Financial Reform ALREADY Injuring Economy

This is something else.

From Business Insider:

Financial Reform Meets First Huge Unintended Consequence As Ford Halts Bond Offering
Joe Weisenthal | Jul. 22, 2010, 8:57 AM

Whenever you get new laws and “reform,” unintended consequences are sure to follow.

Usually they take awhile.

Not so with Dodd-Frank.

WSJ reports that Ford has already yanked a bond deal, because the ratings agencies, fearing legal liability, won’t let the automaker puts their ratings in the prospectus, making a sale impossible.

So did Dodd-Frank just kill the bond market? Well, probably not.. Regulators will likely find some way around this impasse, but it’s still amusing to see the bill INSTANTLY slow down the gears of capitalism (or at least capital raising) as its fiercest critics might have suggested.

Click here to see 15 signs the economy is rolling over

Here’s the Wall Street Journal piece cited above:

JULY 21, 2010
Ford Scuttles Debt Deal as Overhaul Chills Market
BY ANUSHA SHRIVASTAVA

Ford Motor Co.’s financing arm pulled plans to issue new debt, the first casualty of a bond market thrown into turmoil by the financial overhaul signed into law Wednesday.

Market participants said the auto maker pulled a recent deal, backed by packages of auto loans, because it was unable to use credit ratings in its offering documents, a legal requirement for such sales. The company declined to comment.

The nation’s dominant ratings firms have in recent days refused to allow their ratings to be used in bond registration statements. The firms, including Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch …

Oh, well. Nobody needs those stupid jobs that Ford would have financed through an expansion, anyway.  And who really cares if numerous deals that would have happened don’t now because of “finance reform”?  Surely we’re all fine with scraping our own feces to heat our homes as in the other socialist Utopia in North Korea?  Who isn’t willing to personally suffer to punish those greedy businesses?

Analyst David Rosenberg, in agreement with other market experts such as Bob Farrell, said on CNBC that the Dow could challenge the terrifying lows of March 2009 and drop below 5,000.

Well, surely the Chairman of the Federal Reserve would bring confidence to the market.

Not so much:

Bernanke says economic outlook is ‘unusually uncertain’
In congressional testimony, the Fed chairman predicts that unemployment will remain stubbornly high for years. His comments send stocks down sharply.

By Don Lee and Walter Hamilton, Los Angeles Times
July 22, 2010

Reporting from Washington and Los Angeles —

Saying the economic outlook was “unusually uncertain,” Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke predicted that unemployment was likely to remain stubbornly high for several years, straining families and endangering the nation’s economic stability and competitiveness.

“Long-term unemployment not only imposes exceptional near-term hardships on workers and their families; it also erodes skills and may have long-lasting effects on workers’ employment and earnings prospects,” he said Wednesday in his semiannual testimony to Congress.

“This is the worst labor market, the worst episode, since the Great Depression,” Bernanke said of long-term unemployment. “Not only for the sake of the unemployed and for the short-term strength of the economy but also for a long-term viability in international competitiveness, I think we need to be very seriously concerned.”

We look at the financial reform imposed by the Democrats and realize that it will cost banks billions and make them even more reluctant to lend than they already are even as they pass the increased costs to their customers in the form of a tax from Obama to you.

Business leaders are flat-out stating that Obama’s economic policies are stifling growth.

And I go back to the prediction of chief executive officers made prior to the worst decision America ever made:

In October 2008 I wrote an article which quoted Chief Executive Magazine as follows:

In expressing their rejection of Senator Obama, some CEOs who responded to the survey went as far as to say that “some of his programs would bankrupt the country within three years, if implemented.” In fact, the poll highlights that Obama’s tax policies, which scored the lowest grade in the poll, are particularly unpopular among CEOs.

Barry Hussein is preaching about his “summer of economic recovery.”  But he’s a liar without shame or principle.

On the flip side of the “summer of economic recovery,” there’s actual reality.

From CNN Money, July 22, 2010:

Jobless claims jump in latest week
By Blake Ellis, staff reporterJuly 22, 2010: 9:28 AM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The number of Americans filing for initial unemployment insurance climbed last week, the government said Thursday.

There were 464,000 initial jobless claims filed in the week ended July 17, up 37,000 from a revised 427,000 the previous week, the Labor Department said.

The number of claims was much higher than expected. A consensus estimate of economists surveyed by Briefing.com expected new claims to rise to 445,000.

“It’s very disappointing to have this leading indicator of economic conditions jump higher,” said John Lonski, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “This is the latest reminder of a weak labor market, and the jump preserves worries regarding the adequacy of economic growth.”

The Democrats passed a 2,300 page bill that is essentially mystery meat, which creates more than 20 new agencies that will write hundreds of as-yet unwritten regulations.

And even the author of the bill doesn’t have a clue how the massive Rube Goldberg Machine boondoggle will work:

“It’s a great moment. I’m proud to have been here,” said a teary-eyed Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), who as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee led the effort in the Senate. “No one will know until this is actually in place how it works. But we believe we’ve done something that has been needed for a long time. It took a crisis to bring us to the point where we could actually get this job done.”

Never let a crisis go to waste.

If you are a Democrat, I suggest you burn your testicles off with a blowtorch.  Because that would be change.  And of course change is good.  And who really cares about the irrelevant details of “change,” anyway?

Analyst Meredith Whitney, famous for being one of the very, very few who predicted the economic disaster in 2008, has made another prediction that no one listened to:

“Financial Reform Will Cause ‘Tragic’ Unemployment Levels For An Extended Period Of Time“

So, as the economy descends into the hell of unintended consequences, please comfort yourselves with my assuring you that I told you so.

Democrat Bailout Package: 20% Would Go To Partisan And Corrupt Fund

As Democrats and their media lackeys create a fictional narrative of an agreed-upon bailout deal gone bad because John McCain came into town, it is important to look at why this package has REALLY failed.  In short, the answer is an acronym: A.C.O.R.N.

Ed Morrissey has the story:

House Republicans refused to support the Henry Paulson/Chris Dodd compromise bailout plan yesterday afternoon, even after the New York Times reported that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson got down on one knee to beg Nancy Pelosi to compromise.  One of the sticking points, as Senator Lindsey Graham explained later, wasn’t a lack of begging but a poison pill that would push 20% of all profits from the bailout into the Housing Trust Fund — a boondoggle that Democrats in Congress has used to fund political-action groups like ACORN and the National Council of La Raza:

Morrissey then provides the relevant portion of the Senate Democrat proposa which Democrats claim that the Republicans ‘agreed to’:

TRANSFER OF A PERCENTAGE OF PROFITS.

1. DEPOSITS.Not less than 20 percent of any profit realized on the sale of each troubled asset purchased under this Act shall be deposited as provided in paragraph (2).
2. USE OF DEPOSITS.Of the amount referred to in paragraph (1)
   1. 65 percent shall be deposited into the Housing Trust Fund established under section 1338 of the Federal Housing Enterprises Regulatory Reform Act of 1992 (12 U.S.C. 4568); and
   2. 35 percent shall be deposited into the Capital Magnet Fund established under section 1339 of that Act (12 U.S.C. 4569).

REMAINDER DEPOSITED IN THE TREASURY.All amounts remaining after payments under paragraph (1) shall be paid into the General Fund of the Treasury for reduction of the public debt.

Of this clearly poison pill, Morrissey goes on to say:

Profits? We’ll be lucky not to take a bath on the purchase of these toxic assets. If we get 70 cents on the dollar, that would be a success.

That being said, this section proves that the Democrats in Congress have learned nothing from this financial collapse.  They still want to game the market to pick winners and losers by funding programs for unqualified and marginally-qualified borrowers to buy houses they may not be able to afford — and that’s the innocent explanation for this clause.

The real purpose of section D is to send more funds to La Raza and ACORN through housing welfare, via the slush fund of the HTF.  They want to float their political efforts on behalf of Democrats with public money, which was always the purpose behind the HTF.  They did the same thing in April in the first bailout bill, setting aside $100 million in “counseling” that went in large part to ACORN and La Raza, and at least in the former case, providing taxpayer funding for a group facing criminal charges in more than a dozen states for fraud.

It’s bad enough that taxpayers have to pay the price for Congress’ decade-long distortions of the lending and investment markets.  If we realize a profit from the bailout, that money should go to pay down the debt or get returned to taxpayers as dividends from their investment — not to organizations committing voter fraud, and not to restarting the entire cycle of government meddling in lending markets.  I’d support a rational bailout package, but anything that funds the HTF needs to get stopped.

The American people need to become aware that the Democratic leadership are liars without shame.  They literally closed the House Republicans out of the loop in participating in the proposal that they then falsely claim the Republicans agreed to.  They make a full fifth of the total bailout package dedicated to a fund that has historically been a naked partisan tool that has participated in outright pro-Democratic voter fraud.  They claim that John McCain has not done enough to bring about an agreement on the bailout package, and then attack him the moment he shoes up to devote himself to helping come to an agreement.  And they engage in naked “Presidential politics” even as they claim that John McCain’s participation was an act of “Presidential politics.”

In chapter 10 of His Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote:

In this they proceeded on the sound principle that the magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil, and that, therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, they more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads, and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others; yes, even when enlightened on the subject, they will long doubt and waver and continue to accept at least one of these causes as true. Therefore, something of even the most insolent lie will always remain and stick — a fact which all the great lie-virtuosi and lying-clubs in the world know only too well and also make the most treacherous use of.

Hitler claimed that it was the Jews that employed the strategy of “the big lie.”  But the clear verdict of history is that it was he who did so.  And it was he who named Joseph Goebbels as his “Minister of Propaganda.”  It was the accuser who was the biggest liar of all.  Just like what the Democrats are doing now in their attacks.

Sadly, this is where the United States of America is today.  We are at a point where a major political party can use the strategy of “the big lie” to advance their political position.  And we are to a point where a liberal-dominated media will do everything it can to publish and perpetuate the big lie to the American people.

A Hope For Some Rare Awareness About The Economy

I was in a Wal Mart store a little while back, and got into an argument with an older employee with whom I have periodically chatted.

In that discussion, I discovered that the man was a Democrat, and a pretty liberal one to boot.

And I learned that he had a terribly flawed memory about the Clinton years.

His primary contention was that he had never seen the regional economy so bad. He told me, “When Clinton was president, I had no trouble finding work. But now this Wal Mart job is the best I can get.”

Well, to put it into six words: he’s wrong, wrong, and more wrong.

The Press Enterprise, Riverside County’s (and the Inland Empire’s) largest paper, had a front-page article on July 19 titled “Inland unemployment rate hits 8 percent, highest in 9 years.”

I didn’t have to pull out my calculator to realize that “nine years ago we were in the height of the Clinton presidency.

So why on earth was my liberal Democrat friend at Wal Mart so completely wrong?

Partially because that’s precisely what the media told him to think (you ever hear that sarcastic expression, ‘If I want your opinion I’ll give it to you’?).

John R. Lott did a study that demonstrated that the media viewed the economy through rose-colored glasses during the Clinton years even when the economy was in fact entering a recession. By contrast, we have been hearing the word “recession” for the better part of a year now under a Republican president even when the economy was actually growing and even though the economy is STILL not in recession according to the standard definition of the term. When Bill Clinton was president, the media largely saw even negative news through rose-colored glasses. By contrast, throughout the Bush presidency, the media has been hypercritical – as well as hypocritical – of virtually every economic development.

It is simply a demonstrable fact that the media have for years given Democratic administrations’ economic performance every benefit of the doubt, and given Republican administrations’ economic performance an unrelentingly critical review. Republicans aren’t angry that the media is portraying the economy as being in a recession; they are angry because the media subjectively and unfairly refuse to evaluate Democrat-managed economies by the same standards.

And when it comes to the economy, perception often becomes reality, because people who think that the economy is tanking will invariably begin to act in ways that subsequently cause the economy to tank. As one example, if people are continually told that the economy will worsen and the housing market will continue to decline, will they buy homes now, or will they hold off and wait for the market to further decline and lower prices further? But by waiting, they are actually contributing to the market’s actual decline.

So the same media that helps to create positive perceptions of the economy during Democratic administrations helps to undermine the economy during Republican administrations. They frequently resort to downright irresponsible reporting to do so. And when Democrat and former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich used the term “DEPRESSION” to describe the Bush economy, he was going beyond even the irresponsible media and pandering to the very lowest form of demagoguery.

Is our economy really doing so terrible?

Just to demonstrate how horrifyingly irresponsible Robert Reich was in his prediction of a “Bush depression” on March 14, 2008, the VERY NEXT DAY the story emerged that the United States continues to have the best and most competitive economy in the world!

I hate to be rude, but Reich revealed himself for the vile little pandering and demagoguing rodent that he is. Yet rabid little rat or not, he continues to be paraded from elite media network to network with all the fanfare of an enlightened analyst who truly understands what is going on.

My liberal friend at Wal Mart assured me that the economy was always great under Clinton, and that Clinton balanced the budget. The fact that neither statement is true doesn’t matter. Today’s liberals are fitted with psychological filters designed to prevent truth from entering their minds.

First of all, Bill Clinton most certainly did not get off to all that great of a start as president. If he had, he wouldn’t have contributed to the greatest landslide in political history with a massive 52 seat swing in the ’94 midterm elections that put the Republicans in power for the next dozen years.

Furthermore, President Clinton – all ubiquitous media misrepresentation aside – most certainly DID NOT balance the budget. What he did was fiddle with the numbers to pay off the public debt by borrowing from the intergovernmental debt (particularly from the Social Security Trust Fund). The so-called “Clinton surplus” is simply a myth: The national debt continued to grow and grow and grow, and the last Clinton budget was $133.29 billion in the red.

And when President Clinton left office, he also left President Bush with an economy that was very definitely stumbling into a recession about as bad as the one we’re stumbling into now. He also left President Bush with Osama bin Laden (when he rejected a Somali offer to literally hand him over to us) and with an al Qaeda that was growing stronger and stronger after repeatedly attacking the United States throughout the Clinton administration.

Mansoor Ijaz, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that:

Clinton’s failure to grasp the opportunity to unravel increasingly organized extremists, coupled with Berger’s assessments of their potential to directly threaten the U.S., represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures in American history.

Please don’ think that the vicious 9/11 attacks – which President Clinton could have nipped in the bud by taking out its chief leader and architect – didn’t massively hurt the U.S. economy. Yet a liberal media ensured that President Bush duly received all the blame for both the recession and the attack.

The Press Enterprise article points out that a year ago, the two-county unemployment figure was a reasonable 5.9%. If anything, we have Nancy Pelosi and her “commonsense plan” to thank as much as anyone for the dramatic increase that has taken place during the oversight of a Democratic-controlled House and Senate. But you can count on the fact that the media will never connect the economic downturn to the Democrat’s control of Congress the way they routinely connect President Bush to it.

What’s caused the dramatic negative economic turnaround in the last year?

Is it the sky-high increase in oil prices? I have written again and again that it is Democrats – and Democrats virtually alone – who deserve the blame for the current situation by refusing to allow us to act in a responsible way by drilling the oil we have right under our feet and right off our shores.

See my articles (in order from the earliest to the most recent):

Democrat’s ‘Commonsense Plan’ Revealed: Let’s Nationalize the Oil Industry

Blame Democrats for Sky-High Gas Prices

Democrats Block US Energy Independence, Send Gas Prices Soaring

Democrat’s Ideological Stand Against Domestic Oil Terrible for US Economy & Security

If You Want $12 A Gallon Gas, Vote for Obama and Democrats

Pelosi, Reid, and Obama: The Three Stooges of American Energy Policy

Is it the secondary market fiasco and the subsequent housing market collapse? While Republicans deservedly merit some of the blame, let us not forget that it was Democrats who demanded that poor and unqualified borrowers had to have access to home loans. And let us not forget that the principle political figures involved in the subsequent scandal have been Democrats (Former Fannie Mae Chairman and former Barack Obama key assistant Jim Johnson, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad headline the list among other prominent Democrats).

The media that would have left no stone unturned in launching exhaustive and well-covered investigations into Republicans in any kind of similar situation has conveniently allowed the Democrat’s scandal to vanish off the headlines. They continue to play the part – of Democrat apologist and enabler – that they have chosen for themselves all along.

And we saw an all-too typical example of Democrats and the media ganging up to harm the economy under a Republican administration. Sen. Charles Schumer unnecessarily notified the public of the impending federal takeover of IndyMac in California, creating the equally unnecessary lines and panic among account holders. And then there was the media flocking like vultures, breathlessly envisioning one worst-case scenario for the American economy after another.

Don’t you DARE try to claim that Democrats – who were so utterly consumed with investigating baseball players’ for allegations of steroid abuse and with repeatedly demonzing oil executives at one communist-type show trial “hearing” after another that they were entirely blindsided by the secondary market collapse – were one iota less to blame than the Republicans even at their worst.

And don’t you dare believe that Republicans under George Bush mismanaged the economy in spite of the Democrats’ best attempts to keep it rolling smoothly along. If anything, it was precisely the other way around.

My liberal friend is responsible for unquestioningly believing the liberal media spin rather than engaging in the critical thinking that would let him see the truth about the disinformation campaign going around all around him. Please don’t make the same mistake.