Comments on: FDIC Quandary Could Stick U.S. Taxpayers With the Tab for the U.S. Credit Crisis

By: Four Secrets That Will Help You Survive - and Even Profit From - the Whipsaw Stock Market

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 21:10:22 +0000

[...] Insurance Corp. (FDIC), are increasingly worried enough about their own finances that they are hatching plans to raid the Treasury’s coffers at a time when the list of trouble institutions is rising at [...]

By: H. Craig Bradley

H. Craig Bradley — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:44:37 +0000

My response to Trikerguy is one of interpretation. I believe the traditional response by government to any crisis is bound to be after the fact. Just take your po’-lice analogy, for example.

A crime takes place. A victim is shot, robbed and left for dead. Ten minutes later, there are five police cars at the scene, roping off areas for investigation. Of course, nobody was paying attention in the period of time leading up to the crime. If “accidents are preventable”, apparently crime is not.

It bares remembering that bureaucracies are by nature resistant to change. In fact, bureaucrats I have known don’t much like change or change agents. Similarly with vested interests.

Today, change is taking place at a fast pace. It is quite possible that China will supplant America as the dominant economic and military power in the Pacific Region (Asia) in just a mere twenty years.

Here is another consideration: Quite often, things are not what they appear. Take the Iraq War. We have spent at least $500 TRILLION so far to secure the country and establish a kind of democracy. Iraq has lots of oil. Its oil and gas infrastructure is old. The Iraqi government is going to have to issue billions of dollars in contracts to foreign oil companies to develop and market their energy resources for hard currency.

Guess who was the first to secure a contract to develop oil and gas in southern Iraq? A Chinese oil company for $ 2-3 Billion dollars. Now, what is going on? The U.S. Taxpayer funds the U.S. military so our competitor can exploit the peace we paid for. Who is looking out for the little guy?

Of course, the pundits again.

By: H. Craig Bradley

H. Craig Bradley — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:16:59 +0000

I love pundits! They always have an answer. Problem is, hardly anyone was talking about this “credit crisis” back in early 2006. Similarly, nobody was talking about gold as a good investment in 2002 when the U.S. Dollar was peaking. So my question is: Where were the pundits when you needed them? What I did hear was the conventional wisdom, you know, so-called “common sense”.

What I did hear in the media and elsewhere was the same old bromides and denial that I heard in the late nineties, such as:
“Decoupling”. For the unfamiliar, this is the myth that foreign stocks are largely disconnected from our financial problems and vice versa. Put it another way, “what goes around, comes around”.

Don’t you love financial platitudes? (Just think of all the commentators on shows like MSNBC who make a living talking about finance). Too bad it is too late to do much good.

By: Trikerguy

Trikerguy — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:12:18 +0000

It’s curious that anything to stave off financial crises caused by the wealthy and their appoligists and manipulators that may require fed money to fix is a bad thing. But to expend billions of taxpayer’s money on an unnecessary war is never criticized by those same people.

The current mortage/financial crisis was setup by people seeking to make big and easy money without any government (the people’s oversight). So unfortunately it was pay later to fix rather than pay for police in the system. The people’s representatives in government were apparently serving “those” rather than the people.

So now what’s your solution?