
Hat tip: Don Surber.
FDR's Class Warfare: A Tutorial For Obama: AmSpecQOTD: "This year alone, 772 regulatory documents have been deemed “significant” under the president’s definition, heaping an estimated $230 billion in new compliance costs on the struggling economy. A staggering 76,292 pages of regulations have been added to the Federal Register, and the expected paperwork burden for businesses stands at 119.4 million hours per year. Regulations based on sound science that keep the American people safe are an important function of the federal government, but it is quite clear that our runaway regulatory system must be reined in to help foster private-sector job creation. An estimate from the American Action Forum finds that passage of the REINS Act could yield regulatory cost savings of over $40 billion and save 55,000 jobs." --Sen. Marco Rubio
• It's not fair that I don't play basketball like LeBron James.
Are these figures plausible? It appears so. A June 2007 MarketWatch article confirmed that "...[m]ore than half of subprime loans are actually cash-out refinance loans... we see subprime offers all-over the place: 'consolidate your debts' or 'tap you home's equity,' the ads read. As Lee puts it, why not pay off credit cards with 18% annual interest rates with a 9% loan?"
"Cash-out refi's" -- for those unfamiliar with the term -- are situations where a loan is refinanced and cash taken out of excess equity in the home. The excess equity could have been provided by a massive run-up in prices or simply a fraudulent appraisal.
Interestingly, cash-out refi's hit a 16-year high in late 2006.
Because subprime cash-out refi's were known to have higher default rates well before this, a reckoning could have been predicted by regulators.
"During the bailout, I called my Congressman and other leadership including Barney Frank and asked if there was a provision within the Bill that prohibited illegal aliens from being bailed out…..the answer was no. I asked if there was a provision in the Bill that helped homeowners that did not take out subprimes but are faced with losing their home due to the negative impact of subprimes and was told... no. So in other words, those that committed crimes to obtain the loans will get a helping hand to bail them out, compliments of the US [t]axpayer!"
"Of course, we all know that, on October 26, 2001, President Bush signed the USA Patriot Act. However, I would wager to say that almost no one knows that contained in section 326(b) of the USA Patriot Act is a provision that allows US banks to accept Mexican Matricula Consular cards (MCCs) as a valid form of ID for opening bank accounts."
"It should be noted that while... Congress ordered American banks to recognize these Mexican-issued cards, there is not one Mexican bank which accepts their own government’s Matricula Consular card as a valid form of ID, because the bearer’s identity is basically untraceable."
In fact, members of the House Judiciary Committee confirm that Mexican banks do not accept Matricula Consular cards as valid identification.
In 2004, a Congressional effort to limit the use of MCCs was defeated by a consortium of financial institutions, immigrants’ rights groups, consumer groups, and many others. These organizations had formed a loose coalition to defeat, again, limitations on the use of consular ID cards by banks, credit unions, thrifts and other financial institutions.
By a vote of 222 to 177, the House passed a bipartisan amendment (HA 754), introduced by Representatives Barney Frank (D-MA), Pastor (D-AZ), Hinojosa (D-TX), Oxley (R-OH) and Kolbe (R-AZ). It prohibited the Treasury Dept. from implementing regulations regarding the acceptance of FCCs by financial institutions.
But prior to that hearing, the FBI was adamantly opposed to the use of MCCs as valid identification. Assistant Director Steve McCraw's testimony before Congress in 2003 was blunt: "...consular ID cards are primarily being utilized by illegal aliens in the United States. Foreign nationals who are present in the U.S. legally have the ability to use various alternative forms of identification -- most notably a passport -- for the purposes of opening bank accounts..."
The FBI identified a variety of problems with MCCs:
In 2003, Gabriel Manjarrez, Senior Vice President and Hispanic Marketing Executive of Bank of America testified before the House Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit. He explained, "...The first program I want to discuss is our initiative to accept the use of the Mexican consulate ID, the Matricula Consular. We developed this initiative [in 2001] because we wanted to make it easier for Mexican citizens living in the USA to have access to banking services from Bank of America... Today, every single Bank of America banking center recognizes the Matricula Consular as a valid form of identification."
At least a dozen U.S. banks and mortgage insurers offered home loan programs targeted at illegal aliens.
And anecodotal evidence would appear to confirm alarming abuse of the system; the infamous $720,000 mortgage to two pairs of illegal immigrants with a combined annual income of less than $50,000 comes to mind.
Consider the findings of the auditor: "Over 50% of the sub primes were for cash-out refi’s. Regardless of the loan criteria used to pull random samplings for audits, the majority of the last names were Hispanic. The loans I audited were primarily in CA, NV, AZ, FL, CO, compare those to the states with the highest number of foreclosures & illegal aliens."
Obama: Capitalism Has "Never Worked": AceQOTD: “If we’re training cops as soldiers, giving them equipment like soldiers, dressing them up as soldiers, when are they going to pick up the mentality of soldiers?
If you look at the police department, their creed is to protect and to serve. A soldier’s mission is to engage his enemy in close combat and kill him. Do we want police officers to have that mentality? Of course not." --Arthur Rizer
Anxious Greeks Emptying Their Bank Accounts
Many Greeks are draining their savings accounts because they are out of work, face rising taxes or are afraid the country will be forced to leave the euro zone. By withdrawing money, they are forcing banks to scale back their lending -- and are inadvertently making the recession even worse.Georgios Provopoulos, the governor of the central bank of Greece, is a man of statistics, and they speak a clear language. "In September and October, savings and time deposits fell by a further 13 to 14 billion euros. In the first 10 days of November the decline continued on a large scale," he recently told the economic affairs committee of the Greek parliament... the outflow of funds from Greek bank accounts has been accelerating rapidly. At the start of 2010, savings and time deposits held by private households in Greece totalled €237.7 billion ... [but] the Greeks today only have €170 billion in savings -- almost 30 percent less than at the start of 2010.
...Nikoloudis has detected a further trend. At first, it was just a few people trying to withdraw large sums of money. Now it's large numbers of people moving small sums. Ypatia K., a 55-year-old bank worker from Athens, can confirm that. "The customers, especially small savers, have recently been withdrawing sums of €3,000, €4,000 or €5,000. That was panic," she said.
The 2008 financial crisis displayed characteristics of a classic bank run, but people holding bank accounts weren't the ones scrambling to get their cash. It was lenders demanding their money from other financial institutions.
Indeed, today's panics are more likely to involve major financial institutions and are largely hidden from plain sight until they are severe enough to trigger plunging stock prices, bankruptcies, layoffs and rising unemployment. And the current European crisis is a reminder that some of the vulnerabilities exposed in 2008 still exist.These panics often originate in the shadows of the banking system, where major financial institutions do business with one another... [and] the size of shadow-banking activities [are] roughly $60 trillion as of 2010—a sum that represents 25% to 30% of the total global financial system.
At best, shadow banking offers financial institutions a source of funding and liquidity on a day-to-day basis. At worst, it allows the buildup of leverage and systemic risk, as the 2008 financial crisis revealed. Gary Gorton, a Yale University professor and leading researcher in this field, has documented that the crisis was effectively "a run by banks and firms on other banks."
...Given the speed that Europe's debt crisis is unfolding, however, any measures that could help fend off future shadow-banking panics risk coming too late.
A few days ago we presented an analysis by ConvergEx showing that due to the very close historical correlation between home prices and employment, it is the Fed's view that the only way to stimulate employment (aside from such BLS shennanigans as pretending that despite the natural growth of the labor force by 90k a month to keep up with population, those willing to work are in fact declining) is to raise home prices. Raising home prices by definition means either reducing supply - an event which is proving impossible with shadow inventory in the millions and rising, even as thousands of new delinquent mortgages appear each day... or increasing demand. It is the latter that the Fed targets, by attempting to make mortgage rates ever cheaper via LSAP, Operation Twist or other Treasury curve interventions that attempt to push down long-dated yields ever lower. This works in theory. In practice, however, as the chart below demonstrates, the Fed's entire [Zero Interest Rate] policy over the past several years has been one abysmal failure (for everyone expect those with immediate access to the Fed's zero interest rate capital - i.e., the Primary Dealers)......What appears very clearly on this chart is that despite ever declining mortgage rates, there is simply no interest in home turnover, and sales are at record low levels due to lack of demand, and lack of desire to sell into a bidless market, in essence causing the entire housing market to halt.
...And this makes intuitive sense: the bulk of home owners who can take advantage of cheap credit are those who already have a mortgage and at best will refi into a cheaper one. For everyone else, either the bank's admissions criteria are too stringent, or the potential borrower is simply convinced that a year from today, the 30-year mortgage rate will be another 1% lower (most likely with 100% justification). As such there is absolutely no drive to naturally restart the housing market (one can commence here a discussion of how central planning destroys every market it infect like a lethal virus, but we will spare that for another, more preachy night). For now we will leave you with this chart which proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the Fed's primary mandate: to lower the unemployment rate (by boosting home prices) has been a failure...
Following on from the announcement that GM is looking at redesigning the Chevrolet Volt’s lithium-ion battery system in the wake of several highly publicized fires resulting from test crashes, comes further news that both the automaker and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration delayed disclosure of their original findings by months.Top 12 Chevy Volt Slogans
12. Fight global warming by driving an electric car that bursts into flames!
11. The money you will save at the pump helps you pay the deductible on your homeowners insurance.
10. If you have friends push it around while making ***vroom vroom*** noises, it's a lot like driving a car.
9. Reducing our dependence on foreign oil while reducing our garage to a pile of ashes.
8. We call it the “Volt” because the name "Chevy Coal" didn’t test well.
7. Ask us about our Sail option!
6. The Chevy Volt, the $41,000 before-tax-credit, four-seater that you might as well buy because you’re paying for it anyway car
5. Forward, into the futu-- AGGGHHH!!! AGGGHHH!!! PUT ME OUT!!! ROLL ME AROUND ON THE GROUND!!!
4. Got Squirrel?
3. The Kia of Golf Carts
2. I coulda had a V-8
1. Why pollute around you with exhaust when you can pollute far away with coal?
Apparently, way back in June, General Motors heard about a Volt fire that happened three weeks after said vehicle was crash tested, yet it wasn’t until November that the company, or NHTSA disclosed there was a potential problem, urging both dealers and customers to drain the battery pack immediately following an accident.
As a result the public relations nightmare surrounding Chevy’s halo vehicle appears to be deepening, though a good deal of the blame in this case also rests with NHTSA.
Joan Claybrook, a former adminstrator at NHTSA believes part of the reason for the delay was the “fragility of Volt sales.” Yet she also believes that “NHTSA could have put out a consumer alert, not to tell them [customers] for six months makes no sense to me.”
GM designed a complex cooling system for the Volt’s lithium ion battery pack to help regulate its temperature (lithium-ion units are known for overheating), yet until July it hadn’t finalized a standard proceedure to power down the battery system, the Volt had already been on sale in the US for six months at that juncture.The Insurance Institute of Highway Safety, which crash tested a Volt back in February reported no incidents of fire as resulting from the accident, yet when a second crash test was performed in August, General Motors sent a technician to power down the battery.
At some point (like now) it’s appropriate to ask Barack Hussein Obama “what can you be thinking?”
12/6/11
'Obama urging US lawmakers to soften Iran sanctions'
By REUTERS
Senator Mark Kirk, co-author of proposal approved 100-0 by Senate to penalize foreign financial institutions that do business with Iran's central bank, says Obama administration trying to undermine sanctions.
Wargaming the Electoral College: VodkapunditQOTD: "One thing that emerges from the new emails is that, while a large number of scientists are working on separate, detailed nodes of climate-related issues (the reason for dozens of authors for every IPCC report chapter), the circle of scientists who control the syntheses that go into IPCC reports and the national climate reports that the U.S. and other governments occasionally produce is quite small and partial to particular outcomes of these periodic assessments. The way the process works in practice casts a shadow over one of the favorite claims of the climate campaign—namely, that there exists a firm “consensus” about catastrophic future warming among thousands of scientists. This so-called consensus reflects only the views of a much smaller subset of gatekeepers." --Steven Hayward
I was strolling around the waterfront fish market in DC on Saturday, admiring the whole octopi, the squid, lobsters, jumbo crab legs and Maryland blue crabs for sale.
Imagine my surprise when I spotted this sign above a pile of crabs....But this is all good news, according to this administration. Remember, food stamps stimulate the economy!
...according to the latest update from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), some 423,000 Americans found their way to minimum way subsistence, courtesy of Food Stamp handouts from Uncle Sam. Since the start of the Second Great Depression, food stamp participation has increased by 18.7 million, and is now at an all time higher 46.3 million.All Bush's fault, or something. At least the chart below appears to be plateauing... Actually, sorry, no. It isn't.
A skeleton, dressed as Santa Claus and nailed to a cross, was torn down by an enraged woman outside of the Loudoun County Courthouse.
The display was legally there, with the consent of the county, officials said.
Mary Zenecki, a county resident, wasn't having it. Piece by piece and bone by bone Zenecki took Skele-Claus off the cross and laid him on the courthouse's lawn. "You don't think this is offensive?" she asked.
The display was put there by Jeff Heflin. He applied for approval with the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors to put up his anti-Christmas Season display.
"It depicts how society's materialistic obsessions and addictions are killing the season's peace, love, joy and kindness," Heflin said.
The term 'Tax Freedom Day' was coined by the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan think thank. It translates to "the day when Americans... finally have earned enough money to pay off their total [federal, state and local] tax bill for the year."Progressives, the vultures of tragedy, aren’t above exploiting it for a political purpose. (See the funeral of Paul Wellstone, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, the Tucson shooting.) Cartoonist Pat Oliphant is no exception: his latest attention-seeking panel compares Republicans to child rapists.Factually, the only two lawmakers have been making news with child abuse scandal headlines and they’re both Democrats: David Wu and Dale Kildee.
If you don’t already believe we’re headed for a potential disaster in America, just take a look at this Kleiner Perkins chart.
Apocalypse Nowish: NoisyRmQOTD: "Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as 'bad luck.'" --R.A. Heinlein
A Soviet prospecting mission began here in the fifties. In 1971, a drilling operation exposed an underground cavity that discharged enormous quantities of gas. Thinking the supply of gas would last but a few weeks, Soviet engineers decided to torch the hole. And it's been burning ever since. The intense heat coming from the crater allows visitors to approach Hell's Door only for a few minutes at a time because of the unbearable temperature.
At night, the hole looks like Dante's Inferno: the fire burns in all its magnificence, giving the well the look of a volcanic burning crater.In simple terms, this is the stark reality: now that debt and risk have been repriced, Europe's debts are completely, totally unpayable. There is no way to keep adding to the Matterhorn of debt at the old cheap rate of interest, and there is no way to roll over the trillions of euros in debt that are coming due at the old near-zero rates.
Never mind actually paying down debt, sovereign, corporate and private--the repricing of risk and debt mean even the interest payments are unpayable. Consider this chart of one tiny slice of total EU debt:There is no way to push the repricing genie back in the bottle, and so there is no way to roll over this debt and add to it--and to support the high-cost structure of Euroland's welfare-state governments and their astounding debt, then debt must be added, and in staggering quantities.
...[The] repricing has already occurred, and cannot be revoked or shoved back in the bottle. The Great European Debt Bubble has already burst, and so now it boils down to a simple choice: debt serfdom or open rebellion against the banks that profited so handsomely from the euro-fantasy.
There is no middle ground, as the debt cannot be repaid, not now and not in the future. It cannot be reshuffled, masked, or hidden; it can only be renounced.
It's your choice, Europe; choose wisely. If you want a model for sanity and growth, look to Iceland. They renounced their unpayable debts and debt-serfdom, and let the market reprice their currency, debt and risk. The nightmare is past for them; they chose wisely. Now it's your turn to choose.
The debt-serfdom will fall to you, not the banks or your Elites.
Here’s a rather factual news story from the UK's Telegraph reporting the rise of the Islamist bloc in the wake of Egyptian elections. It's headlined Egypt elections: Islamists seize two-thirds of votes.But let's review the last paragraph and the Muslim Brotherhood line spoon-fed and eagerly swallowed by the Telegraph’s reporter. See if you can stop yourself from laughing.
###
Seeking to allay the fears of Egyptian liberals, Essam el-Erian, the deputy leader of the Freedom and Justice party, said: “We represent a moderate and fair party. We want to apply the basics of Sharia law in a fair way that respects human rights and personal rights.”