Tao

Winter's Coming for the Boomers: Part 2

The real problem is greed. I read that they want to patent medicines for 13 years longer so they won't have generics to deal with for that 13 years and can charge what they want without competition.

Most of our leaders seem to think profit is the big thing, but they need to consider quality of life, too.

Price controls are one solution but the leaders are afraid of them.

Common sense is missing in our leaders too.

The elderly need to remind the young that we paid from every paycheck into Social Security, usually about 45 years by the time we retired. We were promised we would get a monthly check for paying in.

There will be plenty of money to pay for Social Security retirement. It is the add ons they added over the years that is causing problems. People shouldn't have to work longer to draw it, the jobs are needed for the young with families.

I honestly believe this crisis is being created by Wall Street so we will have to invest in their stocks for retirement. I don't want to be dependent on them.

Winter's Coming for the Boomers: Part 2

The natural gas pipes run across our part of the country and they are about an inch and a half in diameter and they are on top of the ground. That could easily be done quickly.

Besides that we have stored oil for emergencies.


On Jul 13 01:03 PM Socialism cannot compete! wrote:

> Blatant lie. Last year, during the $140/barrel oil "pricing crisis",
> Transocean's CEO testified to Congress that most new deepwater sites
> could begin production within 1-2 years, with the hardest-to-reach
> at a max of 5 years. Quit perpetuating the lies about time-to-production
> for deep-water drilling!!

Working Geriatrics: We Could Grow Out of a Social Security Problem

There isn't any worthless ious in social security. There are bonds that are as legal as any in our 401ks.

Workers have paid into Social Security for about 45 years when they retire. I can't believe they will not be allowed to collect on it.

What is wrong with the rest of us getting to retire and enjoy life a little?

Inflation Expectations: A Primer

Doesn't new money replace all the money that disappeared out of equities last year?

Great article.

Generic Drug Price War Ramps Up

Those in store clinics won't replace the need for real health care change. They won't help with emergency surgery and long illnesses and heart surgery, etc.

The Deflation Scam

The lenders that didn't have the CRA regulation loaned out a lot more than the regulated banks who were expected to go by CRA.

It was pure and simple greed and dishonesty that made them do it, not CRA.

Your are being intellectually dishonest with yourself, if you really believe that it was Clinton's fault.


On Dec 20 06:03 PM RTF 360 wrote:

> www.bloomberg.com/apps...;sid=aGvwttDayiiM&...
>
>
> In the past 60 days,the feds just spent (without hearings) 4 times
> as much covering up the banking / credit default swap scandal as
> they did for all the wars and all the social programs in the first
> 75 years of the twentieth century .
>
> The velocity of that change is staggering when presented in graphic
> form
> Source Commodity Research Bureau ISBN 13 978 0 471 78443 2
> The Subprime Lending Bias
> By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, December 19, 2008 4:20
> PM PT
>
>
> Media: If, as they say, it's journalists who write history's first
> draft, then future texts will be riddled with errors about the origins
> of the subprime disaster, teaching future leaders the wrong lessons.
>
>
>
> ----------------------...
> Read More: Media & Culture | Economy
>
> ----------------------...
>
>
> Just how did Americans come to lose $10 trillion in real estate and
> stock wealth? And why are our children and grandchildren on the hook
> for as much as $8 trillion in federal bailout money? These are some
> of the most important questions of our time. Yet the mainstream media,
> plagued by monopartisan bias, are not providing the public honest
> answers.
> Take, for instance, a recent front-page article in the Washington
> Post, under the headline, "How HUD Mortgage Policy Fed the Crisis."
> The piece correctly fingers HUD for helping fuel risky lending at
> Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But the newspaper starts its analysis
> in 2004 (in fact, the first sentence begins, "In 2004 . . . "), making
> it seem as if the Bush administration crafted "affordable housing"
> policy and created the subprime market.www.youtube.com:80/wat...
>
> The Post knows better. The Bush HUD merely continued a politically
> correct policy launched by the Clinton administration. For the first
> time, President Clinton ordered HUD to set quotas for Fannie and
> Freddie to buy huge portions of Community Reinvestment Act loans
> and other low-income mortgages made to borrowers with poor credit.
> The Post failed to mention this key fact.
> By 2000, fully half of the mortgage giants' portfolios consisted
> of these risky loans, most of them subprime mortgages. In effect,
> the Clinton HUD set a time bomb that would explode years later with
> the collapse of home prices, which happened to occur on Bush's watch.
>
> At the same time, HUD pressured the federally subsidized giants to
> lower their loan-to-value ratios and other underwriting requirements
> to accommodate minority borrowers. HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo even
> admitted that the administration was mandating a policy of "affirmative
> action" lending (his words, not ours).
> And it was Clinton who initially spread the subprime rot to Wall
> Street. To help Fannie and Freddie reach their "affirmative action"
> lending quotas, HUD in 1995 let them get affordable-housing credit
> for buying subprime securities that included loans to low-income
> borrowers.
> Less than two years later, Freddie partnered with Wall Street investment
> banker Bear Stearns to issue the first securitizations of low-income
> CRA loans.
> There's even a press release still available on the Web that memorializes
> the historic deal, which dumped hundreds of millions of dollars in
> the risky loans on the market — a down payment on the hundreds of
> billions that were to follow.
> The Post left all of that out of its story, even though the deal
> marked the beginning of the boom in subprime securities.
> Of course, providing such background to readers would ruin the impression
> that Bush and Republicans were responsible for the crisis, an impression
> the Post and other liberal media elites hope will stick in the public's
> mind and become conventional wisdom. And conventional wisdom, once
> galvanized, is a powerful thing in Washington. Whole agendas and
> coalitions are built around it.
> The Post also provided just one side of the data in its story. The
> paper said that Bush "ratcheted up" the affordable-housing goal for
> Fannie and Freddie, from 50% to 56%. But it left out the fact that
> the previous president, the liberal Democrat, institutionalized the
> quota and ballooned it up to 50%. Which move do you think had a greater
> impact on the subprime market?
> A recent story in the Associated Press was equally tendentious. It
> blamed Bush for not cracking down on loose lending standards that
> had become the norm in the mortgage industry, while completely ignoring
> the systematic dismantling of those standards during the previous
> decade under Clinton.
> "The administration's blind eye to the impending crisis is emblematic
> of its governing philosophy, which trusted market forces and discounted
> the value of government intervention in the economy," wrote AP Washington
> correspondent Matt Apuzzo.
> Reality check: "Government intervention" is what planted the seed
> to this whole crisis. As we've noted, Clinton in 1995 revised CRA
> regulations to pressure banks into adopting "flexible" lending standards
> to increase minority homeownership. In a 1,389-word story, AP cited
> that easily verifiable fact not a single time.
> Make no mistake: It was Clinton who forced banks — most importantly,
> Fannie and Freddie — to go into the subprime market to serve the
> targeted populations that HUD and other Clinton banking regulators
> wanted them to serve.
> In effect, the media are blaming Bush for Clinton policies. Whoever
> controls the debate in Washington controls the truth. Right now,
> it's Democrats and their press courtiers. And so far, they've managed
> to shade the truth about the root causes of this epochal financial
> crisis.
>
> hotair.com:80/archives.../
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ----------------------...
>
>
>
>
> us1.institutionalriska...
>
>
>
>
> " I blame the mutation of the securitization industry into a toxic,
> damaging thing on Fannie and Freddie. These organizations lost their
> moral compass and began to do things in the marketplace that eventually
> caused them to get into such difficulties that the CEOs were removed
> and all sorts of new restrictions were placed on the GSEs. Wall Street
> said halleluiah and proceeded to dive headlong into subprime mortgages
> and all the rest. The banks loved it as did the Democrats on the
> Hill, who are always looking to make hay about affordable housing.
> "............
>
> ..........If Wall Street had simply stopped and packaged the subprime
> loans into a conventional pass through security, there would be no
> problem. It would be the world's most boring business. But no, instead
> they created pools of dissimilar collateral and derivatives and then,
> with the full complicity of the rating agencies, sold this stuff
> to adolescents in the investment community, the new rich of Asia
> and the Middle East. And they bought big chunks of this stuff as
> did their banks. But the really incredible thing is that not a few
> of the dealers in New York themselves did not understand this paper
> and a couple eventually went bust because this very paper became
> practically worthless or close to it. They have no idea what it means
> when the Street cannot reverse engineer a deal
>
> Roundtable with Roger Kubarych and Richard Whalen
>
>
> www.tavakolistructured...
>
> JANET TAVAKOLI ...watch the 6 minute video on the 'bail out',you'll
> be glad you did.
>
> The Reckoning - From Midwest to M.T.A., Pain From Global Gamble -
> Series - NYTimes.com
>
>
>
> The Reckoning - How Merrill Lynch Faltered and Fell - Series - NYTimes.com
>
>
>
> Firms underwriting the C.D.O.’s generated fees of 0.4 percent to
> 2.5 percent of the amount sold. So the fees generated on the $316
> billion worth of mortgage- and asset-backed C.D.O.’s issued in 2006
> alone, for example, would have been about $1.3 billion to $8 billion.
>
>
> www.nytimes.com/2008/1...;_r=2&ref=busi...
>
>
>
>
> The Reckoning - From Midwest to M.T.A., Pain From Global Gamble -
> Series - NYTimes.com
>
>
> "You hear about all these millions of dollars that have been lost,
> and you think, that’s got to come out of somewhere.”
> www.nytimes.com/2008/1...;_r=1&sq=janet...
>
>
> A Question for A.I.G. - Where Did the Cash Go? - NYTimes.com
>
>
> “When investors don’t have full and honest information, they tend
> to sell everything, both the good and bad assets,” said Janet Tavakoli,
> president of Tavakoli Structured Finance, a consulting firm in Chicago.
> “It’s really bad for the markets. Things don’t heal until you take
> care of that.”
>
>
> www.nytimes.com/2008/1...;ref=business&...
>
>
> Ms. Tavakoli said she thought that instead of pouring in more and
> more money, the Fed should bring A.I.G. together with all its derivatives
> counterparties and put a moratorium on the collateral calls. “We
> did that with ACA,” she said, referring to ACA Capital Holdings,
> a bond insurance company that was restructured {out of court} in
> 2007.
>
>
>
> Fair Game - They’re Shocked, Shocked, About the Mess - NYTimes.com
>
>
>
>
> something more may be at work. And that something centers on trust
> and credibility, which have been lacking in corporate and government
> leadership in recent years.
> www.nytimes.com/2008/1...;scp=4&sq=tava...
>
>
> Is it any surprise that virulent mistrust seems to own the markets
> now?
>
> Janet Tavakoli, a finance industry consultant who is president of
> Tavakoli Structured Finance, said the stock market’s gyrations are
> a result of a severe lack of confidence in the very officials who
> are charged with cleaning up the nation’s mess.
>
> What Ms. Tavakoli means by common sense is a plan that will force
> institutions to get a fix on what their holdings are actually worth.
>
>
> "It is not enough to throw money at a problem; you also have to use
> honesty and common sense," Ms. Tavakoli said. "In fact, if you leave
> out the last two, you are wasting taxpayers' money. If you are going
> to hand out capital, you have to first revalue the assets or take
> over so that you can force a mark-to-market. Force restructurings,
> mark down the assets to defensible levels and let the market clear.
>
>
>
>
> HENRY KAUFMAN on the credit crisis
> Says the Fed is responsible for the financial crisis
>
>
> video.aol.com/video-de...
>
>
>
> Untangling credit default swaps
>
>
>
> www.youtube.com:80/wat...

Should We Really Bail Out the Big Three Automakers with $73.20 Per Hour Labor?

On Nov 11 09:14 AM Tao wrote:

> Workers have to earn enough to pay their standard expenses and they
> should also earn enough so they can afford to do something they enjoy,
> like going to the movies or dining out or a once a year cruise. They
> also need to take care of their retirement.
>
> Common sense says you can't pay workers low wages and expect them
> to pay high health care insurance costs and high gas costs for their
> cars and homes, not to mention the high costs of housing and food
> and other numerous expenses.
>
> Our teachers are doing as good a job as they can, considering they
> are teaching to the NCLB testing.
>
> Capitalism works when we all buy from each other. When many of the
> groups have no money to spend that creates problems.
>
> Universal Health care would work. We already have Medicare, Medicaid,
> VA health care, Schip and other children's insurance. We even pay
> for the cadilac insurance of the elected government. Health workers
> and Physicians could still make excellent money, but there is no
> need of paying the insurance companies their 20% profit.
>
> The CEOs need to be cut back to 10 times what the average worker
> earns.
>
> The stock market takes their cut of the profits by dividends. A few
> years ago, our broker said he was putting all his retirement money
> in Ford because they paid high dividends. I hope he isn't retiring
> any time soon.
>
> In other countries the workers can take less pay because they have
> free health care and other benefits that we have to pay for.
>
> It may be that price roll backs in housing, gas, electricity, cut CEO pay, universal health care, etc. would make it possible to work for less.
> Our necessities should be heavily regulated, especially gas, electricity
> and health insurance and health care.

Should We Really Bail Out the Big Three Automakers with $73.20 Per Hour Labor?

The biggest problem is trying to keep the status quo. Let the companies fail and give the money to those who are hurt by the failure, like those who have insurance with AIG.

American workers would be happy to work for lower wages, if they paid for reduced costs of health insurance, health care, housing, gas and electricity, ect.

Keep in mind the buying power of the dollar has fallen to at least half of what it was when Bush took office. So $65,000 is really more like $32,000 in buying power.

Should We Really Bail Out the Big Three Automakers with $73.20 Per Hour Labor?

Workers have to earn enough to pay their standard expenses and they should also earn enough so they can afford to do something they enjoy, like going to the movies or dining out or a once a year cruise. They also need to take care of their retirement.

Common sense says you can't pay workers low wages and expect them to pay high health care insurance costs and high gas costs for their cars and homes, not to mention the high costs of housing and food and other numerous expenses.

Our teachers are doing as good a job as they can, considering they are teaching to the NCLB testing.

Capitalism works when we all buy from each other. When many of the groups have no money to spend that creates problems.

Universal Health care would work. We already have Medicare, Medicaid, VA health care, Schip and other children's insurance. We even pay for the cadilac insurance of the elected government. Health workers and Physicians could still make excellent money, but there is no need of paying the insurance companies their 20% profit.

The CEOs need to be cut back to 10 times what the average worker earns.

The stock market takes their cut of the profits by dividends. A few years ago, our broker said he was putting all his retirement money in Ford because they paid high dividends. I hope he isn't retiring any time soon.

In other countries the workers can take less pay because they have free health care and other benefits that we have to pay for.

It may be that price roll backs, cut CEO pay, universal health care. Our necessities should be heavily regulated, especially gas, electricity and health insurance and health care.

Does Keynesian Spending Force Savers to Spend As Well?

A stimulus would be a lot of help to many in the middle class and to the poor.

If the government can bail out banks and brokerages and no telling what else, then a stimulus check to the rest of us should not even be questioned.

Merck’s Gardasil: A Risky and Unnecessary Vaccine

I like to wait a year or two before taking new medicine or new shots.

That saves me a lot of stress.

Merck’s Gardasil: A Risky and Unnecessary Vaccine

I like to wait a year or two before taking a shot or medicine that is new.

It saves a lot of distress and worry.

The Dollar's Decline: Taking Responsibility for the Future

The writer, Menzie Chinn, is just whining.

Phil Grahm, McCain's economic advisor, thinks we are all whiners. Don't you know everything is doing great?

Big Lots, Wal-Mart and Costco: 3 Musketeers of the Pooring of America

Wal-mart doesn't buy near as much from China, now. They buy from Asia.

Everything is going up that the retailer has to sell. Wal-Mart just doesn't try to make a fortune off of each person that walks through the door. They have every day lower prices.

The After Hours Oil Scam

Can't that happen with any stock?