Heck of a Job, Hank

"Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it" …Andrew Young, author, civil rights activist, US congressman, mayor, and UN ambassador (b. 1932)

In July, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said of his plan to save Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, "If you have a bazooka in your pocket and people know it, you probably won't have to use it." On September 7, Paulson pulled out his bazooka and fingered the trigger, effectively nationalizing the mortgage giants. Fannie and Freddie, the Frankenstein monsters created by our progressive government, absolutely had to be kept alive (his Wall Street banking cronies).

They owed too much compared to the mortgages on their books. The lenders to Fannie and Freddie had to be saved, keeping the mom and pop mortgage borrowers paying through the nose. If the banking and investment end of the contracts disappeared, mom and pop would have no one to whom to pay the mortgages! We cannot let them off the hook!

Orange Alert

Last week, Paulson pulled out the bazooka Congress's head and demanded ransom. "Seven hundred billion dollars or your credit system will collapse!" That is more than the annual benefits paid out by Social Security. Cui bono? Bankers. Who is better positioned to save the big banks? No better than the former Goldman Sachs chairman, Paulson, now enjoying the prestigious and powerful position of Secretary of the Treasury.

Thus we are now at the juncture to decide to reward the guilty parties at the expense of the taxpayers by arguing that "we have to do it to save the banking system." Bankers, in league with politicians, want a lien on your future and the fortune of your posterity. This may be a democratic nation, however, history has shown that it amounts to a majoritarian war of gangs against other gangs, and banking is now proving to be the stronger gang.

A tiny silver lining in the dark cloud over us is that Barney Frank and company did not accomplish a massive slam on this outrageous proposal by saying that it saddles the government with any loss of money, loss of State revenue or borrowing power. They did not scream about how much it would cost government. The friends of this bailout somehow remembered the taxpayers. Praise Man!

Which Way Rates?

The market for credit may be locking up. The sooner the better! The market wants higher rates to counter the risks. There should be no pretense at this time that rising interest rates are some kind of crime. No, it is normal. That is what the market must cause to happen. Ludicrously, investors now think the Fed will be lowering its rate by 50 basis points.

Too many people did irrational things with cheap money (low rates and rising money supply). All of the malinvestment has to be allowed to unwind as rapidly as possible. The alternative will be a deeper and/or longer recession. The more drastic and knee-jerk the government reaction, the more likely the chances of a depression. The only saving aspect seems to be that the government is not reducing liquidity, although the big kid on the block, banking, is doing so (do not expect a quick resumption of lending).

Hank Paulson is not an economist. He has not explained why he believed the blunderbuss bailout was the only option that would work. As the President of BB&T noted in his letter on the bailout, it appears that Paulson knows nothing about commercial banking or exactly how or when the credit problems would trickle down to " Main Street ."

The chief representative of the moneyed interest who did not effectively protest the irrational encouragement of ownership of homes and easy money during the last few decades, needs to take a step forward. He threatened that we are one step from the abyss. That is the step he should take.

Money is created in most countries by banks privately when they make loans; but the banks create only the principal, not the interest necessary to pay the loans back. The interest must be borrowed into existence, continually increasing the money supply, in a Ponzi scheme that has reached its mathematical limits.

Bankers and consumers ought to minimize this, saving and selling real assets when money is needed for housing or other investments. Over the last decade or so over $700 billion was borrowed, creating debt. The debt was then monetized. And now we are considering throwing another $700 billion at those loans whose market value cannot be determined.

And if that is not enough:

Wall Street Journal, OCTOBER 2, 2008

Revised Bill Lets FDIC Borrow Without Limits

The Senate financial market rescue bill would temporarily allow the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to borrow unlimited amounts of money from the Treasury Department in connection with the larger government deposit coverage that would extend until the end of next year.

This is important because it would increase the backstop that the FDIC has to make sure that insured depositors can be repaid if their bank fails… [end of citation]

Creating this much money is monetary inflation – depreciating the dollar. In turn that leads to price inflation in the market.

Must we also pay interest on the debt we take over?

We the people will be in the anomalous position of paying interest on a debt to the banks to bail out the banks! At the very least, doesn't it seem right that the banks should be paying interest on the $700 billion to us?

Rather than propping up an unsustainable system, it is now time to let the private money-making scheme collapse and replace it with something better. Banks that have thrived in an unregulated free market should be left to work out their fates in that market. If they go bankrupt, they can be put into receivership and reorganized in return for an equity interest in the banks, as was done recently with AIG. That equity should then be sold on the market, with the proceeds rebated to the taxpayers.

We should say "Thanks but no thanks" to Paulson's $700 billion ransom.

Resignation?

Alan Blinder and Newt Gingrich have also called for Paulson's resignation. Frank James asks:  

As the fingerpointing continues following the House's failure to pass the $700 billion bailout, a lot of blame is going to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. for first trying to run roughshod over Congress and the sensibilities of taxpayers until he realized that approach was doomed to failure.  

Paulson is being singled out for crafting an initial proposal that was so offensive to many Americans and members of Congress in how it sought vast new and unreviewable powers for the Treasury Secretary.  

With the controversial three-page proposal he dropped on Congress last week, he wound up creating a wave of outrage so huge it couldn't be overcome by the time yesterday's vote occurred.  

The very same hard-charging qualities that led him to be such major success and riches on Wall Street as investment bank Goldman Sachs' chairman and chief executive, it's thought, caused him to be insensitive to how consensus is formed in Washington and how major legislation must be marketed to the American people.    

There've been the inevitable calls for Paulson to resign. Last week Alan Blinder, a Princeton University economist who served as Federal Reserve vice chair in the 1990s called for his resignation. That was followed on Sunday by a similar call from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.  

There are signs of currency manipulations to keep the dollar strong, with short selling of gold and silver, and buying dollars by central banks. If this came to an abrupt end, the dollar and the US sovereign debt will utterly collapse unless the world is ready to accept the dollar as the fiat currency above all others. And do not think for one minute that the Fed does not see the possibility of this outcome. This is what our bankers do: keep borrowing.

The dollar is the Fed's but the problem is yours.