The opening remarks by Obama at his news conference yesterday evening reflect this underlying premise: Great are the tasks of the National Government in the Sphere of Economic Life. Here all action must be governed by one law: the people does not live for business and business does not exist for capital, but capital serves […]
U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner today announced his Plan for Bad Bank Assets, the Public-Private Investment Program. In a press conference with Geithner today, Obama accurately called Geithner’s plan a “public-private partnership.” The notion of public-private partnership is a recurring theme in the Obama administration. See, for example, this “Summary of Health Care Session” from the […]
My March 4th post on Laughter, Weeping, and Crying was a revision of something I wrote in 1999. At that time, I had done some library research on the topic, but had not found any source of much use. But last week, thanks to the Internet and Google, I did find an excellent source: The […]
This morning, Obama released a videotape intended “to speak directly to the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Obama’s words mean essentially this: You don’t have to fight us anymore, because we are changing to be more like you. Obama said this: My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the […]
Bailouts are wrong, but the government had always implied that it would stand behind mortgage securities sold by the GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The deeper wrong was the government’s creation of the GSEs, which financed homes for the poor on promises of someday robbing the rich. That day has come. And now the […]
1. The U.S. government, armed with the Community Reinvestment Act, forces banks to make home loans to people who cannot afford to repay the loans. At the same time … 2. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs)—create a credit-scoring formula with a very low qualifying score. They give this formula to banks and say, […]
Betsy Speicher alerted me yesterday to the fact that “As of right now, Atlas Shrugged is the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in the category ‘Literature & Fiction.’” At the same time, another edition of the novel was ranked #6, and The Fountainhead was ranked #23. As of this morning, three different editions of Atlas […]
… Compared to Governments. Bernard Madoff has confessed to a Ponzi scheme whereby he swindled investors of billions of dollars. “In court documents, prosecutors say Madoff reported he oversaw $64.8 billion.” Multiply that staggering amount of money by 3,000, and you get roughly the amount of money that Americans have lost over the past two […]
In his March 7th weekly address, Obama said this: [B]ecause we cannot bring our deficit down or grow our economy without tackling the skyrocketing cost of health care, I held a health care summit on Thursday to begin the long-overdue process of reform. Our ideas and opinions about how to achieve this reform will vary, […]
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke to the joint US Congress in Washington yesterday, and received numerous standing ovations. Here is an excerpt of what Brown said. My father was a Minister of the Church and I have learned again what I was taught by him: that wealth should help more than the wealthy, that […]