CosmicConservative’s last blog post..Insanity on the march?

That’s simply not true I have run into few if any Racist Rethuglicans.

Obama has played this so perfectly that people like mikeca will not allow themselves to see that they’ve been played. The Left has invested so much into Obama that they now have to willfully ignore facts in order to maintain their illusion of Obama’s "changey-hopey" mantra.

You know a lot of people feel just like you when McCain calls himself a "Maverick".

Yes, you are right.  It was both Democrats and Republicans, and the things you said above.  I was just upset because the news I read said what the Republicans were the reason we had this mess and in the picture of the Democrats signing, they took it as "They" had done it.

It was Republicans and Democrats and President Bush had to get them to hurry because of our security.  People don’t realize those wanting to do us harm are lurking.  It was in the interest of our National Security too.

CosmicConservative’s last blog post..Lunch in Mongolia?

I am a big believer in Occam’s razor. In daily life that really boils down to me generally accepting the simplest explanation possible. That’s a major reason I don’t go for conspiracy theories, they are usually complex, contrived things that hit too many people’s hot buttons for them to be likely to be true. Also I think that even when there are complex DETAILS in a situation, the fundamental forces that pushed things forward were usually pretty simple.

So how did we get into a situation where the government is having to pony up a trillion dollars worth of taxpayer cash to bail out entire financial industries?

Well, a lot of it boils down to good intentions and bad assumptions. In this case the good intentions were that government and private institutions should do everything possible to encourage home ownership. On the surface that seems a laudable goal. Just about any study will tell you that people who own their own homes tend to be more stable, more responsible and more likely to move UP the economic scale. So both the federal government and private financial companies went out of their way to create incentives such as adjustable rate mortgages to facilitate just that sort of entry into the home ownership lifestyle.

Couple that with a financial crisis, in part fueled by the 9/11 attack, which led the Federal Reserve Board to embark on an historic interest rate decline, where interest rates dropped to levels that made it virtually impossible to build any sort of savings based on traditional CDs or savings accounts, but where trading in financial paper, such as individual mortgages, was providing not only higher interest rates, but with adjustable rate mortgages, the potential for tremendous growth in investment returns, and the end result seems to me to be pretty predictable… in retrospect anyway…

The end result was a flood of new home purchases by people who traditionally could not afford to buy a home, and a rush of people who COULD afford to own homes into more and more expensive homes to cash in on the only game in town, which was real estate appreciation.

As long as home values went up, this created a self-perpetuating dynamic of money flowing into the bubble, which is the classic definition of a bubble I guess.

All it took was for interest rates to start going up, or for home values to start to decline (or both) and those people who bought first homes or status homes suddenly found themselves with monthly payments that they could no longer afford. This created tremendous downward pressure on home values since people began to desperately try to either refinance or sell their houses. Many people ended up PAYING additional money to get out from under their crushing ARMs. This negative equity meant that even those who had leveraged UP to get higher status homes found themselves unable to maintain enough cash to even purchase the sort of home they had moved out of originally.

This sort of thing has a sort of inertia of its own. It would not surprise me to learn that the financial wizards of the world looked at this situation and projected the eventual bankruptcy of enough of the financial institutions that provide capital and fluidity in world markets, that the very real specter of a DEPRESSION, not merely RECESSION, began to solidify in their models. Which leads us to the trillion dollar bailout to avoid just that sort of scenario.

So, if that is a remotely reasonable description of how we got to where we are, the question of "who is to blame" is a bit more difficult to identify.

Clearly there are the seeds of this fiasco in the 90s when the real estate bubble began to manifest itself. No doubt there were alarm bells going off all over the place when the prime interest rate dropped to almost zero. Undoubtedly there were signs within the financial institutions themselves that they had committed far too much of their capital on these mortgages, bought and sold as commodities like pork bellies.

So I can’t help but blame everybody. Democrats, Republicans, auditors, CEOs, Investment houses, regulatory bodies, yes, even individual borrowers themselves.

Basically it reminds me of the "irrational exuberance" that was so famously behind the .com bubble.

So I can’t blame Clinton any more than I can blame Bush and vice versa. I can’t blame the White House any more than I can blame Congress and vice versa.

Right now I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping that we can ride this tiger until we can get away from its fangs.

Hopefully we’ll learn something from it, but based on the history of the free market, I’m pretty sure we won’t.

But in spite of that, the alternative to the free market is still, in my mind, clearly worse.

CosmicConservative’s last blog post..Lunch in Mongolia?

Hell was NOT THE WORD.

Idiots….it was and is a SERIOUS THREAT to those that want to do us wrong. It took Republican’s and George Bush to get them to act immediately…

Dean, I could actually scream a four letter word here….HELLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!

Ahhhhh……..

I am furious.  The absolutely Wizard of Oz, is behind this.  There is no doubt in my mind the lunatic Hollywood crowd, where he received, $28,500.00 per plate, netting him, $9 mil., has been giving this puppet behind the land of OZ, acting lessons, speaking lessons and he is on his way home to be with his ACORN crowd and the Chicago thug political gang to get ready for Friday night.

We will see Oz himself slicker than ever.  I hope he fails only because he has fooled so many good people here in America, Oh…and Europe.

I had to turn off news today because I am getting to involved.

I really appreciate you, Cosmic Conserative.  This Wizard (ha) was going to bring hope and change to millions, it is so sad.  I actually thought it would be good for him to come back in four years when he had more honestly real experience.

Oz…bama did not even come out and condemn the Democrat’s son that broke into Palin’s e-mail.  I guess he will be arrested and the most the hijacker hack will receive is two years.  Sick….

Elisha Feger’s last blog post..Sugar to gasoline

Obama has played this so perfectly that people like mikeca will not allow themselves to see that they’ve been played. The Left has invested so much into Obama that they now have to willfully ignore facts in order to maintain their illusion of Obama’s "changey-hopey" mantra.

And they are perfectly willing to do so.

This allows Obama and his surrogates to do or say ANYTHING they want and still blame the "evil" Republicans.

This is why, day after day after tiresome day, we get stories from the Obama camp about how McCain is exploiting Obama’s race when the ONLY one talking about race on this campaign is Barack Obama and his crew. Forget that McCain has never even mentioned Obama’s race except to congratulate the country for having nominated a black man for President.

Obama will say it, and people like mikeca will FIND it, somehow, somewhere, some way. Because if Obama SAID it it MUST be true, and besides, EVERYONE knows that Rethuglicans are racist, homophobic, sexist bigots anyway. So it’s there, even if it is in some obscure indecipherable WASP code that only THEY can see or smell.

"Reality based community" has always been a hilarious unintended irony, but it has now become pure farce.

CosmicConservative’s last blog post..Lunch in Mongolia?