Saturday, September 29, 2007

Freddie Mac

Freddie Mac: "Hello Congress, we’re upside down and need money."
Congress: "Hello Securities Market, we’re going to need two trillion dollars."
Securities Market: "Hello Congress, we’re going to need 15% interest."
Congress: "Hello Freddie Mac, we don’t have the money."
Freddie Mac: "Hello Congress, we warned you about this, you should have raised our lending limits."

Wal Mart is still selling ammunition. Let the blame game begin:

"Freddie Mac Chief Warns of Recession"

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8b86afc6-6d36-11dc-ab19-0000779fd2ac.html

Demoligarchy

Demoligarchy (noun, © 2007):

A form of government, consisting of a combination of pure democracy and financial oligarchy, whereby dependent, diverse, and distracted populations elected political leadership. Elected representatives reported to business leaders, who controlled the ship of state. Political leadership typically cycled between two organized parties.

Demoligarchy was successfully introduced to Central America in the 1980s, and rose to power in the United States ten years later.

Demoligarchy enjoyed broad-based appeal in its early years due to its ability to combine the appearance of representative government with relatively pure free market principles.

Demoligarchy was superceded by the emergence of the Corporation-State, initiated by the purchase of the Government of Bolivia by Boeing Corporation in 2017, in the aftermath of the Great Upheaval.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Maybe

NEW YORK (AP) -- The decline in U.S. home prices accelerated nationwide in July, posting the steepest drop in 16 years, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller home price index released Tuesday.

Home prices have fallen by more every month since the beginning of the year. An index of 10 U.S. cities fell 4.5 percent in July from a year ago. That was the biggest drop since July 1991.

S&P Index Committee Chairman David Blitzer said the severe declines may be done by the end of the year. "Maybe the first stage is steep declines, and we're just about done with those," he said. "The second stage is not much gain, not much loss.

That’s right Committee Chairman. Maybe.

Monday, September 24, 2007

Accountability

"One of two things will happen if a Democrat gets elected president," he said. "They will either have to withdraw U.S. troops in order to remain true to the rhetoric — in which case, any consequences in the aftermath fall on their heads. Or they have to break their word, in which case they encourage fratricide on the left of their party. Now that’s a thorny issue to work through."
-Anonymous Bush Staffer

No Mr. President, this one’s yours. Do the right thing.

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Miniplenty

"The danger was that the sub-prime collapse…"
Mort Kontracke

It’s worse than these people know (or let on to). For every sub-prime loan, there are many highly leveraged investor-owned homes.
Average number of houses built in the 1990s: 100,000/mo.;
Number of foreclosures in July: 168,000;
Number of foreclosures in August: 244,000; plus
People still building new homes because of inertia and economic situation; and
Lending standards reactionary anal;

Supply spikes, demand drops, price drops faster, investors bail, cycle continues, lenders on the hook.

Hello Airstrip One banking issue. Check out the Federal Reserve site re: bailouts (press releases).

Print money, gold up, borrowing costs up, prices rising, no habla ingles- here’s the emergency room bill.

Miniplenty bellyfeel doubleplus ungood.

Dayorder blackwhite reserved for Big Brother.

Blackwhite by others doubleplus ungoodwise.

CAIR blackwhite doubleplus ungood.

Vaporize CAIR.

Weak Dollar

The weak dollar gives manufacturers an edge in exports, which would be good if we were a manufacturing nation, but less than 6% of Americas are involved in manufacturing. We lose around 60,000 manufacturing jobs each month not because of what used to be the strength of the dollar, but because of strangling government regulations. Given our current form of government, these regulations are irreversible and manufacturing will continue to leave.

The weak dollar makes it more expensive to borrow money. Do you want to borrow ten ounces of gold? It will cost you $7,300 instead of the $3,500 it would have a few years ago. As the bills for our unfunded promises start to come due, this will accelerate the inevitable.

Using cash accounting, we have a $9 trillion deficit. It is illegal for corporations to use cash accounting. Under accrual accounting, our deficit is over $70 trillion. It makes sense for the government to crash the dollar because it would be easier to pay off existing debt. We just won’t be able to take on new debt.

And then we’ll have to figure out what to do with the dependent masses.

Housing III

Everybody is still buzzing about ‘sub-prime’ mortgages. But sub-prime mortgages are only the start of the problem.

The bigger issue is real estate investors.

From 2002-2005, there were two types of home buyers; (1) families looking to live the American dream; and (2) investors, many of whom with little equity, whose plan was to get a home in their name, collect rent to cover the mortgage payment, and get rich on the 10% annual appreciation of the real estate market that would go on for ever and ever.

In my market, home prices are now off up to 40% (actual sales prices, not asking prices).

So put yourself in the shoes of a businessman, holding an asset worth $150,000, on which you owe $225,000. You are $75,000 in the hole.

You look at foreclosure numbers; 168,000 in July and 244,000 in August. You look at census data for historic housing starts, and find that 100,000 houses were started in a typical month throughout the ‘booming’ 1990s. You look to reactionary lending standards and recognize that demand is restricted. You scratch your head as to why anybody is still building houses, and come to the conclusion that it is inertia.

Supply up and accelerating. Demand down. Bad combination. Prices going further down. Sell now.

http://www.census.gov/const/bpann.pdf

Probably half of the houses we sold in the run-up were to investors, not families. This will get worse more before it gets better. The lenders are the ones on the hook.

Friday, September 21, 2007

James Madison

"Your right to bear arms is based on a reasonable degree of safety," Rudolph Giuliani said.

Nice try Rudy. Our right to bear arms is based on the Citizenry being able to defend itself against a Federal government gone bad. And you know it.

"The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence."
-From Federalist 46, attributed to James Madison

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/federal/fed46.htm

$70 Trillion in Debt; Growing by $3 Trillion Annually

"A Republic, if you can keep it."
-Benjamin Franklin

It is generally estimated that because of state property and taxpaying qualifications, fewer than one-fourth of all white adult males were eligible to vote in 1787–1789, the time the U.S. Constitution was being ratified. The history of the suffrage in the United States since then has been one of steady expansion, partly through constitutional amendments and partly through legislation. The states largely abandoned the property qualifications for voting by 1850.

http://www.answers.com/topic/suffrage?cat=biz-fin

Monday, September 17, 2007

Infidelity

You Infidels think that you are so special.

You may eat well, and have parks, and electricity that stays on all day. Your indoor plumbing may keep your streets from smelling like ours. Your women might be taller, more articulate, and more attractive that ours. Your schools may teach your children to capitalize the first letter of the first word of each sentence. You may have men that can compete and win in sporting competitions involving strength. Your society may have shown the ability to organize and achieve great things like space travel while we cannot maintain, let alone manufacture, a bicycle.

But it doesn’t matter. We are more pure than you.

And, with modern weaponry, we will have our revenge.

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Iraq War Diary

The episode covered a New Hampshire reserve unit deployed in Iraq. A good part of the hour was covering an Iraqi interpreter named Mohammed, who made negative references to the "white boys from New Hampshire" who made up the majority of his unit. He lets you know that most of them voted for Bush.

The last scene had Mohammed getting sworn in as a US Citizen. The camera was on him as he vowed to protect the US Constitution and he flinched. He explained how he had refused to translate several orders. The show closed with Mohammed saying that he loved being a soldier, he just wished that he could pick his war. Paddling off on some New Hampshire lake.

He says these things in front of a TV camera. Their arrogance will be their undoing.

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Conspiracy Theory

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles… Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- bourgeoisie and proletariat."
-The Communist Manifesto

Deep in the bowels of an old German warehouse sit a group of men representing extreme wealth from around the world. It is 2012. The plan is ready.

The Spartan model, aka Multiculturalism, has worked. The Proletarians have been divided. Ethnocentric friction makes any unified resistance unlikely.

The Islamic strategy has also worked. Populations have demanded strong security in the face of increasingly organized and deadly Muslim violence. Video surveillance coverage is nearly complete. The security forces are mobilized and augmented after last month’s events.

The men take a vote and it passes. Each will sell off their government securities at 0930 tomorrow morning, collapsing the democracies of the Western world.

http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html