Posted on 10/03/2009 9:55:23 PM PDT by divine_moment_of_facts
He’s blaming bank deregulation from Carter through Bush as the problem for the financial meltown. Free market principles were the problem.
His words, not mine.
If ‘econmic in nature’ includes resources such as oil, I’m on board with that statement.
Wow. This guy is a player from the Effington Post. He’s an Oberlin leftist minion of the same socialist fleece America crowd that has been peeing on our legs and telling us it’s raining.
You are correct. ACORN, in conjunction with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (remember Franklin Raines?), lined up the people who didn’t work to earn their money. Instead, they were “flipping houses” and using the mortgage money to execute the biggest “pump and dump” in history, the great real estate bubble of the 2000s.
That is the looting of America. And now the commies send out their cronies like this guy peddle the agitprop in the midst of the crisis they created. Blame the free market? Baloney, just commie baloney.
Art Bell is calling in from the Philippines.. Saying he’s OK.. Hope you are OK, too.
I know.. I wish I had put a (Gag Alert) in the threat title.
The Democrat Congress was the source of the problem, it will not be the solution.
In 2006, before Democrats took control of Congress, unemployment was low, the deficit had been reduced by President Bush to $189 billion, car sales were strong, the DOW was at 14,000.
Then Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Harry Reid, et. al. came in and took over. Within two years after they took power in January 2007, they managed to destroy the American economy. And they are too stupid to put it back together.
Voters, though slow to figure it out, will eventually.
The problem is not new; correlation with distribution of income = casino environment; proposes narrowing income distibution as Ike supposedly did - he quotes 91% tax rate on most wealthy under Ike as evidence that it is needed to make open markets work. Says he’s an Eisenhower-ite = follower. 91% tax on rich is ‘more fair’ than it is now.
More of his statements:
Wants more regulation on other ‘loopholes’ which he’s sure the banks will take advantage of.
On to topic of life insurance. Banks/financial industry looking at buying your life insurance policy and then selling it to investors to make a profit.
If people live longer, investments devalue. Insinuating banks have an interest in profit rather than your life.
Life insurance premiums must then go up to cover for losses if we don’t die fast enough.
“Art Bell is calling in from the Philippines.. Saying he’s OK.. Hope you are OK, too.”
Yes, I heard Art, but he was over dramatic.
The Typhoon was a big disaster, but only in Luzon, the north of the Philippines, and to the north of Manila, they had a second typhoon this weekend.
I have, of course, been watching it on Phil. TV since last Saturday. The toll is at 200 plus. I am amazed from the video shots, that it is not 1000 plus.
This new one has made an unexpected turn, but not to the south as he reported.
You can see it on www.typhoon2000.ph click on “track 1”
I am on Cebu, in the lower half, and weather was not bad here. There was some rain last Friday and Saturday and some strong breeze, but nothing bad. I was at a local outdoor festival all day.
Cioa, Alex
So glad Art called in to say he was okay, I've been so worried about him all day long as I'm sure all his long suffering loyal fans were, lol!
I briefly listened and he sounded like Michael Moore-on....just another socialist. Uggghhhh!
Good grief, thanks, saved me the trouble of listening in.
I litened on a portable radio for a while as I could not sleep. You are correct. That guy is an idiot. If he wants to blame anyone, it is the algore and johnnie edwards type. Do as I say, not as I do.
Wow.. True, the tracking map show the typhoon skimming the Northern tip of the Philippines.. Art does have a flare for the dramatic. Glad you’re out of harms way!
I listened, and wanted so many times to call-in to show the lack of basic economic facts and understanding that the quest demonstrated.
He more than one way he tried to say that “excessive salaries and bonuses on ‘Wall Street’ were a CAUSE of the financial crisis”. And one of his “facts” concerning that was, along with (in the same time frame as) those “excessive salaries and bonuses” was a rise in the earnings gap, between the top 1-10% of earners and the bottom 50% of earners. Even claimed the “truth” of that claim was “demonstrated” by a similar earnings gap in 1929 before the stock market crash.
The man is an idiot. He believes that correlation (two different items of fact/data existing at the same time) equals causation (that one of the two items can said to be the cause of the other, just because they existed together); when science knows that correlation does not equal causation.
The market bubbles, the “excessive wage gap” and the “excessive salaries and bonuses” are, all three, not prime causes but each is a manifestation of the same cause - cheap money and excessive leverage made too less risky by cheap money. What/who caused that? Fed policy, not ‘Wall Street’.
The guest also attributed the higher income tax rates (top rate of 91% on income over $150K) of the 1950s to Eisenhower, personally, as if he had authored those rates, when in fact they had been in place since the mid-1940s and maybe the national debts piled up in the War was as good a reason (at the time) for even Ike not to demand they be lowered in the 1950s.
He - the quest also attributed those income tax rates to the national economic performance of the 1950s, ignoring the release of the pent-up domestic demand that, finally, with war-time restrictions lifted, was being answered by industry. No, to the “expert” guest, the high taxes and the less-extreme wage gap CAUSED the better economy.
The man, Les Leopold does not speak as if he has any degree or background in economics, besides possibly a professional political background in making assumptions about economics from a Marxist/and-or/leftist/and-or ‘progressive’ perspective. His current professional standing says he heads something called the “Labor Institute” (founded 1976) and the Public Health Institute, both of New York and neither of which could I find a web page for.
The only saving grace to his spiel is that he does ‘blame’ everyone; yet his knowledge gap excludes the Fed and its policies (that is except the ones who devalued the currency, printed the excess money and made excess leverage so cheap that risk valuations went down with the interest rates the Fed charged the banks).
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