But tomorrow we start work on the fortified compound.
Democrat Braintrust Update … as though you needed one more reason to stock up on ammo.
Captain Capitalism makes some adjustments – “to get a real feel for how much money is being printed you have to compare it to GDP, the amounts of goods and services we’re producing;”
Aizlynne commented “which enabled the likes of Price Waterhouse to merge with banks”
When did Price Waterhouse merge with banks?
Price Waterhouse (an accounting firm) merged with Coopers Lybrand (another accounting firm) to form PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
They also do investment advisory services, as do banks, but that’s a long way from “merging with banks”. What are you on about?
Instead, $75B at least is going into banks. And you are telling me that this isn’t a transfer of wealth from you — the taxpayer, to the bank — who made GREEDY decisions by getting into hedge funds that no one is responsible for checking??
Posted by: Aizlynne at January 26, 2009 5:29 PM
Aizlynne — the “transfer” you describe to the Canadian banks was not an out-and-out bail out, as you imply. The Canadian taxpayer purchased high-quality, CMHC-insured, revenue generating mortgage assets from the banks for that $75 billion. In all likelihood, the government will turn a profit when it can re-sell the assets when liquidity returns to normal in the banking system. In the meantime, the government earns the revenue from the noted mortgage assets.
Because global interbank lending largely ground to a halt in the fall/2008 (as many large US and global banks started to fold, banks suddenly became questionable credit risks to each other), the Canadian banks who were otherwise strong and stable (relative to their global peers), were having difficulty securing capital from their usual sources. Capital that was available was much more expensive (i.e. supply and demand).
I assure you, the banks would have preferred to keep those mortgage assets. However, it was a smart move by the government to inject liquidity into the Canadian banking system, while keeping risk to the taxpayer at an absolute minimum.
I’m not sure if your comments betray honest misunderstanding of the transaction in question, or deliberate partisan omission. If the former, I hope my comments shed some light on matters for you.
Kate,
This is kind of rich coming from you now, after all those years when you made fun of those who predicted that the US economy was headed for the dumpster (what happened to your ‘7-year recession watch posts’, by the way?).
Turned out the doomers were right all along. Anybody with twelve functioning neurons could have seen this coming. The US economy has been running on gimmicks for the last 30 years, starting with Reagan’s voodoo economics and all the ‘bubbles’ that followed. Now the party’s over, all that’s left is a huge tab and the mother of all hangovers.
It’s just the beginning, folks. We’re in for a ride.
And Kate, you compound doesn’t need to be fortified. Minus 35 will keep the riffraff away.
And all because we Democrats wanted to give people home loans they could not or should not have been able to obtain.
Thank you Jimmy Carter
Thank you Bill Clinton
Thank you Bawney’s Fwank
and thank you Chris Dodd.
The 1977 CRA did it’s magic. Titling at the redlining windmill has killed our economy.
“and thank you Chris Dodd.”
Oh, yes, that’s another one…
Incredible that so many lefties have no clue. Bill Tieleman on Bill Good’s show a couple weeks ago, responding to a caller who said we need to find the people responsible and kick them out : He said “Well, he was kicked out – it was all GWB’s fault”. Good actually challenged him on that, saying he heard some democrats were to blame as well. Tieleman said, “Really?” And he calls himself a journalist. No clue.
Idiot.
sean: conservative diversification. If you can be in companies that own or operate income-producing assets – regulated utilities, like fortis railways like cn consumer goods like prcterandgamble provided they do not have much debt resourcecompanies that own the asset and realestate companies that operate residential rental units
But make sure to have some percentage in financials in the next few months because when the market bottoms – and it will – the moneychangers will make a fortune for you.
Why are you guys feeding the trolls? Jeeze, I go away for a couple weeks, I come back, here y’all are troll feeding. I despair.
Ok, enough of that. I agree, we’ve never been here before. But I remain skeptical that The End Is Nigh.
The end of Big Media is nigh, for sure. Big Auto likewise. Mega smokestack industries with megabucks invested I think may well be doomed. Because in all but a few very specialized cases, anything they can do, a guy can do in his garage. Cheaper.
Big Media is going first, because the Web attacks their profit centers directly. Which is -advertising-. Blogs did not kill the NY Times et al. Ebay, Google and Craig’s List did.
Kate doesn’t even need a garage to do media, just a PC and a dial-up connection. Total investment, maybe a grand at the outside most. How’s the multi-zillion dollar print/TV/movie/music industry going to compete with that? They’re screwed! All that investment? Kaput! Money, vanishing.
Manufacturing is right on the hairy edge of going the same way. Example, Ikea. The Swedish meatballs are not their secret. Their secret is -inventory control-.
They have good designs which are cheap to produce, but they really clean up with their showroom-to-raw material encompassing inventory control. You buy a chair, a computer someplace in China spits out an order for the raw lumber to make another chair. CNC is programmed, transport is scheduled, blah blah blah, pretty soon the multi-gigabuck manufacturing/storage/delivery system has topped up the store with the exactly right number of chairs they are going to sell this week. Ditto Walmart, only times about seven.
Pretty soon, and I mean like within maybe ten years at the outside, Joe Average be able to do that out of the living room. Post a requirement for an item to a web site, make a PayPal payment, magic happens, the thing arrives at your house to your exact, precise specification, unique, one of a kind, made for you. Made for you and -cheap-.
This is in motion already. Check out MFG.com. Blow your mind, kids. Thin edge of the wedge.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Its easy to tax Ikea, Walmart, the Toronto (Red) Star, etc. Big companies, you know where they live. Same with their employees, you know where they work.
But how are you going to tax an unconnected cloud of one to ten man shops, buying and selling stuff in cash, who together match the output of Ikea? What’s Big Brother going to do when a sizable fraction of the country goes completely off the radar like the construction industry already has? End of Big Socialism? Hard to squeeze blood out of a turnip, y’know.
Therefore my friends, I do not think this is the end of the world. It may be the end of a lot of things which make the world suck, though.
Jethro. They joined with TD Bank to form TD Price Waterhouse. Same for CIBC with Wood Gundy.
When Clinton reversed the Speigel (sp) Act, it allowed banks to merge their services with investment brokerages. This created the financial crisis within the banks. The hedge funds, especially, were totally unregulated. There is no requirement for them to show their books.
The wealth transfer occurs when taxpayers pay for the “bailouts”. I heard at Merrill Lynch, the CEO paid out his and his executives their huge bonuses after they received TARP funds (which is US taxpayer money).
These huge bailouts on both sides of the border commit us, our kids and grandkids to eternal work in order to pay the debt. So not only can you not retire, neither can your kids or grandkids because we were either too unaware, or too sheeple minded to figure out what is really going on here – which is massive wealth transfer on the backs of the middle class, and perpetual slavery forced upon us in order to pay it all.
If Harper was a TRUE conservative, and a leader with some conviction, he would never agree to these conditions. Who would. So who is he really looking out after – you, or his own ass?
ET. Our whole monetary system is based on the idea that growth = prosperity. And this isn’t the truth. Surplus is what is required for growth, as well as prosperity.
The prosperity that the US and Canada use for GDP rates, etc. is “financial services” wealth which is mostly stock market, investments, home equity, etc. But none of this is “real” wealth, only paper wealth. Ask any Bernie Madoff investor.
So you can’t use the GDP numbers from any gov’t source as being accurate if 75% of the wealth calculated can be taken away in a heartbeat.
The brick wall we will hit is that we will eventually run out of oil. Exponential world population growth is placing roughly 70M new people on the planet every year. And the majority of this growth is in China and India, who want to live like we do so their demands for oil increase. Because they too live under the false assumption that growth = prosperity.
If your surplus runs out, then you can figure out pretty quickly what the results will be.
Um, Aizlynne, TD Waterhouse and Price Waterhouse (actually now PriceWaterhouseCoopers) are two entirely separate and unrelated oranizations. They have this in common, the word Waterhouse.
There is no such thing as TD Price Waterhouse.
aizlynne – I don’t know where you are getting your ‘data’ from, but it’s heavily inaccurate, as has been pointed out already many times.
Don’t threaten us with apocalyptic scenarios of ‘slaves to work’; it isn’t true.
No, our market system isn’t built on ‘growth= prosperity’ but on the ability to produce and invest surplus which is then exchanged in a free market and/or invested in long term infrastructures which generate more products/services. Our system is not a sustenance economy but a surplus economy. Surplus can involve growth, but, this growth might not be in simple numbers but in complexity.
No, the GDP is NOT a description of ‘financial services’ but of gross domestic products – all products, both material (agricultural, manufactured) and service.
So what if population increases? Manufacturing and service production increase as well. Inventions and innovative products and services increase as well. Your ‘steady-state’ suggestion actually would reduce the capacity of people to live a productive life.
Stop blaming the greedy banks.
They have to be greedy by definition.
Blame the culprit – the moving of the industry to the 3d world. When industry goes, there go the earnings. People who are laid off find other jobs, but the cash moves overseas. The cash earned by the 3d world workers is getting spent to pay a) taxes that will be used to against us; b) for goods and services that are produced again in the 3d world. Instead of paying taxes in the West, the goods and services do so overseas.
What we get is cheap merchandize, what we loose is large portion of taxes, capital gains and spendable personal income.
You have to be deaf and blind not to see that John Doe from Pennsylvania who used to make the t-shirts, paid US income tax and spent his income buying US made goods, was replaced with 5 china men who pay taxes to the Communist party and buy made in China goods and services. US and Canadian cash vanishes and pays to train the spies sealing our technology, build copies of Aegis battleships and smuggle weapons to Hamas.
You can bend backwards but still fail to prove that globalization is such a wonderful thing. The only argument repeated over and over is that opposing globalization is selfish and the 3d world must be given a chance. I don’t give a dead rat azz about 3d world when I have to feed my family, simply because the 3d world does not give a dead fly about me.
stealing our technology.
Soon we will need their technology, but they won’t allow immigration so easily as we did – they know.
GreenNeck
Kate,
This is kind of rich coming from you now, after all those years when you made fun of those who predicted that the US economy was headed for the dumpster (what happened to your ‘7-year recession watch posts’, by the way?).
remember , although this is the worlds best conservative blog it is basicly still a Canadian blog and since we had a positive growth quarter in the last quarter on 2008 , we cannot by definition go into recession in Canada till september 2009 , and that my friend is still up in the air.so the 7 year recession watch is still underway.
ET / Jethro – here are just a few links to some of the info I provided on here. You can read it or not. It’s up to you. Personally speaking, I would rather be prepared and look foolish if things upright themselves, then do nothing at all and be unprepared. Because the probability of a worse case global wide financial collapse scenario is real, even if the chance is small, it would do one well to be prepared, especially if others rely on them.
http://www.chrismartenson.com
http://www.europacific.com
http://www.wbrussee.wordpress.com