Bloomberg Podcast: Tim Kanes and Mohammed Jabar

This podcast was especially interesting from the information decimation and transparency standpoint.

The interviewer Kanes is attempting to gather information about the overall and fundemental well being of UAE. They meander through the vagurities of differentiating between Abu Dubi and Dubai as cities of influence. Jabar consistantly deflects questions about the ruling class and their internal machanatians. More importantly he references the lack of data, consistancy in statistics and any transparency into the fundementals of these Arab states economies. He simply acts as if the data doesn't exist. "This is a problem..." Really. Rather than demonstrating any ethical understanding of the background for this very apparent lack of objective measures and metric he deceptively implys that these countries are working on it. He also confused the nouns UAE and GCC as if they were interchangable.

See: http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/981020/1998102071.html

This was an eye opening interview for me, it shows that many countries have gained an unfair advantage because of the transparency and openness of the US markets. However they certainly don't find the need to reciprocate. In fact it is the limited use of infomration that is their competitive advantage and any funds investing in these countries are at their whim. In fact I would be hard pressed to invest any capital in a closed economy without specific inside information. But then again how is this any different than the domestic traders...

From them geopolitical and international standpoint it demonstrates that US firms are playing a game at a severe disadvantage. It's as if one player in a poker game can hide five cards in their hand while using 4 community cards with the other must display their five card hand publicly. Their is simply a clear information inequity.

Jamie Gorelick, Bill Clinton's perfect soldier

Comments on the recent developments in the financial crisis as they relate to the architects of these plans and their real intentions.

Mortgage Crisis Undercurrent

Mortgage Crisis Undercurrent

Let’s cover some ground here on two fronts and make the connection once again between the Leftist media and the Leftist activists.

Exhibition A:

Private Sector Loans, Not Fannie or Freddie, Triggered Crisis
Sunday 12 October 2008. »by: David Goldstein and Kevin G. Hall, McClatchy Newspapers.

As the economy worsens and Election Day approaches, a conservative campaign that blames the global financial crisis on a government push to make housing more affordable to lower-class Americans has taken off on talk radio and e-mail.

Commentators say that's what triggered the stock market meltdown and the freeze on credit. They've specifically targeted the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the federal government seized on Sept. 6, contending that lending to poor and minority Americans caused Fannie's and Freddie's financial problems.

Federal housing data reveal that the charges aren't true, and that the private sector, not the government or government-backed companies, was behind the soaring subprime lending at the core of the crisis.

Subprime lending offered high-cost loans to the weakest borrowers during the housing boom that lasted from 2001 to 2007. Subprime lending was at its height from 2004 to 2006.

I have already explained how lenders bolstered their position vis a vie these unqualified and under-qualified borrowers and home buyers. However this is an attempt to lead with a false headline containing assumptive language (buy the premise and check your wallet, caveat emptor!) that is picked up as fact, never examined further than the opening paragraph above. Yet, they admit the truth later on, while attempting to explain it away.

This much is true. In an effort to promote affordable home ownership for minorities and rural whites, the Department of Housing and Urban Development set targets for Fannie and Freddie in 1992 to purchase low-income loans for sale into the secondary market that eventually reached this number: 52 percent of loans given to low-to moderate-income families.

What the authors fail to explain is that along with these targets there were punishments delineated to force loans from these companies. Now these companies could have said, “Thanks but no thanks” declined the federal governments threats and suffered the conferences. In most cases the banks would have been sued, fined, forced to testify in front of congress and literally been destroyed as a result. The CEOs could have said I’d rather go out of business than accept this harassment.

Instead these CEOs played the game, like they had done their entire career. Their response is “you tell me the rules and I will work within them and around them if I have to.” They engaged in these subprime loans in methods that still made money. Some (many) of these methods were unethical, but not illegal. Now liberals like these authors can misconstrue what occurred and point to these companies as corrupt.

When the facts bear out that it was the cabal of HUD, FHA, along with many government agencies under the control of life long bureaucrats that simply “follow orders” and the GSAs Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae that completed this pincer attack on the banking industry for the sake of giving away homes to buy votes rather than handing out cash.

On to a story about handing out cash for votes…

STANLEY KURTZ: Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Rev. Wright’s anti-Americanism “Wright 101” 10/14 4:00 AM

Given the precedent of his earlier responses on Ayers and Wright, Obama might be inclined to deny personal knowledge of the educational philosophy he was so generously funding. Such a denial would not be convincing. For one thing, we have evidence that in 1995, the same year Obama assumed control of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, he publicly rejected “the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation,” a stance that clearly resonates with both Wright and Carruthers. (See “No Liberation.”)

What Kurtz points out is that socialism is inexorably linked to the leftist ideology which is at its core corrupt. Elections are not won or lost but manipulated and controlled, Joseph Stalin said "He who votes decides nothing; he who counts the votes decides everything.” This paradigm has seeped deeply into the leftist conscience of American leaders of various liberal movements from radical racial politics to feminism.

In the end you have an engaged Prada with Leftist movement anti-leaders who seek to consolidate their own power while decimating all those they purport to help. We live in interesting and very dangerous times. No?

Pilate: What is truth

Plato argued that truth lies in the ideal, not the reality...

I would argue that truth is where reality meets the ideal.

"Truths is that which conforms to ultimate reality."

"What draws us onward in this world is our daily glimpses of the ideal made real."

-TBA

The Trend is your Friend

Dems are following a trend, being pushed by a wave of statist growth. The Reps are not willing or able to fight this present battle and they will ultimately loose the war.

Add that the GOP must pair its affinity for tax cuts with palatable proposals for spending cuts, shrinking government waste, and improving efficiency. One reason the Bush Administration’s tax cuts are unpopular is that they are financed with borrowing, even as we wage expensive wars and expand the federal role in education. The thing to understand about fiscal conservatism is that the bond between taxing and spending cannot be severed, at least in the long run.

Life Isn't Fair

Michelle Malkin makes some great points in her recent article Illegal Immigration and the Mortgage Mess:

Fraudsters have engaged in massive house-flipping rings using illegal aliens as straw buyers. Among many examples cited by the FBI: a conspiracy in Las Vegas involving a former Nevada First Residential Mortgage Company branch manager who directed loan officers and processors in the origination of 233 fraudulent Federal Housing Authority loans valued at over $25 million. The defrauders manufactured and submitted false employment and income documentation for borrowers; most were illegal immigrants from Mexico.

What she hints at while addressing the large issue of illegal immigration and the effects of giving preferred lending to individuals who are not financially astute is these moral hazards. First, the many crimes that take place in illegal land deals, second, the inability for many to delay gratification and patiently work into purchasing more complex assets and finally, the enabling by elected leaders who profit (financially and electorally) of this poor and imprudent behavior.

This was anything but unforeseen. I personally experienced the shady real estate transactions taking place day in a day out. When I am competing for property (and all investing is competition for valuable assets) against unscrupulous devils who lie, cheat and steal their way into government subsidized profits I will loose. And I did. Beyond that these actions drive up home prices unrealistically for all home buyers. Purchase prices of all houses new and existing will rise in accordance with over all supply and demand. There is a cascading effect when less desirable homes have prices that are inflated yet money is made available at low (introductory) rates to buy them. Within months McMansions in the suburbs are going for $1M.

However this is a subset of one of the greatest moral failing in our country today. We will not settle for less that the best and we want it now. A definition of “the best” varies from person to person but everyone believes that they are entitled to have some of the finer things in life, a nice home that appreciates, a nice car that does not breakdown and all of the clothes and food we crave. And we want them now. Not later, now. Not in months or years. Now. This inability to delay gratification, the denial of natural patience that build character and grows our determination and proficiencies has undone much of our society. For example, we once saved and produced, now we only consume and recycle. This problem ran rampant in the subprime mortgage market and created this so called crisis.

Further, the politicians who acted as willing accomplices exacerbated the problem by feeding into the greed this illustrates. These anti-leaders supported constituency groups with handouts of cheap loans. Even better than wads of cash, these bureaucrats gave people homes above their level of income. As a result they become perpetual victims indebted to the state. See one of final scenes in Million Dollar Baby where the lead character’s mother can’t accept a new home because she would loose her government dependency status and have to work to buy food, food. Nanny States fill seats with enabling parents who give into demanding children even when these kids are harmed by acquiesce instead of correction and discipline.

If this sounds harsh. It is. Didn’t your mother and father ever tell you “Life isn’t fair.”