A Nation of Village Idiots

Don't let them tell you this economic meltdown is a complicated mess. It's not. Our national financial crisis is readily understood by anyone who has seen greed and hypocrisy. But we are now witnessing them on a profound, monumental scale.

Conservative Republicans always want the government to stay out of business and avoid regulation as long as they are making lots of money. When their greed, however, gets them into a fix, they are the first to cry out for rules and laws and taxpayer money to bail out their businesses. Obviously, Republicans are socialists. The Bush administration has decided to socialize the debt of the big Wall Street Firms. Taxpayers didn't get to enjoy any of the big money profits on the phony financial instruments like derivatives or bundled sub-prime paper, but we get the privilege of paying for their debt and failures. [snip]

How did we get here?

That's pretty easy to answer, too. His name is Phil Gramm. A few days after the Supreme Court made George W. Bush president in 2000, Gramm stuck something called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act into the budget bill. Nobody knew that the Texas senator was slipping America a 262 page poison pill. The Gramm Guts America Act was designed to keep regulators from controlling new financial tools described as credit "swaps." These are instruments like sub-prime mortgages bundled up and sold as securities. Under the Gramm law, neither the SEC nor the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) were able to examine financial institutions like hedge funds or investment banks to guarantee they had the assets necessary to cover losses they were guaranteeing.

Read the rest of the article at Huffington Post, of course.

The more and more I read about the history of the US, the more and more I see how terrible Republican economic policy truly is. Not only do they seem to completely remove the middle class, they don't take care of the poor and they run up such insane deficits... and for what; in the 1980s some military equipment that quickly went obsolete and now an unecessary war? I hope these village idiots wake the hell up and put nation before political party.

Finally, a new homebuyer enters the Phoenix market.

Few states have been hit as hard by the mortgage crisis as Arizona. Years of rapid growth, even more rapid construction and unscrupulous lending practices have taken their toll. To make things worse, this has been combined with greedy people thinking they were just smarter than the rest of us so that they could keep on jumping up the housing ladder into more expensive homes until suddenly they were making enormous payments on mansions that were worth less than what they owed *. These erstwhile 'sharks' have become the 'marks.' It seems that every week I see big stickers plastered on the front of the Arizona Republic advertising an auction of hundreds of foreclosed properties. And with the credit crisis, hundreds of them also go unsold at any price.

But it's nice to know that there is apparently a new homebuyer in the Phoenix metro market. A buyer who is known to have bought property here before. A guy who certainly has the cash to pay for some of these homes. A guy who really isn't all that good with the numbers, in fact he doesn't even know how many he has now (so what the heck, one more can't hurt, right?)

Here are some property signs advertising the new homebuyer in town:




and



Hat tip to Tedski at Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.

*-- almost too polite to mention, but the areas where there are the highest levels of foreclosures on relatively new and expensive homes have in recent years voted heavily Republican. Granted people who have been hit with a huge ARM reset they couldn't pay and been foreclosed on come from all walks of life and it's a miserable experience for anyone, but probably most of the really expensive homes that are being foreclosed around metro Phoenix, their buyers were the jerk that cuts you off while driving a giant SUV with a fading "W" bumper sticker and thinks social Darwinism is real and that he's (95% chance it's a male) at the top of the gene pool.