Paulson, Bernanke, and Bush hatched a brilliant plan. It was not a bailout. It did not hook taxpayers. It would have worked. It has the backing of Frank, Schumer, Dodd, Reid, Pelosi, Rangel, Johnson, and Raines, former head of Freddie Mac and Ginnie--all the Democrats who caused this mess! Badly communicated by back door dealing, it was misunderstood by the public, who saw the guilty getting off the hook. It did not address the core problem. Sarbanes Oxley, a complicit SEC, rating agencies, a foolish mark to market rule and others.
With mail running 500-plus to one against Republicans, house members revolted. Senators Shelby and DeMint saw the writing on the wall.
Senator McCain responded. He kept his powder dry at the White House. Now he will get a bill which blows Frank and Dodd (along with their fellow travelers), out of the water. McCain will be our next President.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Why We Must Vote for McCain
The Paulson plan is not a bailout. Bailouts get criminals out of jail prior to trial. Neither is it a grab of taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street moguls. Rather, it is a means to reverse the perverse accounting rules which caused the originators of bad loans and face immediate bankruptcy by enticing entrepreneurs to participate in a restructuring of the credit behind these loans. A $700 billion cost to taxpayers is ridiculous.
A simple example: Bank A grants a $100,000 dollar mortgage to client B who has no capital and little income. Bank A books the mortgage as an asset on his balance sheet at fair market value held to maturity. Anticipating interest payments, this asset may be posted at more than $100,000. Suddenly, payments stop. The house stands. Accounting rules change. Bank A must mark this asset to market. There is no market. If the bank forecloses, The fair market value disappears. The value of houses in the neighborhood declines. Bank A’s credit rating is compromised. It is now in violation of equity rules.
Paulson intervenes. The government buys the house for $25,000, close to the fire sale price and sells it for $40,000 to an entrepreneur—establishing a new fair market value. Bank A now has $25,000 where it had nothing. Its balance sheet is marginally repaired. Entrepreneur B sells the house to new owner C for $60,000, who posts collateral and shows income capable of repaying the mortgage.
The government gets its money back. A new mortgagor has made a sound investment. Bank A has survived the credit crunch. The only losers may be the displaced borrowers who do not participate in the refinancing. These former residents must rent or become part of that small group of homeless. Society survives.
How did all this happen?
Wall Street in 1956 was ruled by Perry Hall at Morgan Stanley, Gus Levey at Goldman, and Bill Solomon at Solomon Brothers, who ran very tight ships. Their capital was private. They, with partners, took all the risks. By controlling this risk, they enjoyed handsome incomes.
Research boutiques and specialty underwriters invaded their turf. Merrill Lynch, envious and losing market share, inveighed negotiated commission rates.
Commissions paid by burgeoning mutual funds and asset management groups fell from 1% or more per transactions to one-tenth of a percent. The old partners retired and pulled their capital. Many firms failed. DuPont, Goodbody, Reynolds, Dean Witter, Glore Forgan merged. They were replaced by new publicly financed firms.
These firms raised capital from the newly popular mutual funds and investment advisors plus willing individual investors enjoying the rising markets of the seventies.
The old regulations worked when the few partnership owners feared loss of their capital. The new managers had no such capital at risk—they enjoyed free participation from public investors intoxicated by the rising value of the bull market.
A new political class—egalitarian, environmental, espousing private rights—abetted by courts legislating circumvention of the Constitution.
Rights were assured from abortion to home ownership. The more rights granted, the richer were the politicians. Earmarks for votes. Well intentioned Barney Frank, Dick Durbin, Nancy Pelosi, Boxer, Sanders, Kennedy, and Carey—the list goes on—all wanted goodies for their constituents. These excesses created deficits. Social Security was stuffed with IOUs. Government teetered. When excesses threatened home ownership, the economy hit the fan.
Mortgages are contracts. They generally require an up-front deposit, a stream of payments and evidence of collateral and income. These requirements eventually caught the attention of politicians. What could they do? Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac came to the rescue. The implied or explicit guarantee of government mortgages was granted. Everyone was entitled to a home, regardless of income or capital.
How to sell these mortgages became the art form of a new breed on Wall Street—the hedge funds, the syndicators, the bundlers. Bunching thousands of mortgages into debt packages and then splitting these packages into disparate parts—income, principal, front and back end and selling these parts worldwide, opacity was created sufficient to dumbfound the public, avoid the regulators and confuse the rating agencies. The Dutch tulip mania was reborn.
The public woke up as the ceiling fell in. Paulson and Bernanke got the job of clean-up.
The 2008 election pits the opponents of leveraging versus the advocates of cheap money. Here McCain and Obama are a perfect match.
For McCain, five and a half years tortured and imprisoned in the Hanoi Hilton may have broken his body but strengthened his spirit. He emerged not a politician, but a statesman—perhaps analogous to Winston Churchill who was anything but a popular conservative in the 1930s.
Native intelligence and sense of smell enabled him to see through the miasma of Washington. Home loans to those with little income to repay seemed improper—Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac notwithstanding.
Loans of taxpayer money syndicated to make it impossible to trace ownership were unreal. Syndication meant obfuscation.
Add to this a media 10-to-1 supporting his opposition candidate using the modern internet to tag funds from the least informed of the populace while supported by the brightest of Ivy League intellectuals we realize what a long shot McCain became.
Read Don Luskin’s Trend Macrolytics, LLC from June 2088 to present and discover the lies the Obama machine propagates. We are not in recession or headed for depression! Unemployment is not threatening. Productivity is rising. Business has readjusted to globalism. Protectionism is a fear, not a solution.
Obama on the other hand, with an Ivy League education, is enticed to Chicago by Saul Alinsky, a far left reformer. There he allied with Bill Ayers, founder of the Weathermen and the avowed terrorists of the 1960s, and financed by the Annenberg Foundation. As chairman, he renounced private education, even public, favoring instead courses in social activism and revolt in place of math, English, and science. He recently stated he would save workers but not shareholders! What a disaster for 401K holders. As chairman of the CAC, he claimed education must stoke resistance to the American system!
Obama, the Pericles of the left, is not mid-stream. He’s on the left bank.
McCain will make a lot of mistakes. He was wrong about short selling. He was wrong about drilling for oil. He was wrong about Chris Cox. He should praise George Bush for winning in Iraq and thank Paulson for saving the economy. The list goes on. But, his selection of Sarah Palin trumps all of his mistakes.
Palin captures the soul of America at its best. Love of family. Faith in church. Patriotism without exception. Truth in law rather than ACLU relativism. Belief in the men on the street, not the mob of the street. Absence of coalitions of gender, race or nationality.
If McCain/Palin sometimes fails on specifics, they bond on integrity and common sense. Against the smug self-righteousness of Yale, Harvard, Princeton intellectualism, comes the straight-from-the-shoulder, no nonsense pragmatism of the Teddy Roosevelt era.
McCain/Palin stand for change not to a new and more sophisticated socialism, but back to the democracy of our forebearers.
Let the commentators be damned. Obama is the Huey Long of twenty-first century politics. John McCain is the George Washington.
A simple example: Bank A grants a $100,000 dollar mortgage to client B who has no capital and little income. Bank A books the mortgage as an asset on his balance sheet at fair market value held to maturity. Anticipating interest payments, this asset may be posted at more than $100,000. Suddenly, payments stop. The house stands. Accounting rules change. Bank A must mark this asset to market. There is no market. If the bank forecloses, The fair market value disappears. The value of houses in the neighborhood declines. Bank A’s credit rating is compromised. It is now in violation of equity rules.
Paulson intervenes. The government buys the house for $25,000, close to the fire sale price and sells it for $40,000 to an entrepreneur—establishing a new fair market value. Bank A now has $25,000 where it had nothing. Its balance sheet is marginally repaired. Entrepreneur B sells the house to new owner C for $60,000, who posts collateral and shows income capable of repaying the mortgage.
The government gets its money back. A new mortgagor has made a sound investment. Bank A has survived the credit crunch. The only losers may be the displaced borrowers who do not participate in the refinancing. These former residents must rent or become part of that small group of homeless. Society survives.
How did all this happen?
Wall Street in 1956 was ruled by Perry Hall at Morgan Stanley, Gus Levey at Goldman, and Bill Solomon at Solomon Brothers, who ran very tight ships. Their capital was private. They, with partners, took all the risks. By controlling this risk, they enjoyed handsome incomes.
Research boutiques and specialty underwriters invaded their turf. Merrill Lynch, envious and losing market share, inveighed negotiated commission rates.
Commissions paid by burgeoning mutual funds and asset management groups fell from 1% or more per transactions to one-tenth of a percent. The old partners retired and pulled their capital. Many firms failed. DuPont, Goodbody, Reynolds, Dean Witter, Glore Forgan merged. They were replaced by new publicly financed firms.
These firms raised capital from the newly popular mutual funds and investment advisors plus willing individual investors enjoying the rising markets of the seventies.
The old regulations worked when the few partnership owners feared loss of their capital. The new managers had no such capital at risk—they enjoyed free participation from public investors intoxicated by the rising value of the bull market.
A new political class—egalitarian, environmental, espousing private rights—abetted by courts legislating circumvention of the Constitution.
Rights were assured from abortion to home ownership. The more rights granted, the richer were the politicians. Earmarks for votes. Well intentioned Barney Frank, Dick Durbin, Nancy Pelosi, Boxer, Sanders, Kennedy, and Carey—the list goes on—all wanted goodies for their constituents. These excesses created deficits. Social Security was stuffed with IOUs. Government teetered. When excesses threatened home ownership, the economy hit the fan.
Mortgages are contracts. They generally require an up-front deposit, a stream of payments and evidence of collateral and income. These requirements eventually caught the attention of politicians. What could they do? Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac came to the rescue. The implied or explicit guarantee of government mortgages was granted. Everyone was entitled to a home, regardless of income or capital.
How to sell these mortgages became the art form of a new breed on Wall Street—the hedge funds, the syndicators, the bundlers. Bunching thousands of mortgages into debt packages and then splitting these packages into disparate parts—income, principal, front and back end and selling these parts worldwide, opacity was created sufficient to dumbfound the public, avoid the regulators and confuse the rating agencies. The Dutch tulip mania was reborn.
The public woke up as the ceiling fell in. Paulson and Bernanke got the job of clean-up.
The 2008 election pits the opponents of leveraging versus the advocates of cheap money. Here McCain and Obama are a perfect match.
For McCain, five and a half years tortured and imprisoned in the Hanoi Hilton may have broken his body but strengthened his spirit. He emerged not a politician, but a statesman—perhaps analogous to Winston Churchill who was anything but a popular conservative in the 1930s.
Native intelligence and sense of smell enabled him to see through the miasma of Washington. Home loans to those with little income to repay seemed improper—Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac notwithstanding.
Loans of taxpayer money syndicated to make it impossible to trace ownership were unreal. Syndication meant obfuscation.
Add to this a media 10-to-1 supporting his opposition candidate using the modern internet to tag funds from the least informed of the populace while supported by the brightest of Ivy League intellectuals we realize what a long shot McCain became.
Read Don Luskin’s Trend Macrolytics, LLC from June 2088 to present and discover the lies the Obama machine propagates. We are not in recession or headed for depression! Unemployment is not threatening. Productivity is rising. Business has readjusted to globalism. Protectionism is a fear, not a solution.
Obama on the other hand, with an Ivy League education, is enticed to Chicago by Saul Alinsky, a far left reformer. There he allied with Bill Ayers, founder of the Weathermen and the avowed terrorists of the 1960s, and financed by the Annenberg Foundation. As chairman, he renounced private education, even public, favoring instead courses in social activism and revolt in place of math, English, and science. He recently stated he would save workers but not shareholders! What a disaster for 401K holders. As chairman of the CAC, he claimed education must stoke resistance to the American system!
Obama, the Pericles of the left, is not mid-stream. He’s on the left bank.
McCain will make a lot of mistakes. He was wrong about short selling. He was wrong about drilling for oil. He was wrong about Chris Cox. He should praise George Bush for winning in Iraq and thank Paulson for saving the economy. The list goes on. But, his selection of Sarah Palin trumps all of his mistakes.
Palin captures the soul of America at its best. Love of family. Faith in church. Patriotism without exception. Truth in law rather than ACLU relativism. Belief in the men on the street, not the mob of the street. Absence of coalitions of gender, race or nationality.
If McCain/Palin sometimes fails on specifics, they bond on integrity and common sense. Against the smug self-righteousness of Yale, Harvard, Princeton intellectualism, comes the straight-from-the-shoulder, no nonsense pragmatism of the Teddy Roosevelt era.
McCain/Palin stand for change not to a new and more sophisticated socialism, but back to the democracy of our forebearers.
Let the commentators be damned. Obama is the Huey Long of twenty-first century politics. John McCain is the George Washington.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Oil, Obama & McCain
Obama would commit forces to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Russians learned that Afghanistan cannot be tamed. Poppies are the cash crop, bought and processed worldwide by various mafia organizations. We should outbid the competition for poppies, and process them to create pain killers for our elderly. No battlefield casualties. If the Pakistani army cannot control its northern provinces, military intervention by the United States is wishful thinking. Would we bomb localities controlled by terrorists? Are we willing to accept the political risk?
Obama likes oil substitutes. Will he open the doors to Brazilian gasahol? The middle east has cheap oil which they sell to intermediaries. The United States should grant offshore drilling rights, claiming ownership of the oil. That ownership is then sold to the drillers and marketers.
Our oil industry grew by generous depletion allowances. Our cattle industry grew by generous depreciation allowances. These tax breaks from a friendly government drew in the capital necessary for these industries to grow.
What is the point of clean energy in the United States when Russia, China, India, and the rest of the world burn oil? To control the price of oil we must be the world's largest source. Ban ethanol--embrace Brazilian gasahol. Let free markets work. Substitutes must compete on a price basis.
Obama, like Stalin who nationalized agriculture, can only create shortages. Free markets will work if the environmentalists can be tamed!
McCain/Palin affirm reality. They deny the dreams and claims of neophytes who ask for our votes so they can speculate on solutions they cannot define. McCain/Palin know that only cheap oil can draw entrepreneurial capital for substitutes. That is the reality--a reality the media cannot accept.
Obama likes oil substitutes. Will he open the doors to Brazilian gasahol? The middle east has cheap oil which they sell to intermediaries. The United States should grant offshore drilling rights, claiming ownership of the oil. That ownership is then sold to the drillers and marketers.
Our oil industry grew by generous depletion allowances. Our cattle industry grew by generous depreciation allowances. These tax breaks from a friendly government drew in the capital necessary for these industries to grow.
What is the point of clean energy in the United States when Russia, China, India, and the rest of the world burn oil? To control the price of oil we must be the world's largest source. Ban ethanol--embrace Brazilian gasahol. Let free markets work. Substitutes must compete on a price basis.
Obama, like Stalin who nationalized agriculture, can only create shortages. Free markets will work if the environmentalists can be tamed!
McCain/Palin affirm reality. They deny the dreams and claims of neophytes who ask for our votes so they can speculate on solutions they cannot define. McCain/Palin know that only cheap oil can draw entrepreneurial capital for substitutes. That is the reality--a reality the media cannot accept.
Wall Street in Perspective
I entered Wall Street in 1956. Banker's Trust, then Ball, Burge & Krause in Cleveland. Reynolds Securities, Oppenheimer, Drexel and Dean Witter. The old Wall Street was privately owned. The top tier of ownership made up to 30% on their equity--the middle group ranged up to 15%. They were risk adverse. Leverage over 3-to-1 was considered speculative. Mike Milken introduced cash flow equity. But, he too was risk adverse.
Merrill Lynch demanded negotiated rates. The old timers cashed in and fled. Public ownership followed. A young breed of business schoolers replaced the old timers. Greenspan made cheap money available. The new group arbitraged the spread between government money and what the market would bear. New and unintelligible products replaced traditional investing.
The youngsters made millions--far beyond the modest profits of prior bankers. Ponzi ruled. The government provided the tulips.
Then, like dancing school, the music stopped and with one chair short, a domino effect crashed the market. Each day another entity caught short. Short sellers ruled. Hedge funds turned to commodities--the riskiest of all investments. That bubble burst. The government called in markers. Bernanke/Paulson faced Greenspan's profligacy. His double speak was revealed. Where will it end?
Perhaps reality has brought us new leadership. The 2008 election may be the most important in our lifetime.
Merrill Lynch demanded negotiated rates. The old timers cashed in and fled. Public ownership followed. A young breed of business schoolers replaced the old timers. Greenspan made cheap money available. The new group arbitraged the spread between government money and what the market would bear. New and unintelligible products replaced traditional investing.
The youngsters made millions--far beyond the modest profits of prior bankers. Ponzi ruled. The government provided the tulips.
Then, like dancing school, the music stopped and with one chair short, a domino effect crashed the market. Each day another entity caught short. Short sellers ruled. Hedge funds turned to commodities--the riskiest of all investments. That bubble burst. The government called in markers. Bernanke/Paulson faced Greenspan's profligacy. His double speak was revealed. Where will it end?
Perhaps reality has brought us new leadership. The 2008 election may be the most important in our lifetime.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
The Financial Crisis
Twenty years of cheap money by the government benefited not the public, but rather a band of bankers and intermediaries who encouraged the public to borrow by placing unrealistically high valuations on their assets. When these valuations proved false, a credit collapse followed.
Ironically, the message of Fannie May and Freddie Mac was that the government had become a major player in this shill game. Congressmen wooed their constituents risking the capital of coming generations by the profligacy of the current generation. For shame!
Ironically, the message of Fannie May and Freddie Mac was that the government had become a major player in this shill game. Congressmen wooed their constituents risking the capital of coming generations by the profligacy of the current generation. For shame!
Offshore Drilling, Palin & the Deficit: Let's Export Oil!
Drill, drill, drill. Why and for whom? Big oil has no interest in lowering the price of oil. Politicians have their arms in the corn barrel. Only Sarah Palin can twist the arms of big oil to share profits from a huge increase in volume from the lifting of the ban on drilling offshore and in Anwar!
If we produce 50% of our oil consumption (versus the current 3%), any loss in profit will be offset by increase in volume. Big Oil will scramble for that volume. This is because Big Oil owns the lion’s share of our imported oil. The cry for windfall taxes is to support Democrat welfare programs and buy votes for Obama/Biden.
Palin forces big oil to choose. Back massive domestic exploration or face the consequences. Only Palin knows how to play that game. She did it in Alaska.
Share the profits and reduce the national debt. Palin did it in Alaska.
If we produce 50% of our oil consumption (versus the current 3%), any loss in profit will be offset by increase in volume. Big Oil will scramble for that volume. This is because Big Oil owns the lion’s share of our imported oil. The cry for windfall taxes is to support Democrat welfare programs and buy votes for Obama/Biden.
Palin forces big oil to choose. Back massive domestic exploration or face the consequences. Only Palin knows how to play that game. She did it in Alaska.
Share the profits and reduce the national debt. Palin did it in Alaska.
Payroll Taxes
Senator McCain has a unique opportunity to defuse Obama’s tax policy by trading retention of the Bush tax cuts for an expansion of the payroll tax to all employers, subject to the caveat that all payroll tax revenues are trusteed and invested in BAA or better publicly traded bonds. No monies available for government spending. The public would see these monies for Social Security as a miracle.
If passed, a raft of options open up to reform the tax code. Note that Obama talks only about income taxes. Fairness versus inequity. Tax the rich, reward the middle class, spare the poor by tinkering with tax rates! In reality, the rich can avoid taxes, the poor are untaxed and the middle class exploits welfare intended for the poor. Confusing? Yes. Without separating income taxes, payroll taxes, and capital gains, tax avoidance plus offsets of mortgage interest deductions, special deductions for capital investments, corporate taxes and inheritance taxes—state and local taxes—combine to make talk about income taxes meaningless.
Senator McCain can trump all of Senator Obama’s tax proposals by:
1. Extending the Bush tax cuts
2. Expanding the payroll tax to include all income
3. All payroll taxes invested in non-government bonds, BAA rated or higher.
4. Eliminate the inheritance tax as double taxation
5. Eliminate business taxes passed through as a cost of goods (a sales tax).
The increase in payroll taxes on the so-called rich will be accepted if the monies cannot be grabbed and abused by the government.
Our Social Security system with this new funding will gain respectability. Stock options should have a mandatory holding period after which shareholders vote to affirm or deny execution based on the company’s performance.
Transparency should extend from Wall Street, to union elections, to funding of education, even charities. Colleges demonstrating an imbalance of 65% or more domination by any school of political thought should be grounds for re-examination of the institution’s status as a charity.
The tax code should liberate, not enslave.
If passed, a raft of options open up to reform the tax code. Note that Obama talks only about income taxes. Fairness versus inequity. Tax the rich, reward the middle class, spare the poor by tinkering with tax rates! In reality, the rich can avoid taxes, the poor are untaxed and the middle class exploits welfare intended for the poor. Confusing? Yes. Without separating income taxes, payroll taxes, and capital gains, tax avoidance plus offsets of mortgage interest deductions, special deductions for capital investments, corporate taxes and inheritance taxes—state and local taxes—combine to make talk about income taxes meaningless.
Senator McCain can trump all of Senator Obama’s tax proposals by:
1. Extending the Bush tax cuts
2. Expanding the payroll tax to include all income
3. All payroll taxes invested in non-government bonds, BAA rated or higher.
4. Eliminate the inheritance tax as double taxation
5. Eliminate business taxes passed through as a cost of goods (a sales tax).
The increase in payroll taxes on the so-called rich will be accepted if the monies cannot be grabbed and abused by the government.
Our Social Security system with this new funding will gain respectability. Stock options should have a mandatory holding period after which shareholders vote to affirm or deny execution based on the company’s performance.
Transparency should extend from Wall Street, to union elections, to funding of education, even charities. Colleges demonstrating an imbalance of 65% or more domination by any school of political thought should be grounds for re-examination of the institution’s status as a charity.
The tax code should liberate, not enslave.
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