Archive for the ‘Financial Meltdown’ Category
Tuesday, December 31st, 2019
Does the Democratic Party represent the interests of black Americans? Larry Elder gives 10 reasons why blacks might consider leaving the Democratic Party.
VIDEO
10 Reasons Why Blacks Should Leave the Democratic Party by Larry Elder
Posted in Abortion, Acorn, American History, Bankruptcy, Big Government, Border Security, Carter, Charter Schools, Child Endangerment, Class Warfare, Clinton, Culture Rot, Democrats, Demographics, Discrimination, Education, Election 2020, Entitlements, Financial Meltdown, Food Stamps, Hillary Clinton, Identity Politics, Illegal Immigration, Liberalism, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Progressive Movement, Racism, Radical Left, Social Security, Unions, Videos, Welfare, Women's Issues | No Comments »
Monday, September 16th, 2019
This is an extremely informative and interesting article about the subject of Obama’s first film that he and Michele produced with Netflix. As you will read, the author of this article is very critical of the part that Obama played in the original closing of this GM plant during the 2008/2009 financial crisis which Obama does not mention at all in his movie . Talk about chutzpah !!!
I have included the official trailer of this movie and a link to view the entire movie at the bottom of this WSJ article. Nancy
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Obama’s Incredible Movie Makeover
The former president has produced a film about a factory closing—without mentioning his own role in the drama
By Mike Turner, Mr. Turner, a Republican, represents Ohio’s 10th Congressional District. He served as mayor of Dayton , 1994 – 2002
September 14, 2019
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: It’s a fascinating and at times moving film. What’s interesting about it, though, is that it never once alludes to the part Mr. Obama played in diminishing the ability of Moraine’s laid off workers to transfer to other GM plants. The president’s role wasn’t indirect and isn’t a matter of dispute: His administration’s bailout deal for GM included a backroom exclusive agreement with the United Auto Workers. The hypocrisy of this Obama-backed film is astounding. Mr. Obama fails to acknowledge his direct role in creating the hardships the Moraine workers weathered. He had nothing whatsoever to do with the plant’s reopening—that was all the work of state and local officials and community leaders.
To put the point bluntly: If the president had his way, there would have been no plant to make a documentary about. “American Factory” would have been “Abandoned Parking Lot.”
Higher Ground, the production company formed last year by Barack and Michelle Obama in conjunction with Netflix, recently released its first film. “American Factory” is a documentary about a General Motors plant in Moraine, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton. The plant closed in 2008 and was reopened by a Chinese auto glass manufacturer in 2015. The film follows the lives of both the laid-off American workers and the Chinese workers brought in to run the new plant.
It’s a fascinating and at times moving film. What’s interesting about it, though, is that it never once alludes to the part Mr. Obama played in diminishing the ability of Moraine’s laid off workers to transfer to other GM plants. The president’s role wasn’t indirect and isn’t a matter of dispute: His administration’s bailout deal for GM included a backroom exclusive agreement with the United Auto Workers.
How does a nearly two-hour film telling the story of these workers fail even to mention the direct role the co-owner of the film’s production company played in creating their hardships? Did the filmmakers think no one would remember?
A quick refresher. The Obama administration’s auto bailout highly favored the UAW and its members. The GM plant in Moraine was unionized by the IUE-CWA. So—despite being one of the top GM facilities for quality, efficiency and production in the country—it was shuttered, and its employees were put at the back of the line when requesting transfers to other GM plants. Any non-UAW employees looking to transfer were forced to start as new hires, wiping clean any wages, tenure, and benefits built up during careers at other GM plants.
“American Factory” documents the UAW’s efforts to unionize the reopened auto glass factory without any mention of the same union’s direct role in the GM plant’s closure. The Dayton community was left out in the cold—thousands of jobs lost, families devastated, longtime GM workers out on the street looking for work.
(more…)
Posted in American History, Bankruptcy, Big Business, Big Government, Congress, Democrats, Economy, Financial Meltdown, Government Regulation, Industry, Legal Issues, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Political Corruption, Politics, Progressive Movement, Radical Left, Transparency, U.S. Presidents, Unions, Videos | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 12th, 2018
Maxine, the fox guarding the hen house. Stephen Moore gives us a sweet bit of history regarding the financial crisis. Don’t you just love those Dems and their pious self righteousness ! Nancy
www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/nov/11/why-wall-street-must-get-ready-for-maxine-waters/
WASHINGTON TIMES
Why Wall Street Must Get Ready for Maxine Waters
By Stephen Moore • Stephen Moore, a columnist for The Washington Times, is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. His new book with Arthur Laffer is “Trumponomics.”
November 11, 2018
Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California appears a lock to become the next chairman of the powerful Financial Services Committee. Ms. Waters is pledging to be a diligent watchdog for mom and pop investors, and recently told a crowd that when it comes to the big banks, investment houses and insurance companies, “we are going to do to them, what they did to us.” I’m not going to cry too many tears for Wall Street since they poured money behind the Democrats in these midterm elections. You get what you pay for.
But here we go again asking the fox to guard the hen house.
Back during he the financial crisis of 2008-09, which wiped out trillions of dollars of the wealth and retirement savings of middle-class families, we put the two major arsonists in charge of putting out the fire. Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Chris Dodd of Connecticut were the cosponsors of the infamous Dodd-Frank regulations. Readers will recall that good old Barney resisted every attempt to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and said he wanted to “roll the dice” on the housing market. That worked out well.
Meanwhile, Mr. Dodd took graft payments in the form of low-interest loans from Countrywide, while greasing the skids for the housing lenders in these years. Instead of going to jail or at least being discharged dishonorably from Congress, he wrote the Dodd-Frank bill to regulate the banks.
(more…)
Posted in American History, Banking, Big Government, Congress, Democrats, Dodd/Frank Financial Regulations, Election 2018, Fannie and Freddie, Financial Meltdown, Government Regulation, Liberalism, Lobbyists, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Political Corruption, Politics, Regulations, Transparency, Wall Street | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 14th, 2017
Posted in Agenda 21, Agriculture, American History, Anti-Capitalists, Big Government, Cloward-Piven, Democracy, Economy, Elitism, Energy, Environmental Issues, Environmental Protection Agency-, Europe, Financial Meltdown, Free Trade, Global Warming, Globalists, Globalization, Government Regulation, Government Waste and Fraud, Indoctrination of students, Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), Liberalism, Marxism, National Defense, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Oil Industry, One World Government, Open Borders, Political Cartoons, Political Corruption, Progressive Movement, Radical Left, Redistribution of Wealth, Regulations, Saul Alinsky, Social Justice, Socialism, Tyranny, Videos | No Comments »
Saturday, September 24th, 2016
www.americanthinker.com/articles/2008/09/barack_obama_and_the_strategy.html
September 28, 2008
Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis
America waits with bated breath while Washington struggles to bring the U.S. economy back from the brink of disaster. But many of those same politicians caused the crisis, and if left to their own devices will do so again.
Despite the mass media news blackout, a series of books, talk radio and the blogosphere have managed to expose Barack Obama’s connections to his radical mentors — Weather Underground bombers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis and others. David Horowitz and hisDiscover the Networks.org have also contributed a wealth of information and have noted Obama’s radical connections since the beginning.
Yet, no one to my knowledge has yet connected all the dots between Barack Obama and the Radical Left. When seen together, the influences on Obama’s life comprise a who’s who of the radical leftist movement, and it becomes painfully apparent that not only is Obama a willing participant in that movement, he has spent most of his adult life deeply immersed in it.
But even this doesn’t fully describe the extreme nature of this candidate. He can be tied directly to a malevolent overarching strategy that has motivated many, if not all, of the most destructive radical leftist organizations in the United States since the 1960s.
The Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis
In an earlier post, I noted the liberal record of unmitigated legislative disasters, the latest of which is now being played out in the financial markets before our eyes. Before the 1994 Republican takeover, Democrats had sixty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress – with substantial majorities most of the time. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?
Why?
One of two things must be true. Either the Democrats are unfathomable idiots, who ignorantly pursue ever more destructive policies despite decades of contrary evidence, or they understand the consequences of their actions and relentlessly carry on anyway because they somehow benefit.
Posted in Acorn, American History, Anti-Capitalists, Bankruptcy, Big Government, Cloward-Piven, Community Organizers, Congress, Cultural Marxism, Democrats, Entitlements, Financial Meltdown, Government Regulation, History, Illegal Immigration, Legal Immigration, Multiculturalism, National Defense, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, One World Government, Political Correctness, Progressive Movement, Racism, Radical Left, Rules For Radicals, Saul Alinsky, Socialism, Sovereignty, Welfare | No Comments »
Thursday, June 16th, 2016
Are the Clintons the Real Housing-Crash Villains?
Let’s revisit this piece of financial history, before Hillary rewrites it.
By Larry Kudlow & Stephen Moore– Larry Kudlow is a contributing editor of National Review. Stephen Moore is chief economist at the Heritage Foundation.— May 28, 2016
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: The seeds of the mortgage meltdown were planted during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Under his HUD secretary Andrew Cuomo, Community Reinvestment Act regulators gave banks higher ratings for home loans made in “credit-deprived” areas. Banks were effectively rewarded for throwing out sound underwriting standards and writing loans to those who were at high risk of defaulting. If banks didn’t comply with these rules, regulators reined in their ability to expand lending and deposits.
We are going to reveal the grand secret to getting rich by investing. It’s a simple formula that has worked for Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, and all the great investment gurus over the years. Ready?
Buy low, sell high.
It turns out that Donald Trump has been very, very good at buying low and selling high, which helps account for his amazing business success.
But now Hillary Clinton seems to think it’s a crime. Campaigning in California last week she wailed that Trump “actually said he was hoping for the crash that caused hard-working families in California and across America to lose their homes, all because he thought he could take advantage of it to make some money for himself.”
So she’s assailing Trump for being a good businessman — something she would know almost nothing about because she’s never actually run a business (though she did miraculously turn $1,000 into $1 million in the cattle-futures market).
Hillary’s new TV ads say Trump predicted the real-estate crash in 2006 (good call) and then bought real estate at low prices when the housing crash that few others foresaw arrived in 2008. Many builders went out of business during the crash, but Trump read the market perfectly.
What is so hypocritical about this Clinton attack is that it wasn’t Trump, but Hillary, her husband, and many of her biggest supporters who were the real culprits. Before Hillary is able to rewrite this history, let’s look at the many ways the Clintons and their cronies contributed to the housing implosion and Great Recession.
(more…)
Posted in American History, Banking, Bankruptcy, Bill, Clinton, Corporate Cronyism, Democrats, Economy, Election 2016, Fannie and Freddie, Financial Meltdown, Government Regulation, Hillary Clinton, History, Housing Market, Interest Rates, Liberalism, Political Corruption, Social Justice | No Comments »
Thursday, December 31st, 2015
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
FANNIE AND FREDDIE FOREVER
Dec. 31, 2015
Washington is a place where bad ideas go to live forever. How else to explain the latest innovation from federal regulators to keep Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac dominating the market for mortgage finance?
Prior to the financial crisis of 2008, these two government-created behemoths owned or guaranteed more than $5 trillion in mortgage debt. When the housing boom went bust, taxpayers were forced to provide a $188 billion bailout to the toxic twins—and endure an historic financial crisis. So the taxpayer interest is in shrinking and eventually shutting down Fan and Fred.
But these days the Federal Housing Finance Agency that supervises the twins under federal “conservatorship” seems to view itself as the official preserver of Fan and Fred’s market share. So instead of simply telling the mortgage giants to stop buying and guaranteeing so many mortgages, the regulator has been encouraging the use of ever more complex financial instruments to keep Fan and Fred at the center of this multi-trillion-dollar market.
Fan and Fred are selling the CDOs to private investors, who are getting compensated with juicy yields in return for theoretically accepting much of the default risk in Fan and Fred’s bundles of mortgages. The program is ramping up and now covers at least some of the risks on more than $800 billion in mortgages of the more than $4 trillion that Fan and Fred still own or guarantee.
Posted in Banking, Bankruptcy, Big Government, Fannie and Freddie, Financial Meltdown, Government Regulation, Housing Market, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Wall Street | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 4th, 2015
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The Fed, the White House and Congress are setting up the next financial bubble
By Stephen Moore – – Sunday, October 11, 2015
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: The point is that government and politicians have no learning curve. All of the conditions of financial wreckage are reappearing. This is why congressional Republicans absolutely should put up a fight on the debt ceiling by requiring more budget discipline as a condition of higher debt levels. They should require at least 8-10 percent downpayments on all government insured mortgages. They should repeal all or part of the Dodd-Frank bill that is destroying community banks, while promising voters they will never again bail out a bank or financial institution. Finally, they should be urging the Fed to restore sound money by gradually raising short term interest rates. And the presidential candidates should start warning voters that Washington is rebuilding another financial house of cards.
My 13-year-old son told me at the dinner table the other day that Franklin Roosevelt was one of America’s “greatest presidents” because “he ended the Great Depression.” He’s usually a good student, so I checked where he got this tripe and sure enough the fairy tale was right there in his American history book.
Sure enough his text book tells kids that the New Deal ended the Great Depression and even saved capitalism. Of course the New Deal exacerbated the pain and financial devastation of a stock market crash, and unemployment lingered in double digits for a decade after Roosevelt was elected until the start of World War II.
We get this kind of rampant revisionism because the left writes the history books — which they are doing right now.
Here’s the latest story line: bailouts, trillions of dollars of government spending and debt, easy money, and re-regulation of Wall Street ended the 2008 Great Recession. The myth took on new life last week when Ben Bernanke took a bow in The Wall Street Journal for in his mind saving the economy with his $3 trillion of quantitative easing and zero interest rate policy. No, actually this is what created the crisis. Don’t be surprised if Mr. Bernanke receives a Nobel Peace Prize.
As Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute and other scholars have thoroughly documented, the crash of 2008 was caused by the Federal Reserve’s easy money policies for nearly a decade, government housing policies that led to preposterous mortgage loans being issued, and massive overleverage of government, companies, and households.
Posted in Banking, Big Government, Debt Ceiling, Dodd/Frank Financial Regulations, Economy, Election 2016, Financial Meltdown, Housing Market | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2015
BOOK REVIEW – HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: What Really Caused the World’s Worst Financial Crisis and Why It Could Happen Again
by Peter J. Wallison
Mortgage Madness
Blame for the 2008 financial collapse is, and should be, widespread.
Jay Cost
June 1, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 36
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: Wallison ends on a distressing note. He asserts that because experts have embraced a false narrative about the crisis, the remedy of Dodd-Frank will not protect us from the next calamity. Actually, it’s worse than this. The answer to the financial crisis may have been hidden in plain sight, but the failure to see it was willful. A powerful coalition of interest groups dominated housing policy for a generation, and they still do—despite the damage that policy caused in the Great Recession.
In The Semisovereign People, political scientist E. E. Schatt-schneider argues that “political conflict is not like an intercollegiate debate in which the opponents agree in advance on a definition of the issues. As a matter of fact, the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power. . . . He who determines what politics is about runs the country.” Schattschneider calls the organized effort to ensure that some alternatives remain illegitimate “the mobilization of bias.”
Peter J. Wallison must be quite familiar with this idea. A longtime critic of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises (GSE) tasked with injecting liquidity into the secondary mortgage market, he has offered warnings about these agencies that have fallen on deaf ears for over a decade. When he and Edward Pinto, his colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, correctly pointed out that Fannie and Freddie were loaded up with the subprime mortgages that contributed to the financial collapse of 2008, and that maybe—just maybe—this had something to do with the mess, they were greeted with accusations of Hitlerism. “The Big Lie” is what Joe Nocera of the New York Times accused Wallison and Pinto of propagating.
There are some ideas that simply cannot gain mainstream acceptance because they challenge essential priorities of the ruling elite. Accordingly, any connection drawn from Fannie and Freddie to the financial collapse must be squashed, because distributing federally subsidized credit to low- and middle-income (LMI) borrowers has been a backbone of the nation’s housing policy for nearly 20 years. All of this makes Wallison’s work intriguing to anybody inclined to question the status quo—even more so because he has written this excellent book in defense of his thesis. (more…)
Posted in American History, Banking, Congress, Conservatism, Economy, Fannie and Freddie, Financial Meltdown, Housing Market, Lobbyists, Obama Administraiton and Policy | No Comments »
Sunday, July 20th, 2014
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Our Financial Crisis Amnesia
Remember the S&L crisis? Nobody else does either. And we’ll soon forget about 2008 too.
By
Alex J. PollockMr. Pollock is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and was president and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago 1991-2004.
July 10, 2014
It is now five years since the end of the most recent U.S. financial crisis of 2007-09. Stocks have made record highs, junk bonds and leveraged loans have boomed, house prices have risen, and already there are cries for lower credit standards on mortgages to “increase access.”
Meanwhile, in vivid contrast to the Swiss central bank, which marks its investments to market, the Federal Reserve has designed its own regulatory accounting so that it will never have to recognize any losses on its $4 trillion portfolio of long-term bonds and mortgage securities.
Who remembers that such “special” accounting is exactly what the Federal Home Loan Bank Board designed in the 1980s to hide losses in savings and loans? Who remembers that there even was a Federal Home Loan Bank Board, which for its manifold financial sins was abolished in 1989?
It is 25 years since 1989. Who remembers how severe the multiple financial crises of the 1980s were?
The Lehman Brothers headquarters in New York on the day it filed for bankruptcy in 2008. Associated Press
The government of Mexico defaulted on its loans in 1982 and set off a global debt crisis. The Federal Reserve’s double-digit interest rates had rendered insolvent the aggregate savings and loan industry, until then the principal supplier of mortgage credit. The oil bubble collapsed with enormous losses. Between 1982 and 1992, a disastrous 2,270 U.S. depository institutions failed. That is an average of more than 200 failures a year or four a week over a decade. From speaking to a great many audiences about financial crises, I can testify that virtually no one knows this. (more…)
Posted in American History, Banking, Bankruptcy, Big Business, Big Government, Financial Meltdown, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Spending | No Comments »
