Government Conspiracy Theory Blames Hybrid Mortgages for Depression

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Tom di Lorenzo at Lew Rockwell blog has this:

“Following Alan Greenspan’s pathetic “don’t blame me” speeches and books, various Fed branches have parroted his view that the Greenspan Depression we are in was caused by thrifty Orientals whose savings drove down interest rates.  So imagine my surprise upon receiving a hard copy of a Dallas Fed publicaton entitled “Taming the Credit Cycle by Limiting High-Risk Lending” and reading that “The present troubles emerged to a large extent from the growing use of hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages . . .”   Huh?  What happened to The New Yellow Peril?

There is no mention at all — not one word — of the role of Fed monetary policy in creating the housing bubble. The culprits, say these self-serving excuse makers (the author is Jeffrey W. Gunther), are “lightly regulated institutions” that are in need of the Fed’s “disciplining force.”

My Conment

Mr. di Lorenzo can relax –  this new tack does nothing to exonerate Greenspan. Look at this USA Today piece from early 2004, when housing was already showing bubbl-y tendencies:

“He [Greenspan] said a Fed study suggested many homeowners could have saved tens of thousands of dollars in the last decade if they had ARMs. Those savings would not have been realized, however, had interest rates shot up.

“American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage,” Greenspan said.”

Read through the whole piece and it’s  clear that American house buyers actually “preferred the stability” of the traditional fixed rate mortgages. In other words, it was only a concerted PR effort by Greenspan & Co. that changed people’s tastes in this.

Let that put an end to any moralizing of this issue.  Yes – rampant consumerism and debt binging exacerbated the problem. But the problem wasn’t caused by some moral defect in American consumers. It was caused by policies deliberately pushed by the federal government in the hope that the consumer would succumb. The chairman of the Federal Reserve thus acted no differently from any confidence man or grifter who spots a mark (a naive, uninformed person easy to manipulate), then sets about winning the mark’s confidence before baiting the trap….

You can see the chairman’s own words to the national association of credit unions on February 23, 2004. (Skip down to the last 2-3 paragraphs to catch the gist)

And now, just like any con man, the Fed chairman too blames his victims.

They had it coming to them...


Staying Put in Uruguay

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It’s 12:20 PM and I’m writing this at the computer terminal at Tres Cruces bus station in Montevideo.

Tres Cruces – three crosses – must be one of the most comfortable stations I’ve been in. It’s really a combination of a mall, an information booth and a train station. This is Uruguay’s central terminal and you come here if you want a bus to Punta del Este, or Punta del Diablo, or Salto, or to Colonia, or even to towns in Argentina. The trains in Uruguay are old. If you don’t have a car, you take the bus. Tres Cruces is also where you buy your fare for the buquebus (book-eh-boos), which is the ferry that takes you across the bronze water of the Rio dela Plata, between the two capitals. You can also catch the more scenic (and slightly cheaper) water ride offered by Trans-Uruguay from Carmelo to Tigre, a popular Argentina get-away, about an hour to Buenos Aires.

A tall white cross signals where the station is, slightly hidden behind the road.

It’s drizzling faintly outside now, but nothing like the chill rain and sharp wind earlier in the winter. In any case, I don’t plan on going out. I mean to spend the rest of the night here, reading and catching up with some friends. And I thought I’d catch up a bit on my blogging too.

My excuse is that the past two days were a bit frantic, because I couldn’t make up my mind whether to return as I’d planned….or to ignore my ticket and stay on.

The ticket, in case you’re wondering, was $1840 including taxes, which I’m told is a very good deal. I was hoping to get something under $1800 but I missed that….because I postponed my departure from May to June at the last minute…..and then some friends landed up and took up a couple of weeks more of my time. A good time was had by all, but when you’re dying to make a move, it can be exasperating waiting around.

Some tips on picking tickets:

*Always try to travel off-season and on weekdays, if you can.

*Prices on deals aren’t always predictable. It used to be that you needed to book well in advance to get a decent price. But I’ve noticed that these days deals can be had for dates just a couple of weeks ahead.

*Sometimes they’re offered by local airlines, like Lan Chile or Pluna (the Uruguayan airline). Other times, they’re cobbled together in the US by some American airline. A good practice is to check the consolidator sites, a couple of fare-searchers like Orbitz or Cheap Tickets, and then go through the promotions on Delta or American or a couple of the South American airlines.

*You need to do that a few times a week for  2-3 weeks – and bingo, you’ll spot something.

Take home point?

Like so many things, it’s a matter of numbers. Turn up enough cards, and you’ll find the trump.. of course, you’ll turn up a few jokers too. But that’s the way the game goes.

But deal or not, I don’t like wasting something I’ve bought.  So I looked into changing it.

Too bad, bargain tickets turn out to have restrictions. In this case, I’d need to pay a penalty ($200 – not too bad) and then I would have to pay the difference between my return leg and a new ticket. Well, this time of the year, one-way tickets from Buenos Aires or Montevideo to Miami are about twice the price of my round-trip. Unbelievable. And that’s the way it is right through to the end of December. The reason is you have to stick with a one-way on the airline you came from. I almost thought I’d go back and get another round trip and come back in a few months. It seemed smarter than paying $1500 for a one-way ticket. But I didn’t know if I’d have the stamina to repeat this trip so soon.

Anyway, the decision was made for me. …as the best decisions often are. I got up later than I should have. I needed to have left on the ferry by ten at the latest. Instead, I was still going back and forth over the pros and cons.

That doesn’t explain why I’m stuck at Tres Cruces at midnight, of course, but the guard is signaling that I have to close up for tonight and so the explanation will have to wait for another day… adios…

Thought Control and the Sex Police

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The media these days has an unhealthy and strange preoccupation with the sex lives of politicians and “public figures”… especially when they’re adulterous.

All this, despite journalists’ protests that they’re interested in “privacy”…

The issue becomes doubly important because of the role sexual blackmail…or worse yet, sexual libel.… plays and has played in controlling political mavericks, reformers, or even whistle-blowers, whether in government or elsewhere.

I call it strange, because modernity is supposed to have removed itself so far from oppressive mores and bourgeois conventions….and yet in most commentary on the subject, one finds nothing more than the same hideous cliches – about guilt, predation, sex-pots, cheating, and high drama….
In point of fact, most spouses wander (or more accurately, cultivate fantasies of wandering) because of lack of emotional connection in their marriage.

That’s clear from Mark Sanford’s tepid (yawn) revelations..

Now, as a good Tory-Bohemian, I find myself often on both sides of this issue.

On the one hand, the nostalgic popular imagery of It’s a Wonderful Life, and Father Knows Best…..

And, as a Christian – even an unorthodox one, the fact that one is supposed to admire the impossible standard set in the Sermon On the Mount…

A standard that no normal human could follow to the letter..
A standard that perhaps no normal human should follow to the letter.
[I wonder if that was the point Jesus was trying to make?]

Yet, while no one casts stones at anyone for not giving away all his belongings, or for failing to keep the sabbath, or for slandering or lying, or for fraudulent business practices, strange that even the most benign friendship should bring out the sex police.

(As an example, think of McCain’s supposed affair with a lobbyist – an affair both of them denied and for which no proof existed beyond the media’s fervent desire for a little dirt…and mind you, if one were to be precise, it was McCain’s marriage itself that was grounded in adultery…Cindy being a former ‘other woman’).

Stranger yet, the sex police these days are usually so-called leftists and liberals.
Their modus operandi would have made the gestapo proud…

If there’s anything calculated to keep women out of public life, it’s this intensely misogynistic and pornographic scrutiny. If you don’t think that’s what all this is, why haven’t we been treated to sexualized nudes of, say, George Bush, as we have of Hillary?

Why wasn’t Ralph Nader lynched by the media mob in the same way as Cindy Sheehan?

So my sympathies are with scarlet women (and men), then and now, paraded up and down while the public stones them symbolically. Even Eliot Spitzer has my sympathy. The man after all did try to cordon off his extramarital life from his wife and children. He had that much concern for them. It was the guardians of public morality who had none.

I admit it. When there’s a stoning, I’ll take the side of Hester Prynne and Anna K.

I prefer Tolstoi’s intelligent, ambitious, restless, sexual, and deeply moral adulteress, to either her vain, shallow lover or her wooden, hypocritical husband….or even to her brother’s long-suffering wife, the plaintive, babied-out Dolly – so aptly named.

Tolstoi, being a man, could give Anna no credit for anything except beauty or sexuality, but the fact is, you read the novel for her. ..and not for Dolly, or for Levin, or for Karenin, or for Vronsky. She’s worth them all.

The other woman…..

Who’s to say how much this unspeakable she profited countless miserable marriages, neutered husbands, and pathetic, damaged children…by taking up the slack (physical or emotional) of the immoral “business arrangement,” by which I loan you my body to make babies and play with, and in return you fork over 50% or more of everything you make, or will ever make, while we endlessly bait, hurt, rob, insult, control, extort, blackmail, bore, manipulate, wound, sue, demean, abuse, and torture each other verbally, emotionally, and physically….all in the name of holy matrimony.

What a fraud….

And that’s how many children are raised today. Any wonder they became traumatized adults, easily manipulated by propaganda?

Where would respectable Victorian marriage have been without the brothel, asked Shaw..

And where would the nuclear family be without countless other women, whether they were only friends, sisters, neighbors, and “office wives,” or whether they crossed the boundary into a physical relationship?

Thank God for other women….and for other men.

It takes a village to raise a married couple…..

We all have an image of the other woman in our heads: the calculating predator who moves in on happily coupled men. The cloistered, diamond-draped mistress. The office sexpot who’s always just a little too close to your guy at his holiday party. She’s a staple of novels, movies, tabloids, even history books – from the restless Emma in Madame Bovary to Fatal Attraction’s bunny boiler to, most recently, Eliot Spitzer’s hotel call girl. And if you’ve never seen it, go YouTube the legendary clip of Marilyn Monroe purring “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to her rumored lover, J.F.K. That’s the other woman as we usually imagine her.

More at Glamour, via Truth to Power blog.