The Michele Bachmann Watch

Sure High Seas, enjoy your lettuce at $9 lb.

YOU get what you pay for. (Demand always trumps anything else)

The 2012 presidential marathon is on, and one mainstream pollster (Rasmussen) says a Republican apparition is opening up a lead on President Obama. (Any Republican 46 percent, Barack Obama 42 percent.) A growing number of Democrats figure that whoever can keep his head in the rattle and bang of unexpected events just doesn’t understand the situation.....

"trickle down" has al;ways been aided by dereugukation (my main catching point) . NO INDUSTRY will do what it oughta without regulation. ANd, as I said before, regulation spurs new industry to comply.

Confessions of a Financial Deregulator

BERKELEY – Back in the late 1990’s, in America at least, two schools of thought pushed for more financial deregulation – that is, for repealing the legal separation of investment banking from commercial banking, relaxing banks’ capital requirements, and encouraging more aggressive creation and use of derivatives. If deregulation looks like such a bad idea now, why didn’t it then?

The first school of thought, broadly that of the United States’ Republican Party, was that financial regulation was bad because all regulation was bad. The second, broadly that of the Democratic Party, was somewhat more complicated, and was based on four observations:

· In the global economy’s industrial core, at least, it had then been more than 60 years since financial disruption had had more than a minor impact on overall levels of production and employment. While modern central banks had difficulty in dealing with inflationary shocks, it had been generations since they had seen a deflationary shock that they could not handle.

· The profits of the investment-banking oligarchy (the handful of global investment banks, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan Chase, among others) were far in excess of what any competitive market ought to deliver, owing to these banks’ deep pockets and ability to maneuver through thickets of regulations.

· The long-run market-return gradient – by which those with deep pockets and the patience to take on real-estate, equity, derivative, and other risks reaped outsize returns – seemed to indicate that financial markets were awful at mobilizing society’s risk-bearing capacity.

· The poorer two-thirds of America’s population appeared to be shut out of the opportunities to borrow at reasonable interest rates and to invest at high returns that the top third – especially the rich – enjoyed.

These four observations suggested that some institutional experimentation was in order. Depression-era restrictions on risk seemed less urgent, given the US Federal Reserve’s proven ability to build firewalls between financial distress and aggregate demand. New ways to borrow and to spread risk seemed to have little downside. More competition for investment-banking oligarchs from commercial bankers and insurance companies with deep pockets seemed likely to reduce the investment banking industry’s unconscionable profits.

It seemed worth trying. It wasn’t.

Analytically, we are still picking through the wreckage of this experiment.

Ill bet that your entire area of business somehow grew in response to a need for better information of mort tables etc.

Hardly worth a bet since you already know the answer and that would make it somewhat suckerish ne?

Tuesday, July 05, 2011

For the first time this year, a generic Republican candidate and President Obama are tied in a hypothetical 2012 election matchup.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely U.S. Voters finds a generic Republican candidate picking up 44% of the vote, while Obama receives identical 44% support. Three percent (3%) prefer some other candidate, and another eight percent (8%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

RCP Average 5/25 - 7/2 -- 44.0 Obama 41.3republican field

Oylok wrote:

High Seas wrote:

Deaf and blind dogs have to eat in order to stay alive - that's a minor detail eluding your otherwise brilliant financial analysis. Bachmann is right.

What makes you believe "staying alive" is the most meaningful thing to any human?............ destructive, asset-stripping variety that has been proposed here.

Destruction and asset stripping proposed here? By whom? How is a dead person (or dog for that matter) going to benefit from your "meaningful" policy?