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If you're a Tea Party Patriot, looking at the repubican primaries, despairing and wondering what happened to the movement, then you need to read this commentary from David Lepers on the recent post by Troy Senik of the Center for Individual Freedom (http://goo.gl/OM2DM).  It will make your day.  Almost as much as Rush Limbaugh's re write of the Clint Eastwood "It's Half Time in the game of Big Government Bailouts" commercial.  

Stick to the Constitution and your principles become a matter of individual liberty.  Put your personal principles ahead of the Constitution, and big government socialist and establishment trough feeders will paint your wagon with the tyranny of conservative social, Christian, and national security "values". So goes my response to the Red State article: "Principle as Political Liability - even as Reagan understood it".  The article was written at the height of Obama's assault on Santorum.  Pretty cheeky stuff, even for Obama.  With Romney, Obama went all out with a class warfare assault.  Even went so far as to marshal an army of brown and purple shirt anarchist occupying and protesting the very same Banksters who funded Obama in 2008, and have been taking huge bailouts and kickbacks at the taxpayers expense ever since.  Today Santorum is the threat, so Obama has switched to religious warfare and the supposed threat of conservative Christian values to socialist civil liberties.  Awful stuff.  Especially when Obama is busy trying to convince independents that not only is he a Christian, but Christ himself would support the peculiar social marxism - bankster crony corrupt corporatism combination that defines Obammunism. The point i tried to make is that of a recent discovery having a great impact on my own political, economic and philosophical identification; my conversion from that of a long time Reagan conservative to that of a Reagan libertarian.   My "discovery" was that the Constitution champions only one "value" - that of individual liberty and the necessary cornerstones needed for limited governance based on ordered liberty.  The threat any principled position based on conservative values holds is that conservatives will try to burn those values into Federal law, policy and regulatory practice.  

Good primer on world economics.  First of a three part series, focusing on the basic economic terms and the certain bankruptcy-default of Greece.  Short explanation of the Euro  "Greek Bailout" dance we see today, and how it all about buying time for Big Euro Banksters to unload their Greek debt before the inevitable collapse. excerpt: The measure you're seeing frequently, especially in reference to Greece is "debt to GDP", or the amount of sovereign debt - debt guaranteed by the "full faith and credit" of a nation - compared to the nation's GDP. Anything over 120% is generally considered "not sustainable", in other words the country is in a position where they will not be able to make the interest payments on their debt and will likely default unless drastic measures are taken. Greece is running about 160%. Here's an important note. Look back at the definition of GDP and take special note that one of the elements of it is government spending. In other words, the federal government has the ability to impact the GDP - and create the perception of economic growth and stability - by borrowing money and increasing spending - and governments across the world, including the US, have been doing it for decades. OK. let's talk about Greece. And why a little country in the Mediterranean is getting all this attention. Greece is a socialist country whose population is declining at a rapid rate and whose government employees, who represent 10% of their workforce, are retiring at rapid pace with fixed retirement benefits that approach what they were making when they worked. Right now Greece spends 12% of their GDP on public pensions and that's going to go up dramatically because their population is aging rapidly. Their public debt, held primarily by other European countries and the European Central Bank (ECB) is running 160% of their GDP and their last round of bond sales produced interest rates of 17%. Their problem is exacerbated by the fa

Another great chart detailing the Feds destruction of our currency.  Is this money laundering or a giant ponzi scheme? The good news is that the stock market is on a tear.  The bad news?  International banksters are gobbling up US corporate stocks with the Trillions of freshly printed dollars our Federal Reserve Cartel was kind enough to provide.   Recall that the July 2010 GAO audit of the Federal Reserve Banksters revealed an eye-popping $16.1 Trillion dollars had been distributed to domestic and international banksters between December 2007 and January 2010.   Where did the money go?  How do those dollars make their way back into the world economy?  And what will happen to the value of the dollar when these vast sums do show up in world financial markets? The banksters are not lending.  And companies are not borrowing.  The Trillions flooding the worlds banksters was originally thought to provide liquidity and keep the economy churning.  While there are many competing answers to the question of why this massive bailout and reboot didn't work, were now witnessing the wholesale purchase of corporate ownership with those dollars.   "Don't want to borrow those Trillions?  Good.  We'll buy you then." Sorry, but this looks like a gigantic money laundering scheme where hot dollars are dumped off in exchange for real assets. excerpt:  In other words, while the Fed's charter forbids it from buying US equities outright, it certainly can promise that it will bail out such bosom friends as the Bank of Israel, the Swiss National Bank, and soon everyone else, if and when their investment in Apple should sour. Luckily, this means that the exponential phase in risk is approaching as everyone will now scramble to frontrun central bank purchases no longer in bonds, but in stocks outright, leading to epic surges in everything risk related, then collapse and force the Fed to print tens of trillions to bail everyone out all over again, rinse repea

In my lifetime, I have encountered only a single trade agreement, the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade, that I would have supported had I been given the opportunity, and its mandates have been trashed in their implementation. Beware "trade agreements" in general. They are almost uniformly the tools of banksters seeking greater profits at the expense of non-banksters. 

Sanders pushing Hillary to commit to doing something about the banks. Fat chance. But maybe he can show who she really is.

Sounds like no Grexit before the Greek far left reorganizes in a new party separate from Syrisa. And it may be the Communist Party that leads Greece out from under the tyranny of the Eurozone. That would have an anti-communists in the U.S. State Dept. in a true tizzy and might result in NATO intervention. 

Excellent break down of the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Bill.  Core argument is that the bill is far more than a mere threat to future economic growth.  It puts tax payers on the hook for a future of never ending bailouts with the added specter of massive government bureaucratic bungling.  Obama and his band of merry statist will have their boot on the neck of economic activities for years to come.

They say California is a harbinger of the future. If so, we should all be thinking about possible safe havens. The article begins with a description of loan modification seminars attended by the same mortgage brokers whose predatory lending practices got us into this fix. At the seminars, these predators learn how to make even more money off of the exact same clients they pushed off the ledge. It's all about fees and high pressure churning techniques. With one very big difference: Obama is banking on tax payer funded "loan modifications" to help struggling homeowners. The ugly truth is that mortgage brokers are the real winners. Just like mortgage brokers, loan mod companies are under no obligation to act in borrowers' financial interests, short- or long-term. Under California's model contract, which brokers are encouraged to emulate in their dealings with borrowers, almost any change to a mortgage is an acceptable result, whether or not it saves a borrower money. And while the client has to accept the proposed deal in order for the company to get paid in full, the sales forces at these firms are veterans of pressure pitches to people in tough financial situations. Both Carlson and a spokesman for Mortgage Bailout Assistance indicate that their clients almost invariably take the offers they are given. The proverbial fox is helping the hens hold on to their coops, and not just in California. Seventeen states now have laws on the books effectively banning "foreclosure consultants," but most make an exception for mortgage brokers. As consumer complaints about fraudulent loan mod operations proliferate across the country, other government officials, including New York's City Council, are now following California's lead and exploring the creation of an official registry of mod brokers.

Incredible video, a must see even though it's an hour long! If you want to understand how we got to into this financial-crisis, and our options for getting out, this is a must listen too speech. John Allison-the longest-tenured CEO of a top-25 financial services company "BB&T"-argues that this crisis is a legacy of the government's anti-capitalist policies. Mr. Allison uses his unique inside view of the financial services industry to show how massive government intervention into the U.S. economy-from the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 to a reckless crusade to encourage home-ownership-laid the groundwork for an unsustainable real estate boom. And he shows how the government's response to the inevitable bust-a frenzied series of bailouts, nationalizations, and "stimulus" efforts-is only making things worse. Finally, Mr. Allison explains the underlying philosophical reasons for the crisis, and discusses the immediate and long-term solutions. He shows that capitalism, far from being the cause of today's crisis, is its only cure. This is an incredible historical study and commentary provided by the Ayn Rand Institute

The holders [of this debt] are not just banks, but insurance companies, pension funds, foreign lenders, and others. Even so, there is no way to prevent huge, ongoing losses, because the cash flows off of these assets are not sufficient to service the debt. The only question is whether the bondholders appropriately bear those losses, or whether the public bears them inappropriately. A continued policy of protecting all of these bondholders would eventually require U.S. citizens to be put on the hook for something on the order of $10-14 trillion. We are nowhere near the end of this process. We simply cannot make these bad investments whole unless we are willing to hand the next 10-20 years of U.S. private savings over to the bondholders who financed reckless lending.

The new Obama administration needs to understand that greatest heist in history is underway - at least $1 trillion is being transferred from taxpayers to debt holders of failed financial institutions - and take steps to stop it before taxpayers suffer further unnecessary losses. Whitney Tilson explains the financial crisis and makes his recommendation. Rather than sticking it to the taxpayers, these insolvent banks should be put into conservatorship: "..... So what's a better solution? I'm not arguing that BofA (or Citi or WaMu or Fannie or Freddie or AIG or Bear) should have been allowed to go bankrupt - we all saw the chaos that ensued when Lehman went bankrupt. Rather, if a company blows up (and can't find a buyer), the following things should happen: 1) The government seizes it and puts it into conservatorship (as Fannie, Freddie, IndyMac and AIG effectively were, to one degree or another); 2) Equity is wiped out (again, as with Fannie, Freddie, IndyMac and AIG); 3) However, unlike Fannie, Freddie, IndyMac and AIG (and certainly Citi and BofA), everything in the capital structure except maybe the senior debt is at risk and absorbs losses as they are realized; the government would only provide a backstop above a certain level. This is what happened in the RTC bailout; 4) Over time, in conservatorship, while the businesses continue to operate (no mass layoffs, distressed sales, etc.), the government disposes of the companies in a variety of ways (just as the RTC did via runoff, selling the entire company or piece-by-piece, etc.), depending on the circumstances (as it's doing with AIG and IndyMac, for example - these are good examples, except that the debt holders were protected). ......"

Remember that controversial SNL sketch where Golden West's Herb and Marion Sandler were described as People Who Should Be Shot? NBC actually took it off the internet, prompting howls from Republicans who saw the media gagging a sketch that succesfully tied Democrats to Big Mortgage. Anyway, an edited version has back up on Hulu for awhile, but our friends at Guest of a Guest have obtained an edited version, replete with the People Who Should Be Shot descriptor. Oh if only this unedited version had become re-available before the election! November 6th, 2008

This morning Business Insider discussed how the size of the bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac already dwarfs the benefits the supposedly accrued to home buyers. Over the entire course of their existence, Fannie and Freddie may have saved homeowners $100 billion in mortgage interest. The government, however, has now had to pledge $400 billion to rescue them. $60 billion of that has already been withdrawn. The Business Insider argument this morning demonstrated that the GSE's were colossal policy failures. But we were assuming then that the policy goal was something as benign as delivering tangible benefits to the American people. If you take away that assumption--that is, if you allow for the idea that the GSE's were cynical rent-seeking operations to begin with--you can see that they may actually have succeeded. If the goal of the GSE's wasn't to provide a net savings but to transfer wealth from future generations, they seem to have succeeded wildly. There was no free lunch or extra value or savings created by the implied government guarantee. Instead, the liability for the interest supposedly saved was just pushed forward in time. And now it has come due. That's right: the GSE's operated on the same basis as an exploding mortgage. Low interest at first, with a huge balloon payment at the end. And like a borrower victimized by a predatory lender, we just hadn't paid enough attention to the details to realize that this is how this deal would work out.