Commentary about that lying GM ad:
"Here’s what shocks me about the ad: Nothing.
It strikes me as pretty obvious that GM had to expect that someone would find out about their using loan money to repay loan money at some point. Did Whiteacre, clearly a man with intelligence, credentials, and connections, think nobody would put 2-and-2 together? Of course not. He didn’t care. He knows it doesn’t matter."It doesn't matter from the government's point of view, but it matters from a sales point of view. I think GM was taken by surprise that their was exposed and the reaction was so negative. I don't think they expected it to go viral. It's going to hurt their sales, and at some point, nobody will lend the government any more money to bail them out. So in the long run, it matters.
"Ed Whiteacre went on television, in an ad ironically entitled “Trust” and bragged about GM “putting people back to work” and how GM had “repaid their loan in full, 5 years ahead of schedule.” Don’t hate the playa! He was only doing what politicians do to the American public on a regular schedule: lie for specific gains, to an audience who wants to hear the lies, while knowing that even if the lie is found out, it won’t matter that much anyway. Consider: Since anyone who was seriously considering buying a GM car probably didn’t care about the bailout, what’s the downside of trying to rope in a few other suckers via bogus advertising? Moral hazard epitomized."I think some people who were on the fence probably got turned off by the lie. The people do still ultimately have all the power in America. If only we would decide to use our power to take back the power we loaned to the aristocrats, but I see no signs that's going to happen before the aristocrats destroy our country.
Freddie Mac needs another $10.6 billion bailout.
ECONOMY:
Prediction that China's property bubble is about to burst because it was overbuilt by central planners. This would be a big problem. More. More on China's apparent bubble.
"While we can't be entirely sure about the numbers, we are sure that China produced while America consumed, and that while China saved, America borrowed. This is the formula that made the world go round until September 2008, when the wheels came off the worldwide financial system."Maybe we should produce and save instead? Nah. Government doesn't like that.
"Pundits and the mainstream media have bought the China miracle hook, line, and sinker. They speak of China in the same revered tones they worshipped Japan in 1988. Back then, the "experts" concluded Japan was unstoppable. Japan's miracle economy proceeded to implode under the weight of bad debt and malinvestment, leading to a 20-year downturn that continues today."But China has special economic zones with great economic freedom that account for much of its productivity. It looks like the Chinese government is artificially inflating its GDP through government spending to a much greater extent than even the US government is, and through inflationary monetary policy because the yuan is linked to the dollar. That's a recipe for disaster.
"In my view, the tsunami of liquidity unleashed by the government will lead to a classic crack-up boom. With their nation's money supply growing at 28%, it's as if Chinese bureaucrats went to the Greenspan/Bernanke school of creating financial collapse."Yikes.
"Additionally, the ratio of average home prices to average annual household income is almost 10-to-1 in China; in most developed economies, it is no higher than 5-to-1. Home prices are rising at an annual rate of 18%. Prices of new apartments in Beijing and Shanghai leapt by 50% during 2009. Total fixed investment jumped to 47% of GDP in 2009, 10% more than in Japan at its peak. The P/E ratio of the 300 largest Chinese stocks is 39. The Chinese small-cap index P/E ratio is 76.
In other words, all of the elements for a collapse are in place. Only a trigger is needed."This is going to hurt.
"Chinese authorities have started to tighten lending requirements in the last few weeks. The result has been that Shanghai stocks have fallen to the lowest level since October 31. Whenever central bank bureaucrats think they can fine-tune a multi-trillion-dollar economy, the unintended consequences engulf them. As the U.S. recovery peters out by mid-year and the bankrupt countries of Eastern Europe drag the rest of Europe back into recession, Chinese exports will resume their decline.
Combined with a real estate collapse, the Chinese miracle will reveal itself to be another debt-induced fraud. This will be another step towards the Greater Depression. The investment implications are that worldwide stock markets are likely to retest their 2009 lows by the end of 2010. Industrial commodities are likely to plunge. Gold and silver would surely correct in the short term, but as faith in all fiat currencies declines, they will resume their place as a currency that can't be manipulated or created out of thin air."When the central bank tightens credit, the crash follows. I wish I had known that 25 years ago. I'd be a very rich man.
Aggregate demand is not the problem, but since it serves government's purpose to loot the people, government pretends it is.
Parallels between the stock market and the Titanic.
"Even though the Titanic's crew was aware of iceberg-laden waters, the ship was heading full-steam for a destination it would never reach. Making good time, fame and fortune were more important than safety."That doesn't sound very positive.
"Now, Greece's debt problem has spiraled to $145 billion. Wasn't it just $60 billion a few weeks ago? At $60 billion, there was no help for Greece to be found. It seems like at $145 billion, European countries took the bait."I remember that, but I didn't even notice when the bill more than doubled.
"Even more noteworthy is the fact that high-risk investments like junk bonds (NYSEArca: HYG - News) - or high yield bonds if you want to be politically correct - along with the financial (NYSEArca: VFH - News), real estate (NYSEArca: IYR - News), technology (NYSEArca: XLK - News), and homebuilders (NYSEArca: XHB - News) have roared back and more than doubled. Who are homebuilders building homes for?"
All the people who were already foreclosed on?
TAX AND SPEND:
Democrats continue marching toward seizing private retirement funds.
Republicans propose tax cuts, but without spending cuts to go along with them, they would just drive us deeper into debt faster. Taxes are just a symptom of the real problem - spending.
Now that Greece has been rewarded for fiscal insanity, Spain and Portugal are up to bat with much more debt. It's unlikely they'll receive a Greece-like bailout because their total debt is much greater.
Senate votes not to provide money for bailouts. This is unusually good news out of Washington.
"Any liquidation would require approval by a court to ensure no unjust government attempt to seize a company."Is there any such thing as a just government attempt to seize a company?
REGULATION:
Guess on whose behalf government is going to loot us the most with financial regulations?
"The world’s top-earning hedge fund managers have bankrolled almost exclusively Democratic campaigns.
The top 10 highest-paid hedge fund managers in 2009 have dished out campaign contributions almost only to Democrats.
Over their lifetimes, those managers have given almost $33 million in campaign contributions to Democrats, according to research by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) and that is based on data maintained by the nonpartisan CQMoneyline.
The same managers gave roughly $600,000 to Republicans, according to the research. The contributions went 98 percent to Democrats and two percent to Republicans."That's how the political economy works.
FEDERAL RESERVE:
Bernanke admits that the Fed is monetizing US government debt.
Greenspan wanted dissent about the housing bubble the Fed was inflating kept secret so nobody would find out the Fed was the culprit.
"As top Federal Reserve officials debated whether there was a housing bubble and what to do about it, then-Chairman Alan Greenspan argued that dissent should be kept secret so that the Fed wouldn't lose control of the debate to people less well-informed than themselves.
"We run the risk, by laying out the pros and cons of a particular argument, of inducing people to join in on the debate, and in this regard it is possible to lose control of a process that only we fully understand," Greenspan said, according to the transcripts of a March 2004 meeting."Saying this central planner is slime is a redundant. All central planners are slime. Central planners can't stand open, honest debate, because their central plans can only harm our economy. Note that the Fed withheld these transcripts it should have released earlier so that Bernanke could get reconfirmed as Fed chief.
Audit the Fed provision which passed the House picks up steam in the Senate. The far left wants to socialize the Fed, so they're aligned with the libertarian end the Fed movement and the conservative distrust of government movement.
EDUCATION:
How does a school provide education to Mexican children who don't live in Arizona?
"State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne says state auditors found that the students involved claimed to live in Arizona but actually reside in Mexico and crossed the border daily to attend school in the Ajo Unified School District."This is what the welfare state does to us.
GLOBAL WARMING:
And you thought tax and trade was dead. Think again.
Solar cycle 24 coming to life. If this isn't just a bounce, this will mean we won't suffer a terrible cold snap like the Maunder Minimum, which would be a great thing, but it may also stop the growing skepticism about man-made global warming, which would be a bad thing. Cooling kills. Warming is great for life.
WAR:
Navy to allow women to serve on submarines. The inevitable result will be more rapes, sexual assaults and hand-wringing about them, just like happened with the surface navy, but worse. Nothing like taking one of the most stressful jobs in the world and injecting primal, sexual stresses into it. This is stupid.
Just to show how out of touch leftists are with reality, over 60 percent of Daily Kos poll respondents predicted the Times Square not-bomber would be right-wing domestic terrorist. Those of us in touch with the real world realize since nearly all terrorists are Muslims, a Muslim was the most likely choice, and that radical leftists are the most violent group in America, so radical leftist should have come in second. Radical right-winger should have been third at best. I might put false-flag operation before radical right-winger, and given the bizarre nature of this incident (I hesitate to call it an attack because I'm not convinced the bomb was ever supposed to explode) false-flag seems like a pretty good theory to me still.
"The more we learn about this failed Times Square bombing, the more 'splaining Janet Napolitano may have to do. For example, Deputy FBI director John Pistole says that the (alleged) Times Square bomber was placed on the No Fly list on Monday of this week.
Interesting, because hours later authorities did stop him ... but he was already ON A PLANE. As of right now, Janet "the system worked" Napolitano has declided to say how the (alleged) Times Square bomber was able to board a flight if he was on the No Fly list."He was probably escorted on by a CIA agent like the underwear-not-bomber. The more I read, the more this sounds like a real terrorist attempted attack. It sounds more like the civil war we started in Afghanistan has blown back into the US, turning the Taliban into an enemy, making us all less safe.
Softening of the US use of torture? Is Boortz condoning torture here? I don't condone torture, but waterboarding is not torture, but it can only be done to enemies who don't adhere to the Geneva Convention during war time, and we haven't legally been at war since the middle of 2003.
This is scary. Intelligence agents caught this guy making a cell phone call making a reservation for the United Arab Emirates flight by tracking all cell phone calls from the air over New York. I'm glad it worked for this (I assume they had a warrant), but you bet these guys listen in on every cell phone call their girlfriends and people they don't like make, as well as other conversations. Again it shows you how amateurish this guy was. They used army intelligence planes to do this. That used to be illegal. Now we have military intelligence listening to our conversations. The vendor who alerted the police to the smoking vehicle is a Muslim immigrant. I don't see why this is important. The terrorist is the person we need to know about.
Now we hear in the fireworks in the supposed bomb are firecrackers. This article calls it a dud.
""Terror is a mind f--k," as a veteran of the New York City Police Department once told me. "And a big part of our job is to f--k with the terrorists' heads before they f--k with ours." Both parts of that formulation are worth keeping in mind as the investigation continues into the abortive attempt to detonate a car bomb on the edge of New York's Times Square on Saturday night.
The device was a dud—almost a joke. The alleged would-be bomber, Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad, was tracked down and arrested in less than three days. But the incident still has something of the psychological impact terrorists want: spreading fear, undermining public morale, putting a whole city—if not a whole nation—on edge."More evidence this thing was never supposed to explode. So we know that US intelligence helped put the underwear-not-bomber on the airplane. Now some guy creates a phony bomb scare in Times Square. You have to wonder if the government played any role in setting this thing up.
ABC 22 local news just verified my suspicion - the Times Square not-bomber has claimed the bomb was never supposed to explode, but he was afraid for his family if he didn't stage the attack. This just makes all the hyperventilating about how the police saved so many lives seem more silly than ever. The only reason that bomb didn't go off is the builder didn't want it to.
I don't see any reason to tell our enemies the size of our nuclear stockpiles. That's just stupid, and like everything government does, for political gain. But why in the world do we need over 5,000 hydrogen bombs?
Canada is not Iran. They don't stone women to death in Canada. The Canadian government doesn't fund terrorist groups all around the world. The Canadian government doesn't want to see another country wiped from the face of the earth. This is phony representation of moral equivalence. But I'd still prefer Canada not have nuclear weapons. The fewer, the better.
POLITICS:
It looks like other party of big government won pretty much everywhere and the tea parties turned out to be little more than a tempest in a tea pot. Nothing will change.
Gibbs attacks Wendal Goler from Foxnews about something one of Foxnews's interviewees said.
Another prediction of mine comes true:
"The White House wants to pass as much legislation as possible before losing its big majorities, no matter how unpopular its proposals are."This stuff isn't exactly rocket science, but I usually wish I was wrong.
"This is unprecedented and a bit weird too. A revival of civility and an end to the ugly political polarization in Washington—goals stressed by Mr. Obama in his presidential campaign and again last Saturday in a speech at the University of Michigan—won't be furthered by passage of an unpopular agenda. A more likely result is years of partisan resentment and bitter fighting over efforts by Republicans to repeal the unwanted policies."You mean Obama's actions don't mesh with his words? I'm shocked.
More well-organized leftist mob groups come out of the woodwork. These are Obama's army, and we know they'll be violent like leftist protesters always are.
Greek liberals set fire to building and kill three in protests, but liberals continue to pretend tea partiers are violent. Expect this to spread all around the world as debt takes away entitlements.
"[The survey] even finds that Republicans in Congress, while still unpopular, are less disliked than Democrats in Congress."What do you expect when you vote for the lesser of two evils all the time? We will never change America for the better by voting for the lesser of two evils. Unless Americans decide to oust Republican incumbents and suffer Democrats for one term, our country is doomed. There ought to be a way to orchestrate this. Elect Ron Paul president in 2012 but wipe out all the incumbent Republicans in the House. In 2014, elect new Republicans to the House committed to dramatically reducing the size and scope of government. In 2014, 2016 and 2018, wipe out incumbent Senate Republicans. It would be best to wipe out the incumbent Republicans in the primary, but that failed to work this year in almost every case. If that fails in subsequent elections too, we have to be committed to wiping them out in the general election, allowing the Democrat one term, then electing a small government Republican the next term. By 2020, the Republicans elected in 2012 will be the new big-government Republican establishment, so we'll have to repeat the process.
Another top Democrat to retire.
LOCAL:
Local Republican incumbents win in landslides.
MISC:
Why not feel sorry for the oil company? Because it obtained much of its wealth by looting us through the political economy.
"The environmentalists are in pursuit of their own perverse and anti-human value-scale, in which every creature, animal, fish, or bird, heck even blue water, ranks higher than the wants and needs of human beings. The environmentalists welcome this trumped up "crisis," because they want to shut down the Alaska pipeline, which supplies a large chunk of domestic American oil; they want to reverse the Industrial Revolution, and get back to pristine "nature," with its chronic starvation, rampant disease, and short, ugly, and brutish life span."Yes they do. This is why environmentalists look forward to oil spills.
"We must no longer allow the environmentalists to seize, undisturbed, the moral high ground, and arrogate to themselves the good of the cosmos while the rest of us are portrayed as narrow, selfish, short-sighted, and immoral. There is no greater immorality than deep opposition to mankind per se, and environmentalism must be exposed as that kind of immoral and destructive creed."I agree. Lovers of humans and all they've accomplished should take the moral high ground.
Why not feel sorry for BP? I just answered that.
"It is not as if BP profits by oil leaks, or that anyone reveled in the chance to dump its precious oil all over the ocean. Its own CEO has worked for years to try to prevent precisely this kind of accident, and did so not out of the desire to comply with regulations, but because it is good business practice.
In contrast to the families and others who are weeping, we might ask who is happy about the disaster: the environmentalists, with their fear mongering and hatred of modern life, and the government, which treats every capitalist producer as a bird to be oiled and plucked. The environmentalists are thrilled because they get yet another chance to wail and moan about the plight of their beloved swamps and other supposedly sensitive land. The loss of fish is sad, but it is not as if they will not come back: after the Exxon-Valdez trouble, the fishing was better than ever in just one year."Everybody loses in an accident like this. It makes us all poorer. Only people who hate human existence would revel in the destruction - environmentalists.
Democrats won't allow offshore drilling because of the oil leak. The economic losses from the spill could top $1 billion. But BP won't have to pay because of the liability cap.
The owner of the oil rig had concerns about safety. This is going to help BP offset some costs.
You knew this was coming - environmentalists concerned the chemicals used to clean up the oil spill will harm the environment. They want to harm mankind as much as possible.
Now Robert Gibbs parrots the keeping government's boot on the throat of BP line. It must have really fired up their leftist base the first time.
BP develops an alternative plan that might stop the oil leak sooner while government stands around doing nothing but pretending to do something.
I can see why small businesses are the most trusted institution in America.
Newly released FBI documents from Kent State investigation provide evidence that an FBI agent-provocateur fired the first shots at Kent State, prompting the national guard to fire into the crowd killing four.
Obama bingo.
In defense of price gouging. I don't think there's any such thing as price gouging. It's a term created by central planners to denigrate the most effective resource management system known to man - free market prices. When the demand for a certain item skyrockets, the only sensible response is to raise prices so supply can be matched to demand. Otherwise shortages result.
"It never fails. No sooner does some calamity trigger an urgent need for basic resources than self-righteous voices are raised to denounce the amazingly efficient system that stimulates suppliers to speed those resources to the people who need them. That system is the free market’s price mechanism — the fluctuation of prices because of changes in supply and demand.
When the demand for bottled water goes through the roof — which is another way of saying that bottled water has become (relatively) scarce — the price of water quickly rises in response. That price spike may be annoying, but it’s not nearly as annoying as being unable to find water for sale at any price. Rising prices help keep limited quantities from vanishing today, while increasing the odds of fresh supplies arriving tomorrow. "Yeah, that.
"That isn’t “gouging,’’ but plain good sense — and the best method yet devised for allocating goods and services among free men and women."Hey, I just said that.
Somali pirates capture Russian oil tanker. I disagree with the pacifist prediction. I bet the Russians take them out.
While Congress attacks Goldman-Sachs for taking a bear position during the mortgage meltdown, 13 members of Congress did the same thing. Short selling is fine, but attacking others for being bearish or for playing both sides (hedging) in an attempt to make money is not.
I thought this NOVA show on the financial crisis might be insightful, but it's just an excuse for central planning based on so-called behavior economists who show that people sometimes make stupid decisions. They try to say these decisions aren't rational, but rational doesn't mean smart. People must be free to make bad decisions and to experience the consequences, but these people are making the case that since people sometimes make stupid decisions, benevolent central planners must make their decisions for them. It's a new premise for the same old multi-thousand year old argument.
Leftist praises China's planned economy and attacks Austrian economists. These people love using violence against others - for their own good, of course.
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