New Video + Graphs!
From NRO’s The Corner:
According to an internal U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service memo going the rounds of Capitol Hill and obtained by National Review, the agency is considering ways in which it could enact “meaningful immigration reform absent legislative action” — that is, without the consent of the American people through a vote in Congress.
“This memorandum offers administrative relief options to . . . reduce the threat of removal for certain individuals present in the United States without authorization,” it reads.
Also: “In the absence of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, USCIS can extend benefits and/or protections to many individuals and groups by issuing new guidance and regulations, exercising discretion with regard to parole-in-place, deferred action and the issuance of Notices to Appear (NTA), and adopting significant process improvements.”…
Stripped of its bureaucratic phrasing, what the memo amounts to is a proposal to not enforce the law – to simply refuse to deport illegal immigrants. Using bureaucratic slight of hand, the plan would be to have whole classes of illegals simply ignored by ICE.
NRO received a note from USCIS stating that this is just an internal memo for discussion and doesn’t mean any policy shift. That, in turn, is pure, unadulterated BS. They got caught working out ways to implement amnesty on the sly and are trying to cover their foot steps – make no mistake about it, this is what they very much want to do, if they can’t get amnesty through Congress.
It must be kept in mind that liberals, on the whole, don’t understand what law is. They don’t understand, that is, that law is the only thing protecting us from both anarchy and tyranny. Laws are passed and unless struck down as unconstitutional, they must be rigidly enforced until such time as the legislative power alters or abolishes them. If we don’t do this, then we have no laws, at all – just the whim of tyrants, or the out of control acts of anarchists.
Pressure and publicity is our best defense against this – to let the people know what the Obama Administration is up to is to immediately generate the proper level of opposition which will make them run for the hills.
Exceptionally important point noted by PIMCO and brought to our attention by Mish:
Our modern era of capitalism over the past several centuries has never known a period of time in which population declined or grew less than 1% a year. Currently, the globe is adding over 77 million people a year at a pace of 1.15% annually, but slowing.
Do read the entire linked article, but to nutshell it – population growth around the world has been slowing for 40 years. Population has gone in to decline in many of the advanced economies and only has significant growth in some of the poorest areas of the world – and even they are headed towards, first, population stability and then towards decline. In spite of this trend, prosperity has continued to grow, especially in the advanced nations. This has been fueled by printing and borrowing money.
But without people, there is no wealth. A million pounds of gold is entirely worthless to the last man on earth, ya dig? We’ve been cutting off wealth at the source, while borrowing money like mad. We’re in quite a fix – or, as PIMCO puts its, a “new normal” which will be “deleveraging, reregulation and deglobalization”. If present trends continue, we’re all going to get a lot poorer, and then stay impoverished for a long time.
And by “cutting off wealth at the source”, I mean in its entirety – we haven’t been having children, we’ve been shutting down mines, farms and factories and we have increasingly wasted what wealth we have by purchasing worthless garbage instead of saving and carefully investing. There is nothing left save the increasingly empty cradle, and the increasingly large debt.
What to do?
It will take a societal change – which cannot be forced – to convince a proper number of people to engage in child rearing in sufficient numbers. That is in the realm of theology and morals, and no government action can help us there. A conviction that hard work is rewarding is what is necessary to provide the foundation for a renewed respect for faith and family. And hard work is what we need to start doing, in any case, if we are to survive. Really, we need to rebuild our economy from the ground up – starting with farming.
I know, it isn’t sexy and won’t win a Nobel Prize, nor get you a sycophantic write-up in the MSM, but there is this – if no one grows the food, we all die. So, farming is the basis of any healthy economy. As far as practical, a society must grow sufficient food to feed itself. We here in America can do this – we have the land and the know-how, but our entire structure of taxation and regulation in agriculture discourages farming. All that needs to change – we should be encouraging farming with tax incentives, regulatory easements, supports for production and exports (nothing signifies the insanity of our dying system than the fact that we have paid people not to grow food).
After farming comes mining and manufacturing. We have to extract from our own soil the maximum amount of raw materials necessary for our economy. All incentives should be on exploration and both opening up of new sources as well as more efficiently using the sources we currently have. Once we’ve got the stuff out of the ground, it should be turned in to consumer goods in factories here in the United States.
If we do this, we’ll start to create wealth. This wealth is necessary first to discharge the absurd debts we’ve built up, and then to provide the basis for an expanded American prosperity in to the future. It is do this, or die off as a nation – if we won’t do hard work, we deserve to die, anyway – and mark this, while I’m in favor of strict border security, I figure that if Americans won’t farm, mine and work in factories, then we should just go on and import people who will. Screw a bunch of post-modern layabouts who want a cushy, high paying job. America is a place for work, savings and investment – if you’re not doing that, then you’re just wasting time and resources.
We can’t count on anything but the sweat of our brow. The cheap labor of the third world is going to vanish via demographic decline and rising wages. The era of free government money is coming to end in a mountain of debt. The time when someone can remain an adolescent in to his 30’s is over. It is time, boys and girls, for us all to become men and women – and get back to work, and do the right thing.
Economy Social Issues by .
Andrew Klavan notes what the left really wants in our political debate – a monologue:
…everywhere, the Left favors fewer voices and less information, and conservatives favor more. Everywhere, the Left seeks to disappear its opposition, whereas the Right is willing to meet them head-on.
Take the e-mails that the Daily Caller obtained from the now-defunct lefty Web service Journolist. Never mind the personal or psychological implications of a radio producer who lovingly imagines Rush Limbaugh’s death or a law professor who doesn’t know that the FCC has no power to deprive Fox News of a license or a reporter who wants to smear Fred Barnes and other right-wing commentators as racist in order to distract the public from the hateful radicalism of Jeremiah Wright, then Obama’s pastor. The point is not these people’s animus or ignorance or wickedness. The point is that what they desired was not victory in open debate but silence—the silence of censorship, intimidation, or the grave…
This stems from the leftist conviction that they are absolutely better than conservatives – morally better and intellectual superior. Where a conservative might, from time to time, grant that a liberal has a good idea and will always and everywhere defend the right of a liberal to express his views (regardless of how hair brained), no liberal will ever do either. It must be kept in mind that the left considers conservatism to be an evil – a wicked, hateful visitation upon the people of the world. Something to be destroyed – you certainly can’t compromise with it! After all, should good compromise with evil?
The liberal conviction of absolute superiority is also invincible. No amount of facts will deter a liberal from holding to the view of his personal excellence – and the excellence of all those wise enough to hold to liberal views. You can prove a particular liberal idea a failure; a particular liberal to be an idiot; a particular conservative idea to be good – it won’t matter. And, in fact, the more you prove such, the angrier liberals will get.
In the end, it boils down to this: its either get them out of power, or eventually find ourselves suppressed in the public square, because they’ll keep going no matter how long it takes.
Political Philsophy by .
No doubt about it, we’re in a fix as far as housing goes. While some short sighted analysts are pumping up recent data alleging a growth in home sales, the fact of the matter is that in raw numbers of houses sold, we’re clearly in a housing Depression. Prices continue to drop, foreclosures continue at a rapid pace, and the incidence of strategic default (ie, people walking away from homes they can afford because the market value is so much less than the mortgage balance) continue to rise. Rosy housing scenarios have us maintaining prices right about where they are now, but I fully expect major reductions in home prices unless we some how change the dynamics of the market.
Here is the terrible scenario – we’re already in the dumpster on home prices and as this dumpster spreads, it pushes more and more people “underwater” on their mortgages, thus stressing their willingness to keep up consumption and/or making them more likely to just walk away from their homes.
Continually falling consumption leads to an increasingly slack labor market which, in turn, puts more and more more people in to the position of being unable to maintain their mortgage payments. As foreclosures and strategic defaults continue to spread, the “shadow inventory” of foreclosed homes (homes owned by the banks but kept off the market for fear of really killing home values) will grow, thus providing even more downward pressure on home prices. The circles continues, ad nauseum, until houses are selling for a tiny fraction of their peak price.
This is a classic supply and demand event. There is too much supply of housing and too little demand – so, prices drop. Demand is suffering from a lot of things – most notably, of course, high unemployment, but also such things as demographic change (Boomers are retiring thus looking to downsize their houses rather than upgrade, eg). Supply suffers from over-built conditions (a lot of houses were built until the crash hit – and home builders are still working at a pace to put hundreds of thousands of new homes on the market this year) and, of course, the very large number of foreclosed homes. A balance must be struck, or things will just continue to get worse.
Bringing down unemployment would be the ideal solution, but that will take a major shift in national economic policies which are unlikely under a liberal, Democrat Administration – and even if we get those policies, it will be a few years before they bear substantial fruit. Additionally, even if we get back to full employment it doesn’t mean we’ll see a huge surge in home purchases – people are gun shy and unwilling to take on a great deal of debt. This is wise, but it complicates efforts to prevent a complete collapse in housing.
We’ve tried tax credits to spur home purchases but all we ended up doing was front-loading home purchases, thus making things even worse on the demand side down the road. Essentially, increasing demand is not something we can do in any time frame that will work. And, meanwhile, the longer we go on, the worse it gets.
If you can’t do much with demand, then it is to supply we must turn. How do we lower the supply of houses actually or potentially on the market for sale?
You turn them in to leased houses.
Millions of potential home owners cannot buy homes because they are out of work, have reduced income or have wrecked credit. With all that, they still have to live somewhere, and while some of them are in desperate straights, most of them have some sort of income (and, in a lot of cases, just as much income as they had before they lost their homes). Can’t buy? Rent.
The trouble is that banks don’t want to be land lords. This is understandable, and I wouldn’t ask them to be. But they can put the houses in to corporate structures which do manage rental properties and which can use at least part of the rental income to provide a revenue stream for the banks. We can put a big incentive on this by making the revenue from rental housing tax free for five years. The key is that time frame – though we can go as low as two years: but we want these houses off the market until we have at least a chance of reviving the economy and thus providing a solid base for home demand.
The idea here is to take the massive number of foreclosed homes and lock them away for two to five years – to get out of the housing market the houses which simply don’t have a buyer, and won’t have a buyer for some years to come. But we can’t just let them sit there unoccupied and deteriorating, nor can we expect banks to just sit on things which don’t produce any revenue. We also don’t want to increasingly force the banks in to fire sale prices for the homes they hold as that will just accelerate and make worse the problem we have.
For the renter, incentives can also be provided – perhaps by making part of their rental payments tax deductible? But aside from any direct benefit like that, the fact remains that a lot of people want to live in a house but can’t at the moment. We can even set up the system so that someone who is being forced in to foreclosure can have an option to lease the property from the bank for two to five years. If a man loses his job and thus gets his home foreclosed, he can then continue to live there, paying rent to the bank and after five years, if he’s been at all careful, he might have restored his credit rating to the point where he can re-purchase his home from the bank.
With the foreclosures off the market, the housing market will become a lot smaller and prices can at least stabilize. Stable home prices will help provide a level of security which is currently lacking, thus affording more opportunity for a return to economic growth. After two years, banks can slowly start to release houses – which, meanwhile, have been well maintained and generating at least some revenue – and keep that up for years, taking advantage of what is hoped to be a reviving economy to sell the houses for a lot more than they would have received had the market collapsed completely.
The final beauty of this is that the expenditures by government would be relatively small. Action would have to be taken to modify tax and regulatory codes and the housing provisions known as Section 8 (which helps people with rent when they are simply unable to meet the full rental charge for their area) might have to be expanded a bit, but we’re not talking a trillion dollar bail out – certainly, not a bail out of banks but, finally, some direct help to the people actually being hurt in all this.
Anything is better than just letting this spiral out of control or, even worse, having the government step further in to the housing market. We’ve got a spreading crisis which threatens to take down the whole economy and we need to think anew and act anew if we’re to get ourselves out of this mess. We can pull ourselves out of this mess if we just show a bit of courage and imagination.
Economy by .
The “wikileak” of US military documents related to the Afghan campaign doesn’t really tell us anything perceptive observers had not already figured out – but it does highlight, once again, the need for a clear US policy regarding the use of military force.
The fundamental problems we face in Afghanistan – attempting to win hearts and minds; dealing with timid allies; enemies who have safe havens from which to launch attacks upon us – have been with us ever since the Korean War. In the highest councils of our government and in spite of having, at times, Presidents and generals who understand war, we have had an overall paralysis of will which has prevented the United States from securing clear-cut victory most of the times we have engaged in battle since the Second World War. Only the comparatively minor operations in Grenada and Panama have been fought to a conclusion – and the clear peace resulting from such action stands in stark contrast to the bitter defeat or disappointing half-victories of other conflicts.
In Korea were the bad military seeds planted. First in Truman’s decision to go to war without a clear, Congressional declaration of war. Secondly, and most fatally, in the loss of nerve when things didn’t immediately work out as well as planned. In these two actions came about both the concept that the American people cannot sustain a big war as well as the insane proposition that wars may be fought for limited ends (this last bit had a shred of support from the fact that in the 19th century Bismarck had fought three wars for very strictly limited ends and wound up with a united, powerful Germany dominating the European scene – left out of such considerations were, of course, the dragon’s teeth sewn by those limited wars which united to undo Bismarck’s Germany in World War One). The truth is that both the Civil War and World War Two demonstrated America’s willingness to go all out for victory, while to fight for less than absolute victory is an absurdity no great captain of the past would understand, let alone agree to.
It is America’s leadership which has been unwilling to either declare war or to show courage when things go badly. Because of this unwillingness/cowardice, America’s wars since WWII have tended to be half-fought, and thus rapidly lose support from a public which seems to instinctively know that if you go to war at all, you go all out (and they understood this from the start – the massive, unprecedented outpouring of public support for a relieved General MacArthur in 1951 was testimony to a popular desire to win, once war was started). It is time for us to bring to an end the era of quasi-war for the United States – we have to short-circuit an often faint-hearted leadership, and ensure that if an American soldier is ever engaged in battle from this point on, then his entire nation is absolutely committed to victory regardless of cost.
As a first step, we need to retrieve our war-making power from the Executive Branch. We must pass whatever legislation is necessary to forbid the deployment of US ground forces outside the territory of the United States except during time of declared war. The President must lose his ability to send troops in to battle outside our nation until such time as he obtains specific war powers from Congress. Many will say that this ham strings the United States in times of emergency and to a certain extent they will be correct. But given the baleful effects of leaving this power in the Executive, alone, I think that on balance we’d be better off, even if a US response might be delayed a day or two while Congress gathers to debate and vote upon a war resolution.
The second step must be to prevent a Congressional cut-and-run once the war starts. The cut off of funds by Congress to South Vietnam ensured that our efforts there would end in complete failure; the attempts by Congress to cut off funds for the Iraq campaign nearly caused our complete defeat in that campaign. Once in, we must essentially be forced to stay in until victory is done – and so, legislation must be enacted to ensure that war appropriations can only be refused by a 2/3 vote of both houses.
Once in and committed to funding the fight, we can have some assurance that the war won’t be left half done. We can then look our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in the eye and tell them that whatever sacrifice they make, it won’t be for anything less than victory. It will also tell the world that while we might be slower to act than previously, you can rest assured that once we do act, we’re coming in all the way and with everything we’ve got.
We dare not become a fortress trying merely to protect ourselves. But we also cannot become a global 911. Diplomacy and economic activities will play a large roll, as always, but behind words and trade must lie not just a superb US military, but the knowledge that if we un-sheath the sword, it won’t be laid down until the enemy is completely destroyed.
None of this will help us in Afghanistan. For good or ill, the plan and forces we have in place now will have to do the best they can. The troops there deserve our support – but once we do finish in Afghanistan, we should pledge ourselves that will be the last such war we fight. Next time when faced with an insurgency supported by a Third Party, we’ll have to steel ourselves to taking on the sponsors, as well as the terrorists – in any fight, the enemy will know that war with us means ultimate destruction for them.
War is a terrible thing and should not be engaged in save for the weightiest of reasons – but once we determine that war is the only means of securing our interests, then it must be war to the bitter end.
National Defense by .
First, a bit from the Wall Street Journal:
The old bogeyman of deflation has re-emerged as a worry for the U.S. economy. Here’s something else to fret about: After studying more than a decade of deflation in Japan, economists have slowly realized they have no idea how it works.
The Powers That Be have been attempting to spur inflation since the start of the financial crisis. Printing money and pouring it in to the economy – using every desperate expedient they can find to cause inflation. It hasn’t worked, at all. Worries of utter and complete destruction are at the back of every inflationist mind. It is, as noted in the linked article, a “bogeyman”.
Now, why is deflation a bogeyman? An Instapundit reader provides the answer:
Inflation helps the government hide its spending, while easing the burden on politically influential debtors and those who’ve lent against property. Deflation helps savers, salary earners and those on fixed incomes.
This is all VERY well understood.
What “Ivy League” governing elites don’t know, is how to finesse the politics of debasing the currency without inciting the pitchforks-and-torches crowd, whose latest manifestation has been the Tea Party movement.
And that is spot on – Inflation is a bogeyman because the elites in government and financial sharks will be on the short end of the stick if our economy deflates. People who work hard, save their money and invest with care will be on top of the world – and that is a nightmare for people who either like to exercise power via borrowing and spending (government) or who like to pile up vast sums by playing the global financial markets (financial sharks).
It should be kept in mind what inflation really amounts to: picking the pockets of the hard working, sober people in our society. It is a massive transfer of wealth from the working poor and middle class to the fabulously wealthy. It has been the basis of our economy since FDR’s New Deal (and that, my friends, is what the New Deal really was – stealing money and using it to reward the least deserving; with a few crumbs tossed to the middle class to keep them from getting too angry).
The political and financial elites are worried that the game might be over for them – that the amount of fiscal irresponsibility necessary to spark inflation might be so large that it will create a revolution. Their whole world of power and privilege is on the brink of disaster.
And we should just keep pressing them to the edge of the cliff and over it. The eventual complete crash of the system will be painful, but it will give us our best opportunity of getting rid of the thieves and allow us to reform an economy for the benefit of the hard worker, the person who saves and the person who carefully invests his savings for the long term.
Economy by .
Its like the man really figures we don’t have any long term memory, at all:
The U.S. economy is gradually recovering, but the private sector now must drive growth rather than the government, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Sunday.
The private sector must drive growth!?!? This from the man who has presided over the spending of trillions via government in order to “save” the economy? Hey, Timmy, if you wanted the private sector to drive growth it would help if you hadn’t locked trillions of dollars up in us government bonds!
A string of obscenities presents itself to my mind to fully express my feelings about this dunderhead at Treasury.
What we’ve got here is a establishment man entirely at his wit’s end – he doesn’t have any clue what to do. The stimulus was supposed to work. That is what he learned in college and what he and all like him take as an article of faith. Now that it is abundantly clear it hasn’t worked, Geithner is trying to bamboozle the private sector in to making it all happen. He’s talking up the economy in the absurd hope that businessmen won’t look at their balance sheets and will utterly ignore the big tax hikes impending and just take off and hire and expand like mad.
This is getting painful to watch. Our country is in the hands of utter fools – the greatest nation in human history has a government unworthy of the smallest banana republic out there.
HAT TIP: Mish’s
Economy by .
From the Las Vegas Sun:
…The program Friday released the first-year results showing that 29 percent of lenders did not appear for mediation sessions, had no authority to make a deal or did not bring all the documentation required.
Nevada has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation, and 11,716 people applied for the state program to get a chance to meet with their lender to work something out with a mediator present…
I do have a bit of personal experience here, though not in the actual mediation program. To nutshell it, I’ve been trying to work things out with my lender since late 2008 and it has been a complete nightmare. The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing and this has resulted in a series of gross errors from the lender which has driven me up the wall. And now I see this and find that the lenders aren’t showing up for the mediation sessions, or don’t come ready for them.
The problem, I think, lies in the fact that the people running our financial institutions haven’t the foggiest notion of what they’re doing. The firms, themselves, are lead by carbon-copy business school graduates who climbed the corporate ladder – a ladder where ability and intelligence count for far less than whom you know and whether or not any gigantic mistake is attached to your name. Know the right people and don’t entirely screw things up, and you’ll rise to the top.
Stuck in the complete melt down of our financial system – and my view, which is held by many others far more knowledgeable than myself, the entire financial industry is functionally insolvent – the leaders are ill-equipped to map out an exit strategy. Its not supposed to work like this – slumps are supposed to end after a while and then high profits are supposed to return, making everyone at the top ever more wealthy and allowing them to retire as successful businessmen. Faced with the fact that things aren’t getting better, they are at their wits end.
And, so, the confusion. Some people get foreclosed on lickety split; others go for years without making payments with nary a peep out of the banks about it. Some people get modifications and everything is fine. Some get modifications only to find that the bank changes its mind a few months later (this is, among many other absurd things, what happened to me). Some don’t get modifications, at all – while still others get them and then re-default. Some people go in to short sale (selling the house for less than the mortgage balance) and are then pulled in twenty different ways by banks, buyers and real estate agents in a many-months long process which often ends with the house still being foreclosed.
No wonder more and more people are going for “strategic default” – this is where you can make the payments but just decide to bag it and find somewhere else to live because your house is with vastly less than the mortgage balance. Personally, I think that there’s a lot to be said for it – provided you don’t mention it to the bank. I think that attempting to work with the bank just draws attention to yourself and thus puts you in to incompetent hands who will screw things up royally day after day.
What to do? First off, admit that any solution will not satisfy everyone. Secondly, think about what we want.
From what I have learned, there could be as many as 8 million houses of “shadow inventory” in the United States. These are foreclosure homes which are held off the market for fear of collapsing housing prices even more. We don’t want to add to that pile. Keeping people in their homes if they can in any way, shape or form make payments is the ideal in keeping houses off the market. My preferred way of doing this is “cram down” – reducing the principle balance to be in line with current market value. This, of course, only works for people who can make payments, so even under ideal circumstances, it won’t be for everyone.
The second step is to clear out the “shadow inventory”. My preferred method here is to provide incentives for long-term leases of foreclosed houses. Using the tax system, I’m sure we can work out a way to make it worthwhile for the banks to develop a property management combine which would then lease out foreclosed properties, with preference being given to those people who have lost their houses via foreclosure – and, in addition, offering such lease deals to people who are in or going in to foreclosure (ie, they would stay in their home, but it would become bank owned, with them leasing it for 2 to 5 years). This would get a very large number of the foreclosures off the market at least for the next few years, thus preventing another massive downturn in home prices.
In the long run, our housing market is not going to be fixed until the overall economy improves and people can start contemplating home purchases on a large scale. Even then, I doubt much that houses will ever return to pre-crash valuations. But we need to do something – and it will take imaginative thinking outside the financial industry to do it, as those within the industry have proven themselves utterly incompetent.
Economy by .
Deacon Keith Fournier over at Catholic Online has an excellent run down on the gay sex scandal currently rocking the Church in Rome – as well as statements of the Catholic view on matters of homosexuality and homosexual sex. It is well worth reading because as the MSM starts to churn the mud on this story, it will do well to re-affirm basic Catholic teaching – being gay is not a sin; gay sex is wrong because it cuts off the sex act from the gift of life, etc.
But what of the larger issue at stake here – the clear infection of the Church by the disease of modernity?
This is not the first time a priest has sinned. Always and ever a Christian must remember that even among the 12, there was a betrayer and that even the Rock our Lord founded his Church upon denied Him three times. God knows full well that in fallen Man perfection is not going to be found – but can only be created by effort and, of course, the grace of God. In any group of 100 priests there will be a percentage who are in grave sin.
But there does seem to be more of it now than before. Priests once upon a time had a reputation for sanctity which was admitted even by the Church’s most bitter critics. One only has to think of the way priests were depicted in popular culture even as late as the 1970’s to see that there was an awed respect for the men who heeded the call. What happened?
We fell asleep at the switch. Ultimately the Bishops are responsible, but even the laity bears its portion of blame. Well famed is the Catholic opposition to abortion – but practically unknown is the supposed Catholic opposition to birth control, divorce, smut, co-habitation. Less well known, that is, because we Catholics are not living it out – and not attempting to convert the culture to our views.
If two unmarried persons are living together and present themselves for communion, where is the priest who will say, “no”? Where is the Bishop who will ensure that this flock knows that, no kidding, you can’t be in full communion with the Church unless you subscribe 100% to Church teaching? What has happened is that discipline has slackened – we’ve turned a blind eye to things for decades now, and so its almost inevitable that we’d see shocking, horrific pictures of priests disgracing themselves.
We must get a handle on this – even if it means offending the popular culture and even if it means a much smaller number of Catholics in the pews on Sunday. Bishops must be called to task, but the laity must also be called – and we must eventually ask ourselves this question: do we want a Church, or do we want a social club? As for myself, I look towards my salvation, realize how far short I am of anything Our Lord wants, and so I want a Church which can lead me…not a club which will foolishly gloss over my errors.
Are we tough enough to be Catholics? I hope I am – and I hope we all will be.
Pop Culture Religion by .
From CNN Money:
A Minnesota bank was closed by government regulators Friday, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said, bringing the total number of failed banks this year past 100.
We’re well on track to exceed last year’s 140 bank failures – though the FDIC is dressing this up as good news as we won’t hit the record for bank failures of 534 in 1989. Of course, it does seem that the FDIC is stringing this thing out and only taking down banks as money becomes available for FDIC action. So, there are probably a lot of hidden bank failures (banks which should be shut down, but aren’t.
And all the supposed hope for the future depends on the economy getting better and the bad loans to stop cropping up. If you believe that is going to happen, then I’ve a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.