The financial markets---how do I begin?Well, suffice it to say,
my worries first began several years ago when I moved my 401K out of mutual funds into money markets. NO, I haven't made much over the past few years, but at least I haven't lost anything.....
My worries escalated a couple of years ago, when my daughter bought her first house. Now, understand, my daughter did not even have a credit card at that time. She always paid in cash. Poor, but debt-free, would describe her, with an income of around $25K/year. So she finds a house she likes, and applies for a loan. Nada, zilch, they won't give her a loan. You see, she had NO credit rating, never having bought on credit.
And THEN, here is what the loan company did to give her the loan: they allowed her to get a statement from her UTILITY companies, that she had always paid her bills on time, and they used THAT for her credit score! How inventive!
Top that off, they told her that she could borrow up to $190,000! For 100% of the value of the home!!! God, what a miracle!Hell,
I saw so many red flags I nearly choked. I told her to be damned sure she got a FIXED-RATE loan, and she was wise enough to listen to my counsel. (Now fortunately, my daughter was bright enough to know that she did not want to borrow that $190K and instead chose a cheaper house, and to her credit, she always paid her mortgage payments on time and even paid extra on some months.)
But in the larger picture of things, I did some reading and decided that no way was this kind of lending practice safe for the lenders. I remember a time when you had to put 20% down on your home to get a loan, then that dropped to 10% and finally in about 1975 my husband and I got one of the first 5% down loans, which at the time you could only get if you had a really SUPER credit rating.
But I digress....It's shoddy lending practices like these that put us in the fix we are in now. One VERY SIMPLE thing could have prevented this entire fiasco: make the lender who sells the loan, HOLD that loan and worry about getting his money every month. That ONE THING would have stopped this foolishness.
But NO, our free-wheeling, "home-in-every-family" president GUTTED our safe lending practices with de-regulation, and VOILA! Loan peddlers were selling loans to anyone who could sign his name. Literally. People got loans withOUT any proof of income, without any proof of credit rating, without basically anything except the ability to say YES and sign their names. The loan sellers turned around and SOLD those mortgages for A-1 Rated Securities, and they sold them all over the world. It was like a dog pissing on every lamppost he could saddle up to.
At any rate, logically knowing this was going to go down the tubes big time, somewhere down the line, I kept my 401K money in money markets, and then this week, the OTHER SHOE dropped:
One of the biggest and oldest money market funds announced that they would give LESS than $1 per share for the fund. Well, that put me in a total sweat. I went to my 401K's website, with the intent to switch mine over to US Treasuries, and guess what?
That Option no longer existed!!! Now sweat is pouring off me like a prostitute in church!
However, reading the announcements from my 401K provider, I found that they publicly declared that their money markets were in NO danger of being devalued. (Let's hope they are honest!)
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So now, Treasure Secretary
'Kommissar Paulson' (catchy name, don't you think?), the Kommissar has decided that the US taxpayer has to pony up the money to help every soon-to-be-failing bank in the entire country. Thank you, O Great One! Just what I wanted to do, absorb another $1 Trillion or so in US debt! I believe that puts us up to something like $10 Trillion in debt now, isn't that impressive?
We've just gone from the capitalist society to the socialist society in one fell swoop, and guess who we thank? We thank the republican party! How wonderful!And what, you say, brought this on?Well, DE-regulation....aka letting the people with money spend it any way they want. And the prime problem with this deregulation involved the Sub-prime Mortgage crisis.
Because, you see, when MONEY is involved, people will do ANYTHING to make MONEY. Politics and religion don't mean crap to them, and I don't mean that disrespectfully, but people have NO MORALS when it comes to money,
abso-f*cking-posi-lutely NONE. ALWAYS REMEMBER THAT!! We NEED regulation, and we needed it about 20 years ago.
Eliot Spitzer nailed Bush on predatory lending practices, and he took a big fall for doing it. But nobody listened to him.The president of these United States PREVENTED the states from STOPPING predatory lending. You heard me, he not only allowed predatory lending,
he made it IMPOSSIBLE to stop predatory lending.
AND NOW, "MY FRIENDS", HERE IS THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY, AND I WANT YOU TO READ CAREFULLY AND STUDY THIS, BECAUSE IT'S THE BIGWANA...THIS IS WHAT SHOULD BE ON THE FRONT PAGE OF EVERY NEWS ORGANIZATION OUT THERE RIGHT NOW!!
FIRST, read this article:And here's Spitzer's original article on Bush's treasonous act in the sub-prime mess, just prior to getting outed on the call girl episode that brought Spitzer down.
NOW, read this page to see how the Bush admin **caused** the sub-prime mess that Eliot Spitzer was getting ready to expose. Bush **stopped** the US States from preventing predatory lending.
Now, bear in mind that the OCC claims it's innocent in all of this, and one of the big talking points is that the states have control over state banks, but NOT over national banks. However,
several in the State of New York accused the OCC of being complicit in the lack of national bank oversight regarding predatory lending.Because the OCC was charged with organizing and administering a uniform system of banking, the OCC employed "Federal preemption," arguing that any other approach simply led to chaos. In short, the states could not oversee or regulate national banks, regardless their suspicions of predatory or dangerous lending practices.
A similar situation occurred in the now infamous "Keating 5" Scandal, one of whom involved was.
....(get ready).....(drum-roll.........)........Yep, your "friend" and (
not) mine--->>>
Mr. John McCain.(ta-DUM!!)Go to this page to read the following:A somewhat similar preemption occurred during the Keating Lincoln Savings and Loan Association scandal of the 1980/s. This preemption involved the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. San Francisco examiners suspected that Lincoln was engaged in high risk investments. Keating asked that the examiners be removed in favor of Seattle based examiners. At first the FHLB objected the removal of the San Francisco examiners. Then, oddly enough, by a vote of 2 to 1, it removed them, recommending that "oversight of Lincoln be handed either to the bank board's Washington, D.C., office or to examiners from the Federal Home Loan Bank of Seattle."
Keating, apparently, had squealed long and loudly about the San Francisco examiners. His voice was heard.
A year later, that scandal finally broke with the bank board taking "over Lincoln, with $5.5 billion in assets, saying it posed a threat to the banking system. Losses at the institution, which has vast holdings of undeveloped land in Arizona, are expected to exceed $2 billion. "
The FHLB's handling of the Lincoln case was cause for much Congressional scrutiny. Guess who worked for the FHLB during this time. Yup, Julie L. Williams, soon to be Chief Counsel at the OCC.To update you on Julie Williams: Julie Williams has been the acting comptroller of the currency since October 2004. [The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) is the federal agency that charters, regulates, and supervises all national and foreign banks in the U.S. (National banks such as Chase, Citibank, and MBNA issue most of the credit cards in the U.S.).] Yes, this SAME Julie Williams who was involved in the Keating scandal, it looks suspiciously like she's probably involved this one too. Gee, who woulda thunk it?
And who funds the OCC, you might ask. Well, guess what? The BANKS fund the OCC budget!!! Banks are subject to annual fee assessments by the OCC, which since 1914 have been asset-based. They also pay fees to cover the cost of processing corporate applications. Those two sources together account for nearly 97 percent of the OCC's $413 million annual budget. Yeah...that's right...these same banks who participated in predatory lending, these banks who fund the OCC who made an "exception" to the normal rules...these banks PAY for the OCC who MAKES THE RULES. Doesn't that just make you all warm and snuggly?WOULD SOMEONE PLEASE GET OUT MY HIP BOOTS, THIS SH*T IS REALLY, AND I MEAN *REALLY* DEEP!!!!! What we have here is a blatant transfer of wealth: the government prevented oversight of the banks, which resulted in shoddy lending that caused bank defaults, which now is being bought with taxpayer money, except we don't have that money so it's borrowed money, and which will result in devastation of the middle class due to debt for the foreseeable future. Your dollars are almost worth as much as pesos at this point. Welcome to the New World Order.
ADDENDUM: Now WE get to bail out foreign banks too. Isn't that just too chummy....In a change from the original proposal sent to Capitol Hill, foreign-
based banks with big U.S. operations could qualify for the Treasury
Department’s mortgage bailout, according to the fine print of an
administration statement Saturday night.===
And that is why I will never vote republican again, and I do not care WHO is running for office from that ticket. Because frankly,
the president is merely a figurehead and it's the
party that runs the office.
But at this point, it probably makes no difference how I vote, we are totally screwed.
