I Wonder

Upon thinking about the current economic downturn and the recent election (which seems years ago), I was wondering if the people with goobs of money saw the current party coming to power and pulled their money out. A major exit of cash from the stock market would burst the bubble that was building because of all the ponzi stuff. It is a thought. It is sort of like seeing someone coming down the road you do not trust and so you hide your valuables.


Link to Pigs can be Mean

AIG Citi, Bank of America

AIG keeps being in the news. I cannot help but wonder why the government continues to give them money when the same people are running the company. My suspicion is rising that there are those who have personal interest in seeing AIG survive as a company. Or is it that the government is so involved financial with AIG that they are somehow forced to dump money into their laps. The commercial says "if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging". Maybe this Charlie is the smartest guy around.

As for Citi, they are the ones who flood America's mailboxes with those so-called pre-approved credit card offers then charge outrageous interest to people who should not have had a credit card in the first place. They dug the hole. It is time for us to throw the dirt over them.

We survived major wars, licked our wounds and went about our business. Freedom survived. We will survive letting these companies go the way bad companies ought to go. Let nature take its course and be done with it, would be my advice.

You know, the loss they are talking about is the stock market value where people invested money hoping to gain from it. True it is sad that people loose their money but they all knew it could happen or they should not have been playing the stock market. Guess some will just have to bite the bullet.

The Mess We're In

Sometimes you have to stretch the memory to get to the root of things. Way back before Bill Clinton left office, he lifted the regulations on Wall Street. It was in his last days so the change took place in the Bush administration. That was about the deal of insuring those risky Wall Street bets on the risky loans for people who could not afford the houses they bought. They bundled the loans and sold them to investors who posted them on Wall Street and got more people to invest. If you understand that, you are probably hiding your money in a mattress, if you have any money.

Next, the Democrats took over Congress about the time Bush was reelected. With Pelosi in charge, they blocked every piece of legislation the president sent to them that would help the country. Government was almost at a standstill for several years. Why would a Democratically controlled congress block even good legislation? The answer is to make the Republican president look bad and pave the way for a Democratic candidate to get elected president. Maybe some think no political party would put the country at risk to gain power in Washington DC. Maybe pigs fly too.

The housing problem is little different than the Savings and Loan disaster of a few decades ago. The associations stretched the bands of the market and it snapped leaving many in financial distress. That also cost a bundle. It was not caused by a failure of the system but was a result of greed.

Here is the danger we face. The government is putting up the money (which they don't have) to prop up companies that played the stock market (with money they did not have) and lost. Who did have the money? The citizens of our country had the money and trusted it to Wall Street. That's like giving a monkey a banana and telling it to not eat it. The danger is that instead of a free enterprise system, we are slipping into a socialist system where everyone depends on the government for everything. In the free enterprise system, you take your chances and if you loose, you start over. In the socialist system, you take your changes, and if you loose the government gives you back the money you lost and takes part in the company. We all know how good the government is at making a budget balance.

The problem is if you give a teenager all the money they need, they will never go to work and become responsible citizens. If the government gives the companies all the money they need, they will never take responsibility for their actions. Since when do we reward crooks who run crooked companies, well, since just a few months ago. Probably a lot of the people giving away taxpayer money also lost money in this mess and are trying to recoup it by building the companies back up.

Our country prospers only when the government minds their own business.

Whose to say that we can't do without the stock market anyway? Everything doesn't have to be national or international. If banks did their job, businesses would have the expansion capitol they need. The stock market is a trumped up casino where people bet their few thousand that they can make a million off it.