My previous host (Servers and Domains) crashed on me, and despite considerable passage of time, are still down.
As a result many articles are missing
I hope to recover nearly all of them in the next couple of days. Recovering comments will take a little longer.
I apologize for the inconvenience – and for my failure to keep adequate backups.
Megan nails it:
the government is using its intervention in the banking system to pressure banks to give special deals to the government’s special friends.
From the point of view of oligarchs and crony capitalists, the crisis is not that a lot loans were made to no hablo English wetbacks. The crisis is that people are rejecting securitization of debt.
The Obama regime’s capitalism smashing measures are intended not to destroy capitalism, nor to install socialism, but to restore securitization of debt. This is socialism for the financiers, not for the proles: Crony socialism, crony capitalism, a fascist economic order.
Regular old fashioned loans are going through just fine. There is no credit crisis, the financial system is not freezing up. Securitization is freezing up, and it @#$% well should freeze up.
When debts are securitized, many different debts of many different borrowers are piled together into a great big pool of debt, and then shares in the pool are sold to lots of creditors – which means that there is no one person responsible for verifying that any one particular loan is sound, that the assets securing the loan are worth what they are supposed to be worth, that the person responsible for making payments on the loan can read and write, that he speaks the language that the papers that he signed were written in, that he was sufficiently sober when he signed them to remember signing them, or even that the paperwork exists and is in good order.
For securitization to work, the particular organization that arranged the loan, and the particular people in the particular organization, would have to remain responsible for that loan. The debtor would have to be making payments through the people that arranged the loan for the life of the loan.
Securitization leads carelessness with large sums of other people’s money. Such carelessness leads to crime. Crime destroys the trust that is necessary for the economic system to work. Securitization must stop. If securitization continues, capitalism will end. By and large, those who favor continued securitization are wealthy criminals, who personally benefited from stolen money, as over the years carelessness slowly became indistinguishable from deliberate fraud. The problem before Obama was not lack of regulation, but that the foxes were regulating the chickens, and now under Obama the foxes are still regulating the chickens. Each Obama intervention has the effect of keeping the criminals in power over other people’s money, resisting the natural propensity of capitalism to purify itself through creative destruction.
Securitization was born in fraud: The original motivation for securitization was the 1995 Community Reinvestment Act. If the government is pressuring you to make loans on the basis of race, rather than willingness and ability to pay one’s just debts, you want to get rid of the politically correct mortgages to some other sucker as fast as possible.
Securitization of debt is only legitimate when the people that arranged the loan remain linked to the loan. Otherwise, securitization is a scam, as the origins of mortgage securitization demonstrate.
A kid carrying a gun, and wearing an explosive vest, attempted to enter a mosque. It seems that though the congregation were Muslim, they were the wrong kind of Muslim.
A guard tackled him. That is courage.
The Randian concept of a Galt Strike is that if the elite slack off, the masses will be impoverished – that countries are rich or poor according to whether the elite is productive, while the masses and resources do not matter much, except in extreme cases such as oil rich sheikdoms.
There has been a large fall in GDP over the past six months:
The Keynesian explanation of this fall is inadequate aggregate demand – the economy could easily produce more, but no one is spending due to depression of animal spirits, in which case a big spending government will make everything rosy.
The Austrian and Chicago explanation is complicated, and perhaps confused.
The Randian explanation is that it is a Galt Strike – the elite are slacking off, and focusing on hiding their wealth and economic activities from the government, rather than creating value, in which case big government spending will merely result in inflation or massive borrowing from abroad.
Core CPI will in time tell us which account is correct. We will know by about November 2010.
I am betting on disturbing levels of core inflation with a distinctly unimpressive recovery in real GDP.