summer, the Federal Reserve was rushing to the rescue, making the first of many unorthodox interventions in the economy, including cutting the lending rate by 50 basis points and buying up tens of billions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities. When Roubini returned to the I.M.F. last September, he delivered a second talk, predicting a growing crisis of solvency that would infect every sector of the financial system. This time, no one laughed."

http://mr-damon.stumbleupon.com/review/21772794/

Sun, 25 May 2008 09:22:53 -0700

"Mrs. Clinton had been saying that some in the Obama campaign and in the media were trying to push her out of the race and she didn't know why.

""Historically, that makes no sense," she said, "so I find it a bit of a mystery."

"Question: "You don't buy the party unity argument?"

"Mrs. Clinton: "I don't because, again, I've been around long enough. You know my husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. You know, I just don't understand it and there's lot of speculation about why it is."

"She was referencing the assassination as a familiar timeline benchmark that might remind listeners that Mr. Kennedy was campaigning in June. (Her references were not quite right, since those campaigns began much later than this one, but that's another story.) At the same time, she used an eye-popping word in the context of a presidential campaign with a black candidate.

"In the deli section, we were seeking reaction from Clinton aides. One of them, Mo Elleithee, who had been with Mrs. Clinton at the editorial meeting, said her comments were being distorted.

"A usually mild-mannered man, he was noticeably angry. He gave an on the record statement, saying that any attempt to portray her comment as anything other than a timeline was "inaccurate." He came back again to add the word "outrageous."

"Mrs. Clinton, meanwhile, was finishing up her short talk with the people in the produce section, where voters were asking her about her decision to pursue the nomination, often offering words of encouragement. One woman asked her about the once-arcane subject of superdelegates.

""I'm racing against the wind here," Mrs. Clinton said, noticing that Mr. Obama had the "establishment" endorsements in the state. Afterward, she posed for pictures with workers behind the deli counter and went into a holding room.

"By then, the Obama campaign had issued a statement, linking to the Post item and saying her comment "was unfortunate and has no place in this campaign." Privately, we were told, the Obama camp was livid.

"As the news whipped around the Web and on cable television. furious comments from readers started piling up on Web sites (including our own).

"As it did on cable. Keith Olbermann, granted no friend of Senator Clinton's, went on a tirade about all of what he considers her mistakes in this campaign. It's, without further comment, tough beyond measure."

http://mr-damon.stumbleupon.com/review/19741733/

Wed, 21 May 2008 05:31:11 -0700