Democrats have caused our current economic problems, by:
1. Destroying the root of our economy by obstructing access to any economical fuel sources including oil, natural gas, nuclear energy, hydro electric, clean coal and anything else that could sustain a healthy economy. Fuel is the very core of our economy and they crushed it.
2. The democrats deliberately pushed the core of the credit crisis, and ignored warnings that things were being done by Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae that would be very harmful to our economy, by the Bush administration, and even John McCain. The democrats buddies in Freddy Mac and Fannie May (powerful advisers in the Obama campaign and huge democrat contributors to Obama, Frank, Dodd, Waters, and Reid among other democrats started out on a dangerous course, lied to investors about the status of the investment, and caused the credit crisis and the bringing down of banks and insurance companies because of those investments becoming worthless as collateral, making those institutions illiquid and thus unable to legally do business … this sent a chill through all lending institutions and froze up credit which has lead to this disaster in the economy … accomplished by democrats with a few idiot republicans help. The worst thing any republican ever did in the last 8 years, even 16, was to go along with democrats and try to work with them. They are the bane of the US economy, and it was caused by their lust for power and their greed … as well as the accomplice of the liberal media and entertainment industry in this country working to push their lies and deceptions on the people of the US, and even the rest of the world.
Fuel being so high was the catalyst that caused the problems with the mortgage backed securities to come out like they did, and this destroyed the backbone of commerce and industry in the US and weighed so heavy on the world that the rest of the world could not bear the weight.
I also think China was deliberately driving up fuel prices and pushing things to a head, maybe working with some US politicians like the Clintons to make this happen, so things would be ripe for Hilary’s presidential bid. This kind of thing is classic Clinton, if you really know how the man has worked in the past to get what he wanted. His mob exploits are long and detailed, and he thinks very big of course, afraid of nothing and knowing no limits.
This whole thing has effected the entire world, and it all goes back to what democrats have been pushing for decades. The press has been with them. The press is actually THE power, as they inform the voting public, or in the last decades they deliberately misinform the public to help the democrats gain power.
Do you think this mess was completely deliberate? Even done by design to gain power in the country by creating a crisis and because the masses don’t really understand that the president can only influence so much, doing it during a republican presidency?
When you look at what has occurred there is no question about who pushed policy which caused it. The only Question IS: WAS IT DELIBERATE?
No one has control of the government who doesn’t have control over public opinion. The rich elite democrats have control over the press and entertainment industry, so control over public opinion, which trumps everything because the voter is the boss, and the voters opinion is IT, as far as power goes.
That’s right truth seeker ; ) … but do you know me? Try checking out my information for yourself and see how it adds up before you discount it. Such a dismissive remark is hardly the mark of a genuine truth seeker, is it? Go, seek, find, compare and contrast, see what is plausible and then do it over and over again until you get a good feel for the trending of realilty. That’s what I did, for years. Find me conclusively wrong on any point and I’d be happy to hear about it. Facts now, not media crap ok?
You guys? I am not a republican. No party is any better than the accountability they are held to by the press and their constituents. The Republicans are under a microscope and their own constituents take out their own trash. Democrats? The press goes along and covers for them, and their own constituents don’t hold them accountable. Check the history on that. Democrats who do crimes tend to get re-elected. Republicans usually get tossed before there is an election, and if not they are fired by their public, quickly.
Under Bush there was more money allocated for alternative fuel research than under ALL presidents before him. Under Bush water standards were held to levels many times what Clinton did, especially arsenic levels. Bush did more for Aids research than any other president, and pushed it personally. I wish people who didn’t know much wouldn’t expound as if they were speaking of factual information, and not just a general hate Bush so he couldn’t have done anything right, haze.
Clinton didn’t leave a surplus, that is a lie perpetrated by himself and the press. He speaks of a projection as if it happened, but it was a bad projection, and it never happened. The economy was tanking as he left office. He left a recession for Bush to deal with, and a budget deficit which would become huge. 911 a few months later added to problems which added to it. After all that Bush’s lowered taxes, just like Kennedy did, and as Kennedy did, he brought in much more revenues, 20% more than Clinton did as a matter of fact. Every time certain taxes are lowered the economy kicks up and tax revenues go up because of all the added economic activity which results. 20% of 200 is more than 35% of 100, to keep it simple.
Thanks Rush Limbaugh. Spoken like a true Faux “news” watcher.
Now go find out what really happened these 8 years.
Click your heels and say 10 times …”the dems were in charge the dems were in charge, the dems invaded iraq in a trillions dollar war the dems invaded iraq in a trillions dollar war the dems ran up the deficit the dems ran up the deficit”
The people of this nation are really tired of all the Republican irresponsibility and buck passing.
one has to wonder.
I like enchiladas.
That would be plausible BUT we had a republican president
yes, of course. the one thing they didn’t count on was that it would be you that would be the clever one to figure it out.
You guys had control of the govt. for six years. Bush talked about alternative fuels for 4 straight State Of The Union addresses, and did nothing
I don’t think they wanted it to tank this bad, but most of them are filthy rich (Like Ted Kennedy) so they really don’t care
And they are in power now, so all the better for them.
Liberals = SCUM
That was under Bush- he makes his money form oil.
Clinton left us with a near record breaking surplus which Bush used up before 9/11.
They control the congress !! still do.
Were sooooo screwed !!
Hmmmm….I don’t tend to think like that, but you’ve got a point. Without all that, anyone who’s willing to see knows that the Democrats tanked the economy when that got into Congress in 2006. Boy, you covered everything. (See, THIS is what a logical conspiracy looks like.) Sadly, the way liberals are, I wouldn’t put it past them.
Apparently, the libbies are unable to admit just how little power the President has since they think they’ve elected the messiah.
Um, your wrong.
way wrong.
Instead of watching Fox News all day why don’t you read the paper get your facts straight then come back to me.
Those people are not that stupid, and the democrats are the power, the ultra wealthy in the country who own the big banks, controlled Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae, Control the Entertainment Industry and the News media pretty much. They control Universities and most of what is approved for our childrens text books.
Was it delibertate? This group of ultra elite with their eyes on the ball of world trends and world power? You know it is, the odds of all of it being an accedent are astronomical.
actions taken by the Dem’s and allowed by the repubs over the past several decades caused the problems
and the actions were deliberate
but i am sure that they expected a glorious outcome, and are thoroughly shocked by the current bad condition
i do not believe that it was sabotage except. possibly sabotage by delusion
You didn’t just buy the crock, you bought the entire outhouse.
David Corn
June/July 2008
Who’s to blame for the biggest financial catastrophe of our time? There are plenty of culprits, but one candidate for lead perp is former Sen. Phil Gramm. Eight years ago, as part of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade, Gramm pulled a sly legislative maneuver that greased the way to the multibillion-dollar subprime meltdown. Yet has Gramm been banished from the corridors of power? Reviled as the villain who bankrupted Middle America? Hardly. Now a well-paid executive at a Swiss bank, Gramm cochairs Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign and advises the Republican candidate on economic matters. He’s been mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary should McCain win. That’s right: A guy who helped screw up the global financial system could end up in charge of US economic policy. Talk about a market failure.
Gramm’s long been a handmaiden to Big Finance. In the 1990s, as chairman of the Senate banking committee, he routinely turned down Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Arthur Levitt’s requests for more money to police Wall Street; during this period, the sec’s workload shot up 80 percent, but its staff grew only 20 percent. Gramm also opposed an sec rule that would have prohibited accounting firms from getting too close to the companies they audited—at one point, according to Levitt’s memoir, he warned the sec chairman that if the commission adopted the rule, its funding would be cut. And in 1999, Gramm pushed through a historic banking deregulation bill that decimated Depression-era firewalls between commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and securities firms—setting off a wave of merger mania.
But Gramm’s most cunning coup on behalf of his friends in the financial services industry—friends who gave him millions over his 24-year congressional career—came on December 15, 2000. It was an especially tense time in Washington. Only two days earlier, the Supreme Court had issued its decision on Bush v. Gore. President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress were locked in a budget showdown. It was the perfect moment for a wily senator to game the system. As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Written with the help of financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the chairman of the agriculture committee, the measure had been considered dead—even by Gramm. Few lawmakers had either the opportunity or inclination to read the version of the bill Gramm inserted. “Nobody in either chamber had any knowledge of what was going on or what was in it,” says a congressional aide familiar with the bill’s history.
It’s not exactly like Gramm hid his handiwork—far from it. The balding and bespectacled Texan strode onto the Senate floor to hail the act’s inclusion into the must-pass budget package. But only an expert, or a lobbyist, could have followed what Gramm was saying. The act, he declared, would ensure that neither the sec nor the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (cftc) got into the business of regulating newfangled financial products called swaps—and would thus “protect financial institutions from overregulation” and “position our financial services industries to be world leaders into the new century.”
Subprime 1-2-3
Don’t understand credit default swaps? Don’t worry—neither does Congress. Herewith, a step-by-step outline of the subprime risk betting game. —Casey Miner
Subprime borrower: Has a few overdue credit card bills; goes to a storefront lender owned by major bank; takes out a $100,000 home-equity loan at 11 percent interest
Lending bank: Assuming housing prices will only go up, and that investors will want to buy mortgage loan packages, makes as many subprime loans as it can
Investment bank: Packages subprime mortgages into bundles called collateralized debt obligations, or cdos, then sells those cdos to eager investors. Goes to insurer to get protection for those investors, thus passing the default risk to the insurer through a “credit default swap.”
Insurer: Thinking that default risk is low, agrees to cover more money than it can pay out, in exchange for a premium
Rating agency: On basis of original quality of loans and insurance policy they are “wrapped” in, issues a rating signaling certain slices of the cdo are low risk (aaa), medium risk (bbb), or high risk (ccc)
Investor: Borrows more money from investment bank to load up on cdo slices; makes money from interest payments made to the “pool” of loans. No one loses—as long as no one tries to cash in on the insurance.
It didn’t quite work out that way. For starters, the legislation contained a provision—lobbied for by Enron, a generous contributor to Gramm—that exempted energy trading from regulatory oversight, allowing Enron to run rampant, wreck the California electricity market, and cost consumers billions before it collapsed. (For Gramm, Enron was a family affair. Eight years earlier, his wife, Wendy Gramm, as cftc chairwoman, had pushed through a rule excluding Enron’s energy futures contracts from government oversight. Wendy later joined the Houston-based company’s board, and in the following years her Enron salary and stock income brought between $915,000 and $1.8 million into the Gramm household.)
But the Enron loophole was small potatoes compared to the devastation that unregulated swaps would unleash. Credit default swaps are essentially insurance policies covering the losses on securities in the event of a default. Financial institutions buy them to protect themselves if an investment they hold goes south. It’s like bookies trading bets, with banks and hedge funds gambling on whether an investment (say, a pile of subprime mortgages bundled into a security) will succeed or fail. Because of the swap-related provisions of Gramm’s bill—which were supported by Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury secretary Larry Summers—a $62 trillion market (nearly four times the size of the entire US stock market) remained utterly unregulated, meaning no one made sure the banks and hedge funds had the assets to cover the losses they guaranteed.
In essence, Wall Street’s biggest players (which, thanks to Gramm’s earlier banking deregulation efforts, now incorporated everything from your checking account to your pension fund) ran a secret casino. “Tens of trillions of dollars of transactions were done in the dark,” says University of San Diego law professor Frank Partnoy, an expert on financial markets and derivatives. “No one had a picture of where the risks were flowing.” Betting on the risk of any given transaction became more important—and more lucrative—than the transactions themselves, Partnoy notes: “So there was more betting on the riskiest subprime mortgages than there were actual mortgages.” Banks and hedge funds, notes Michael Greenberger, who directed the cftc’s division of trading and markets in the late 1990s, “were betting the subprimes would pay off and they would not need the capital to support their bets.”
These unregulated swaps have been at “the heart of the subprime meltdown,” says Greenberger. “I happen to think Gramm did not know what he was doing. I don’t think a member in Congress had read the 262-page bill or had thought of the cataclysm it would cause.” In 1998, Greenberger’s division at the cftc proposed applying regulations to the burgeoning derivatives market. But, he says, “all hell broke loose. The lobbyists for major commercial banks and investment banks and hedge funds went wild. They all wanted to be trading without the government looking over their shoulder.”
Now, belatedly, the feds are swooping in—but not to regulate the industry, only to bail it out, as they did in engineering the March takeover of investment banking giant Bear Stearns by JPMorgan Chase, fearing the firm’s collapse could trigger a dominoes-like crash of the entire credit derivatives market.
No one in Washington apologizes for anything, so it’s no surprise that Gramm has failed to issue any mea culpa. Post-Enron, says Greenberger, the senator even called him to say, “You’re going around saying this was my fault—and it’s not my fault. I didn’t intend this.”
Whether or not Gramm had bothered to ponder the potential downsides of his commodities legislation, having helped set off an industry free-for-all, he reaped the rewards. In 2003, he left the Senate to take a highly lucrative job at ubs, Switzerland’s largest bank, which had been able to acquire investment house PaineWebber due to his banking deregulation bill. He would soon be lobbying Congress, the Fed, and the Treasury Department for ubs on banking and mortgage matters. There was a moment of poetic justice when ubs became one of the subprime crisis’ top losers, writing down $37 billion as of this spring—an amount equal to its previous four years of profits combined. In a report explaining how it had managed to mess up so grandly, ubs noted that two-thirds of its losses were the fault of collateralized debt obligations—securities backed largely by subprime instruments—and that credit default swaps had been “key to the growth” of its out-of-control cdo business. (Gramm declined to comment for this article.)
Gramm’s record as a reckless deregulator has not affected his rating as a Republican economic expert. Sen. John McCain has relied on him for policy advice, especially, according to the campaign, on housing matters. The two have been buddies ever since they served together in the House in the 1980s; in 1996, McCain chaired Gramm’s flop of a presidential campaign. (Gramm spent $21 million and earned only 10 delegates during the gop primaries.) In 2005, McCain told a Wall Street Journal columnist that Gramm was his economic guru. Two years later, Gramm wrote a piece for the Journal extolling McCain as a modern-day Abraham Lincoln, and he’s hailed McCain’s love of tax cuts and free trade. Media accounts have identified Gramm as a contender for the top slot at the Treasury Department if McCain reaches the White House. “If McCain gets in,” frets Lynn Turner, a former chief sec accountant, “we’ll have more of the same deregulatory mess. I like John McCain, but given what I know about Phil Gramm, I wouldn’t vote for McCain.”
As a thriving bank exec and presidential adviser, Gramm has defied a prime economic principle: Bad products are driven out of the market. In John McCain, he has gained an important customer, so his stock has gone up in value. And there’s no telling when the Gramm bubble will burst.
Personal responsibility.
What democrat made John McCain say the fundamentals of our economy were strong?
What democrat kept Bush from campaigning for republicans?
What democrat kept Bush from the republican convention?
Why wouldn’t any republican be caught dead standing next to Bush near any camera before election?
Personal responsibility.
Yes. Even if it wasn’t a deliberate, planned effort to put their pretty boy into the White House, it was sure a happy coincidence that they can blame Bush for. Because how could the country vote for a president who didn’t know he owned 7 houses. They would have to vote for the guy who will give them taxpayers money to pay for what they can’t afford to buy.
Yup. I think it could very well have been deliberate. but then I love conspiracy theories.
Yes it was done deliberately.
The Liberals/Democrats/Socialists in our Government did this then Screamed their way through the election using racism, they were extremely sexist and use false information and buzz words like “tax Cuts” when it’s really a “rebate check”…..
Currently there isn’t anything thing Obama or his Party can do to bring the economy back - the one they ruined. So in the end, once again they over reached and it will come back to haunt them.
No, I think you are talking about the Republicans. If you remember, Bush got a major warning in 2006, the year after McCain and Sununu were co-sponsors of a bill to privatize the over-sight of Connie Mae and Freddie Mack!
I believe Republicans controlled every branch of government, including the US Supreme Court!
And personally, I believe you are politically biased and are not using any actual FACTS in your misrepresentations!
As most will say, Bush was President, regardless of the fact that the economy was in pretty decent shape until the DEMS won back congress, amazingly just about that time the economy started on a downward spiral. I would not be at all surprised if it came to be known in the future that the Democrats in congress orchestrated the collapse of the economy to see that a Liberal won the White House
Now if Obama fails you will hear the phrase “A president can only do so much” and “It is congress’s fault” Yes there is a double standard!
And it was the democrats that sent jobs overseas and moved haliburton base to Dubai,and spent the budget surplus on tax relief for the rich and started our country’s first preemptive war for reasons that did not exist, and it was the democrats, no wait that was the Republicans wasn’t it. And how about the bail outs for AGI who’s CEO made 850 million in the last eight years for running a business into the ground. The last eight years are the reason that the Democrats are in power now. And check the source and read the article about why the bill failed to pass that would have regulated Freddie mac.
100% yes it was an evil hostile take over from the get go. A plan that has been in the works for many many years!! They own our schools our media our homes our banks open up your eyes people. Soon they will come for our guns then what will we do fight with sticks and stones?? Strip us of all our rights SOCIALISM!!!!