M Rebman

Prof. Roubini today calls for “much more radical” action to include a blanket government guarantee of all bank deposits. Plus he wants to separate good from bad banks, and save only the solvent ones. Roubini thinks the government can and should resolve the ongoing financial declines. He wanted the government to inject money and take preferred shares. He wants a New Deal style Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to handle foreclosures and homeowner debts.

Original post by Michael S. Rozeff

The 2008 presidential election, scheduled to be a fight over differing visions of foreign policy and domestic spending priorities, has changed significantly. The two campaigns have been focused for weeks on figuring out how much money to take from taxpayers to insulate those same taxpayers from the costs of the decisions of a variety of parties, including the Senate to which both of them belong.
But the commonality between John McCain and Barack Obama on the giant bailout is, in some ways, similar to their overstated differences in the realm of foreign policy. Real differences exist, but in football terms, this been a boring struggle back and forth between the 45-yard lines of foreign policy thought.
Although the two candidates disagree vehemently about who said what when on Iraq policy and whether to negotiate with Iran, they agree with each other on a range of issues, including humanitarian intervention, the supposed […]

Original post by Justin Logan

Today the German government rescued a large commercial real estate company that could not get short-term loans to finance its long-term holdings. Ordinarily, it would simply go bankrupt.
Rescues are now happening all over Europe, as in the U.S. Governments are taking over assets and major companies. This is the pattern. Bankruptcy courts and procedures have been bypassed. Taxpayers are made into involuntary financiers of companies that are corpses.
Creditors of these failed companies are being paid off so that they also do not fail. The governments are trying to maintain their values too rather than let them decline. This is an attempt to prevent systemic deflation. This policy will fail. The values they are trying to hold up run into multi-trillions. The deflation will win.

Original post by Michael S. Rozeff

A provocative post by Andrew Sullivan highlights how the strategy of terrorism is to bleed its victims, and how it might be working. Sullivan quotes a reader at length:
Seven years after 9/11, we are seeing Al Qaeda’s long-term goal being realized: the destabilization and economic collapse of the United States. Even as it’s happening, the people who supported it all along want to continue facilitating our own long-term disintegration by clinging to simplistic concepts of traditional military victory and defeat. In this sense, they are possibly the most myopic, least strategic thinkers in the history of this nation.

It’s exaggeration to say that the United States is destabilized and in economic collapse, and I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that our leaders are that simplistic. But we’re quite a bit worse off economically than we could have been had we responded strategically to terrorism rather than just reacting. […]

Original post by Jim Harper

Maybe I’m wrong, but I think I’m the source for the only constitutional question asked in Thursday’s vice-presidential debate. Moderator Gwen Ifill asked one that sounded a lot like the one I asked that morning in the New York Times:
IFILL: Governor, you mentioned a moment ago the constitution might give the vice president more power than it has in the past. Do you believe as Vice President Cheney does, that the Executive Branch does not hold complete sway over the office of the vice presidency, that it it is also a member of the Legislative Branch?
PALIN: Well, our founding fathers were very wise there in allowing through the Constitution much flexibility there in the office of the vice president. And we will do what is best for the American people in tapping into that position and ushering in an agenda that is supportive and cooperative with the president’s agenda […]

Original post by Gene Healy

For those of you in the Washington, DC, area, on Sunday our local NPR station, WAMU (88.5 FM), broadcast a debate over whether the federal government should pursue a policy of universal health insurance coverage.   Super-famous debaters included John Stossel of ABC News, Paul Krugman of The New York Times, and me.
The debate is now available on the NPR website, and on iTunes under “Intelligence Squared.”

Original post by Michael F. Cannon

That motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel, the Yuri Gagarin of Snake River Canyon, was a horrible human being is pretty well understood by anyone with half a brain. Indeed, the guy once beat someone with a baseball bat for calling him "an alcoholic, a pill addict, an anti-Semite and an immoral person"—which of course perfectly underscores the point in question.
But the FBI spent plenty of time following Knievel around because, you know, there weren’t serious criminals to be tracking or anything. From his recently released file:
Authorities first wanted to charge Knievel with violations of the Hobbs Act, which prohibits interfering with interstate commerce by attempting to rob or extort someone. But the case was dropped when a new federal prosecutor picked up the case and decided there was insufficient evidence. The federal government today won’t comment.
"The Department follows the facts and the law in making decisions and beyond that, couldn’t […]

Original post by gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie)

Over at Forbes.com a stockbroker named Jerry Bowyer presents a totally false history in order to defend the Plutocrats’ Bailout Bill by praising Alexander Hamilton for bailing out the crooked stockbrokers of his day.
See my article today on Hamilton for a different perspective.

Original post by Thomas DiLorenzo

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Taxpayers should not be expected to pay for Wall Street’s mistakes. The legislation requires companies that sell some of their bad assets to the government to provide warrants so that taxpayers will benefit from any future growth these companies may experience as a result of participation in this program. The legislation also requires the President to submit legislation that would cover any losses to taxpayers resulting from this program from financial institutions.

That summary of one of the provisions from the greatest act of theft in history, the bailout, sounds wonderful.  Too bad it can’t be true.
Companies that remain in existence by selling their worthless assets to the taxpayers are not going to be paying that money back.  Any paybacks will render the companies uncompetitive and they will ultimately fail , or they will raise prices […]

Original post by Michael Rebmann

As I’ve noted, increased demands for decentralization and secession will be one result of thie Greenspan-Bernanke Depression. Who wants to be ruled by BushCheneyPelosiReid? Or the equivalent in leviathan state governments like California’s and Oregon’s? Last week, you could watch the power draining out of the federal pygmies as they imposed their ripoff. Now 12 counties in northern California and southern Oregon want to form the new state of Jefferson. Like everyone opposed to centralized tyranny, these people are stigmatized as hicks and rubes and rednecks. Never, needless to say, trust this sort of “we the cosmopolitans” argumentation. It is invariably advanced in favor of centralized government. And watch for much more secessionism, especially as state and local governments, not to speak of the feds, seek to raise taxes on the rubes and hicks and rednecks to continue living in the style to which they’ve become accustomed. (Thanks to […]

Original post by Lew Rockwell