This sums the banking issue well.
“Is anyone even paying attention to these Wing Nut AGW people? With 1/2 of America worried about having to eat cat food during their retirement, global warming is the last thing on their mind.”
From “Jeff” in comments
He’s exactly right. This issue hasn’t placed in polling anyway. Now the next year or two, the economy will be most on the minds of people. Any policies regarding this issue will not get to far when its economic impacts are brought to light. But we must be careful, because something could slide under the radar. Due diligence from reps like Sen. Imhofe to keep this from happening.
Wait till you get a load of this…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/30/food.ethicalliving
Start hoarding now! It’s just a matter of time.
Speaking of wingnuts and global warming:
“Meat must be rationed to four portions a week, says report on climate change.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/30/food.ethicalliving
This is from a British paper. Its making it much easier to understand why our founders kicked the Brits out of our country.
Good point. The 1/2 that is concerned are too busy to give it a thought during their ‘discretionary’ time or are secure but on the economic margin.
There’s a banking crisis?
From Instapundit, I was led to this piece. It looks like somebody hasn’t gotten the message about the disaster:
http://www.bobkrumm.com/blog/?p=1940
So what kind of offer did I get today in the midst of this horrible financial crisis? I got four offers, the lowest of which was a 15-year fixed-rate VA mortgage of 6.0%, zero points and zero down, yielding a monthly payment of $948.20. Yes, that’s right, as bad as everyone says the economy is today, I can get the same mortgage as I had twelve years ago for about $250 a month less than I was paying 12 years ago in the midst of a “great” economy.
And from a Harvard economist {!!} who says they ought to just let ’em go belly up:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/29/miron.bailout/index.html?iref=mpstoryview
This crisis is sounding like the climate crisis. Nothing to see here. Move on. Move on.
“with 1/2 of America worried about having to eat cat food during their retirement”
The second half will be scrapping the empty cat food cans from the first 1/2.
maybe this unfortunate turn in the economy will cool off the rhetoric long enough that the current cooling trend will become evident even to the alarmists…
‘Slip under the radar’ is right. Just last week a dozen Northeastern states signed onto a ludicrous carbon cap-and-trade scheme with hardly a peep in the news. In Rhode Island the bigger news was that a company had been selected to build an off-shore windfarm ($2 billion of private investment was the claim, but no doubt there will be some tax breaks in there somewhere). Even bigger news was the State’s fiscal deficit.
If there’s a silver lining with this crisis caused by corrupt Washington lawmakers, it’s that this global warming fantasy and the let’s-play-rescue-the-planet action heros like Gore and Hansen will get no real attention.
With no credit and collapsing businesses, who is going to want to hear about higher energy prices?
Remember the Stern Report?
Remember how he warned the world economy would suffer immensly in 50 or 100 years because of manmade global warming?
LOL! Well, politicians have managed to screw it up completely all by themselves – and have done a far more extensive job of it than even an ice age could ever muster.
Economic crisis in 50 years…what a joke.
Paulson is a AGW nut. Somehow, this fact keeps getting overlooked.
http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=144182
Bill Anderson predicts “Second, this will be the way that energy leftists take control of the system. It will be much more difficult for power companies to get financing of their projects that people like Al Gore claim are not politically-correct. Instead, they will direct investments toward those projects that never would make it in a free market.” (http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/023160.html)
AGW isn’t going away, even if it’s temporarily out of sight.
One could make the argument that many of the people who brought you the anti-government-regulation extremism that is to blame for the current problems in the financial markets are the ones who are arguing against any government intervention in the markets in the case of climate change!
Perhaps the lesson from this is that, although the market system works well when used carefully as a tool, it cannot just be left unregulated as a matter of religious faith in “free markets” as many of the libertarians and conservatives seem to want.
David Segesta (11:12:48) :
Speaking of wingnuts and global warming:
Luckily the comments show how much “faith” the common man has and that is the Guardian readership who have been fed from the AGW spoon for a long time. Even the Mirror readers – not the brightest needles in the haystack – are on to the scam.
The big question is, will the voice of the people get heard over the clamour of the clowns?
David Segesta Said:
This is from a British paper. Its making it much easier to understand why our founders kicked the Brits out of our country.
Any room for a Brit who’s a little tired of Brittain over there? 🙂
DaveM (11:12:02) :
” Wait till you get a load of this…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/30/food.ethicalliving
Start hoarding now! It’s just a matter of time. ”
” Future recommended diet (average person, per WEEK)
– 500g of meat and 1 litre of milk, which is equivalent to:
– – 1 quarter-pound beefburger
– – 2 sausages
– – 3 rashers of bacon
– 1 chicken breast
– 1 litre of milk OR 100g of cheese ”
If Winston Smith can live on this, then so can we.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Smith
How about this one then – ignore the I believe in global warming bit at the beginning http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article4849167.ece
Ray (11:18:30) :
“with 1/2 of America worried about having to eat cat food during their retirement”
The second half will be scrapping the empty cat food cans from the first 1/2.”
ATTENTION COMRADE:
Cat Food counts against your weekly Climate Ration of 500 grams of meat, so eat it sparingly.
We suggest extending it with Catfood Helper.
This crisis is sounding like the climate crisis. Nothing to see here.
I wish that were true. But the 3rd quarter ends tonight, and per the new FASB rules that went into effect late last year, banks are going to have to mark to market with any of these questionable securities they hold — meaning, they’re worthless. There is no market.
We’re about to find out in the coming weeks which banks are solvent and which aren’t. And this is where it starts hitting the fan.
Climate crisis? Eh…..see page G15. That’s why they’re resorting to more desperate tactics to stay in the news.
They will also have to burn all that expensive furniture acquired through the years to stay warm.
Joel Shore:”Perhaps the lesson from this is that, although the market system works well when used carefully as a tool, it cannot just be left unregulated as a matter of religious faith in “free markets” as many of the libertarians and conservatives seem to want”
It was the pressure applied by the Clinton administration to give loans to low income people that started the crisis. This government interference is not how the free market works. This was all done under the idea that big conservative banks were only lending money to people who could meet strick requirements and it wasn’t “fair” to those who couldn’t.
Liberal “fairness” doctrine once again screws things up. Sub-prime loans only make up about 5% of the market. There is plenty of mortgage money to lend to those who can fully document their income, who have a history of paying debts on time and who meet the 24/36 % income ratios. People making bad decisions isn’t the fault of a free market. Bailing them out so there is no consequence to those decisions just encourages more bad decision making.
Joel Shore – you have your facts wrong about regulation and the current financial crisis which results more from governmental skewing of free market principles than it does from regulation. Between the mandated lending to poor credit risks (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack) and the Federal Reserve’s mishandling of interest rates, this mess was set up to occur. I’ll agree that the derivative investments went unregulated in terms of being bought on extremely low margins. However, that and other Wall Street excesses would have been minimized if the gov’t hadn’t essentially promised to insure the risks. In that case the free market actually would punish foolish lenders rather than the rest of us. The only time you want to regulate is to protect people from fraud and theft. Anything else is social engineering and that rarely turns out well.
Nancy Pelosi needs to get the National Weather Service to announce that “unless we bail out Wall Street, the economy faces certain death.”
The current mess proves ‘social engineering’ works about as well as ‘climate engineering’, which is to say, not well at all. Alas, the ‘solution’ to the former may be still more social engineering. That will be expensive. If the powers that be take the same approach to the latter, it will be even more expensive.
Fixing the GISS temperature monitoring system would be far easier.
Could the great carbon trading bubble be bursting too?
I got a kick out of Al Gore talking about fraud, and demanding civil disobedience.
Lehman Bros. got passed over for bailout and was left out in the cold. Didn’t anyone tell the Democrats that Lehman was holding Al Gore’s global warming slush funds? I don’t know how they missed that.
http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?3a425e7e-55ac-4179-847d-243272db20e4
I am wondering why so many E.U. banks are going down too.
That’s not cat food from China, is it?