| Sunday,
September 28, 2008 It appears that we have a bailout bill. It is festooned with 100 pages
that I am sure include a lot of perks to Pelosi, Reid, Dodd, and Barney
Frank. There is probably buried in there a provision that allows lobbying
with money that will be paid out. The Democrats will tell everyone they have
saved the country from some disaster. In a bipartisan way they will beat up
on Bush and the Republicans, and they will never mention the real cause of
all this bad paper (The CRA forces the banks to issue bad paper to
irresponsible buyers; see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5tZc8oH--o for details. But Pelosi will
certainly go out and tell everyone how the Democrats have save us from the
crisis, and the Republicans are the villains.
I am listening to Pelosi, who is telling us that the heroes will be
Barney Franks and Chris Dodd, who, according to the Democrats, had nothing
to do with causing the problem, and who now ride forth to save the country.
Whether this will inspire confidence in the economic system is
problematic: they seem to have forgotten that this is really the purpose of
this immense injection of public money into the private sector. But the
Democrats, who are dominating the press, act as if they discovered the
crisis, and they and they alone have saved the nation; and Barney Frank and
Senator Dodd are the real heroes.
It will be interesting to see what happens next.
====================
I note that Barney Franks and Dodd are making certain we understand that
the crisis was caused by deregulation. Of course it was not. It was caused
by over-regulation, and the CRA forcing banks to make bad loans or face
lawsuits. But we will hear it all again and again. But see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5tZc8oH--o for details.
==================
Regarding firing the SEC Chairman: The President cannot "fire" a
commissioner of a quasi-independent agency like the SEC, but he can fire him
as chairman and name a new chairman; the commissioner remains a
commissioner.
================
It will be interesting to see what is in that 100 page bill. I am sure
there is a lot of what amounts to earmarkery.
==============
Off the top of my head observations:
Golden parachutes: we may detest them, but they are not the cause of the
problem. And every one of the Democrats involved in this bailout benefited
from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and every one of them was in favor of the
CRA provisions requiring more and more sub-prime loans in order to increase
home ownership.
And listening to Pelosi and Reid's press conference, I am guessing that
their provisions for helping keep people in their homes probably means that
those who should not have been buying houses in the first place will be
protected in one way or another. People who made horrible decisions and
bought houses without down payment and interest only loans will be bailed
out by those who put up a down payment and took out a normal 30 year
amortization loan and have made their payments all along. Perhaps this is a
good thing. Ownership promotes a certain independence. But I suspect that
things will be gimmicked so that in order to keep the house you should never
been able to buy, you will have to continue to support the Democrats. But
then I have a nasty suspicions mind.
On protecting Wall Street:
Of course when government forces banks to make bad loans, is there then a
moral obligation from all of us to make the banks whole again? They were
only doing what we told them they must do. I know, I know, we the people
didn't vote to force the banks to make bad loans; but our government did,
and the Congress did, and we continued to elect those who did that, and we
are now to cheer them as heroes for rescuing us from the financial collapse.
Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Pelosi, Reid -- they were all for regulations
requiring more sub-prime loans. Banks that didn't comply were in a world of
hurt.
Biden is asking where McCain was! Well, Biden, McCain was in 2003
trying to curb Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and cut back the pressure from the
CRA, that's where he was. Where were you? And where was Obama?
===============
Query: does anyone know the holdings of Pelosi and Reid and the others in
AIG and Lehman and such like? They must keep their money somewhere.
============
And here is the kind of mail that really makes me feel like working to
keep this site going.
Subject: jerrypournelle.com
It seems strange that a man like you who embraces
technology has such a lousy website.
I think you should fire your webmaster - immediately
if not sooner.
Non scrivetemi
Winston Smith
Fortunately there are enough of you who have subscribed to make me think
this is probably not typical. Alas, since I am my own webmaster --
whatever that is -- since no one else has done much work on this site, I
don't think I can comply with that suggestion. Boy it sure makes me feel
good to get mail like that.
====================
Interesting. I replied to the above mail at this address:
And I received this answer:
RE: jerrypournelle.com
This message is being sent to you automatically in
response to an email that you sent to <nonscrivetemi@pboxmix.winstonsmith.info>.
Most likely, you tried to reply to an email that has
been sent through this service. If you did not send an email to <nonscrivetemi@pboxmix.winstonsmith.info>,
please ignore this message.
The "Pboxmix, a Winston Smith Project anonymous
remailer" is a free service that allows individuals including crime
victims, domestic violence victims, persons in recovery, and others, such
as those living under oppressive regimes, to communicate confidentially in
a manner that ensures their privacy under even the most adverse
conditions.
To block individuals using this remailer from
sending email to your address in the future, please send a message to <mixmaster@pboxmix.winstonsmith.info>
containing the line
destination-block jerryp@jerrypournelle.com
anywhere in the body text of the email. You can
simply forward this entire email to <mixmaster@pboxmix.winstonsmith.info>
using your email program for your current email address to be permanently
blocked from users of the "Pboxmix, a Winston Smith Project anonymous
remailer".
For more information about the "Pboxmix, a Winston
Smith Project anonymous remailer" Administrator's strict anti-abuse
policy, please send a blank email to <pbox-admin@winstonsmith.info>
Sincerely,
-- The "Pboxmix, a Winston Smith Project anonymous
remailer" Administrator
Which is interesting, I suppose. I wonder whether the anonymous sender is
a crime victim, a domestic violence victim, or a person in recovery, and I
am entirely mystified as to why his views on my web site demanding my
resignation have to be sent through this means or how my web site
contributed to his (her) becoming a crime victim, domestic violence victim,
or a person in recovery -- or indeed how it might contribute to anyone
entering one of those categories. Ah well.
=============
I am now listening to the Republican press conference on the bailout
bill. It's pretty clear that they think this is better than nothing, but
there's little fervor for it.
If the Republicans had stood on principle after Newt left as Speaker and
had not taken us on a wild spree of wild spending and unlimited pork, we
wouldn't be in this mess. Now they stand on principle when something has to
be done to restore confidence -- and thus liquidity -- to the financial
system.
I suppose it was all inevitable?
==================
In about an hour I got a lot of mail like this:
Webmaster for
www.jerrypournelle.com
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the
webmaster at
www.jerrypournelle.com for maintaining a readable and
uncluttered web site.
I do not have to put up with flashing ads or other
insults to my eyes in order to read this excellent site that helps me to
understand the world and the people in it, why so many things are so
screwed up and how I might be able to make some small contribution toward
righting the wrongs.
Bob Holmes
and
Dr. Pournelle,
I read today's update about someone asking you to
'fire [your] webmaster' and your note that such mail doesn't exactly fill
you with enthusiasm.
It just so happens that almost exactly ten years ago
(!!), I wrote to you and apparently it helped you regain some enthusiasm
in a similar circumstance:
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/
archives/archivesmail/mail9.html#lift.
I sincerely hope that this email serves as a counter
to the 'fire the webmaster' email; thanks once again for your engaging and
thought-provoking fiction and nonfiction writing.
FWIW, I'm a web professional (have been for years)
and I find your site quite usable, even on my handheld device. I do wish
you could provide a somewhat more usable RSS feed, but other than that I'm
happy to scroll down to read your writings each day.
If money is any judge, I have been happy enough to
become a Platinum subscriber of late, and continue to enjoy and value (and
purchase) your fiction as well as your day book writings. I'm quite a bit
to the left of you politically, but I always enjoy (and often agree with)
your political and economic discourse.
Thanks again for maintaining one of my favorite
places to read on the web.
Best to Roberta and Sable,
-Carl
Indeed. And in the past hour or so I have many more such notes, so I do
not think we will be making many changes here. I do agree that I could do a
better job with making an analytical table of contents, but that takes time
I often don't have.
I think this closes the discussion except that I welcome concrete
suggestions on how I might improve the place; the general note that things
aren't always easy to find I already have, but I am dancing as fast as I
can... Incidentally the link takes us back to very early days of this site
(mail 9!) and the kinds of things we talked about then. I was just learning
how to do this and wondering if it was worth the effort. Now we are up to
mail 537...
=================
for the record:
Here <http://dallasfed.org/research/eclett/2007/el0711.pdf>
is a comment worth considering from the Dallas Fed:
/Some 80 percent of outstanding U.S. mortgages are
prime, while 14 percent are subprime and 6 percent fall into the
near-prime category. These numbers, however, mask the explosive growth of
nonprime mortgages. Subprime and near-prime loans shot up from 9 percent
of newly originated securitized mortgages in 2001 to 40 percent in 2006./
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