May you and yours have a very Happy Thanksgiving.

Reese

Borrowed from Craig's Corner... great photo of Mr. Reese... haven't we all had a tractor at sometime in our lives...  well, ok, some of us did.. haha..

and on and on and on... seems the folks who got us into the mess, are being assigned to lead us out of it...

on our farm, we have chickens and dogs. They get along, well sort of, except for one, ole Jagger. Now ole Jagger will kill a chicken inside of a minute or less...  so you know what we do? We tie him up, put him in doggie jail when the chickens are out because we know what he will do, he has proven this many times over....

and so it seems to me the right place for those who got us into these hard times is JAIL... what do we do... why we put them in charge of getting us out of the mess they made... hum... common sense here for just a second... says using ole Jagger... if we put him in charge, there would be NO chickens...  so if we put these idiots in charge... will there be no USA economy??  

my humble opinion of Mr. B. Hussein Obama was simple and it has not changed one bit. Simply close your eyes and listen to the man and his words. There was NOTHING between the ears. If you wondered what a Hillary Administration would look like, take a look at his "New" idea folks... all left over folks who in some way are tied to the mess in wall street and all former Clinton aids...  with the exception of two big time appointments, one of which is a carry over. The man has zero common sense, and a true opinion of how high his self worth is... he leads by saying "I know, I said, I did, you're done"! The anointed one, the killer dog, is leading us to slaughter by gathering more killer dogs around him...  but hey... America voted but the one thing they missed was that usually one votes for someone who has a plan, and has the experience and wisdom to called "Leader" of the free world. Our President. This time America got caught up in the "anointing" effect of voting for a popular speaker and big time smuzzer who makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy while actually saying nothing... the ole fashioned con artist, and we all will pay the price of their mistake.

According to IMUS, the following article is required reading... and it really is well put, written by a big time B. Hussein Obama supporter. 

All Fall Down

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I spent Sunday afternoon brooding over a great piece of Times reporting by Eric Dash and Julie Creswell about Citigroup. Maybe brooding isn’t the right word. The front-page article, entitled “Citigroup Pays for a Rush to Risk,” actually left me totally disgusted.

Why? Because in searing detail it exposed — using Citigroup as Exhibit A — how some of our country’s best-paid bankers were overrated dopes who had no idea what they were selling, or greedy cynics who did know and turned a blind eye. But it wasn’t only the bankers. This financial meltdown involved a broad national breakdown in personal responsibility, government regulation and financial ethics.

So many people were in on it: People who had no business buying a home, with nothing down and nothing to pay for two years; people who had no business pushing such mortgages, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business bundling those loans into securities and selling them to third parties, as if they were AAA bonds, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business rating those loans as AAA, but made a fortunes doing so; and people who had no business buying those bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so they could earn a little better yield, but made fortunes doing so.

Citigroup was involved in, and made money from, almost every link in that chain. And the bank’s executives, including, sad to see, the former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, were clueless about the reckless financial instruments they were creating, or were so ensnared by the cronyism between the bank’s risk managers and risk takers (and so bought off by their bonuses) that they had no interest in stopping it.

These are the people whom taxpayers bailed out on Monday to the tune of what could be more than $300 billion. We probably had no choice. Just letting Citigroup melt down could have been catastrophic. But when the government throws together a bailout that could end up being hundreds of billions of dollars in 48 hours, you can bet there will be unintended consequences — many, many, many.

Also check out Michael Lewis’s superb essay, “The End of Wall Street’s Boom,” on Portfolio.com. Lewis, who first chronicled Wall Street’s excesses in “Liar’s Poker,” profiles some of the decent people on Wall Street who tried to expose the credit binge — including Meredith Whitney, a little known banking analyst who declared, over a year ago, that “Citigroup had so mismanaged its affairs that it would need to slash its dividend or go bust,” wrote Lewis.

“This woman wasn’t saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt,” he added. “She was saying they were stupid. Her message was clear. If you want to know what these Wall Street firms are really worth, take a hard look at the crappy assets they bought with huge sums of borrowed money, and imagine what they’d fetch in a fire sale... For better than a year now, Whitney has responded to the claims by bankers and brokers that they had put their problems behind them with this write-down or that capital raise with a claim of her own: You’re wrong. You’re still not facing up to how badly you have mismanaged your business.”

Lewis also tracked down Steve Eisman, the hedge fund investor who early on saw through the subprime mortgages and shorted the companies engaged in them, like Long Beach Financial, owned by Washington Mutual.

“Long Beach Financial,” wrote Lewis, “was moving money out the door as fast as it could, few questions asked, in loans built to self-destruct. It specialized in asking homeowners with bad credit and no proof of income to put no money down and defer interest payments for as long as possible. In Bakersfield, Calif., a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000.”

Lewis continued: Eisman knew that subprime lenders could be disreputable. “What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism... ‘We always asked the same question,’ says Eisman. ‘Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.’ He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S.& P. couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. ‘They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,’ Eisman says.”

That’s how we got here — a near total breakdown of responsibility at every link in our financial chain, and now we either bail out the people who brought us here or risk a total systemic crash. These are the wages of our sins. I used to say our kids will pay dearly for this. But actually, it’s our problem. For the next few years we’re all going to be working harder for less money and fewer government services — if we’re lucky.