Is there a Republican candidate you like?

[Warren Dew]

Plz, remind just what fanny and freedie are (or rather what makes them special, since I do know they are a lind of banking institution that was particularly involved in extending mortgage loans to people who cohld not get them from normal banks, or afford the rates practiced by those), and just how he wanted to fiddle with them?

They were and are the main backers of zero down payment mortgage loans, and their turning of high risk mortgages into mortgage backed securities was one of the main drivers of the housing bubble. Gingrich says he was advising them not to fuel the mortgage binge as much.

[Tyrannical]

This austerity shit needs to stop. This is not the time for austerity. This is the time for governments to dig in and spend on infrastructure. We can help each other. But everyone has to do it. We all go into debt to each other, and we all get rich.

I'm not holding my breath. There's too many people whose achievement of their obsession relies on making it fail.

The place you should study isn’t the bust
It’s the boom that should make you feel leery, that’s the thrust
Of my theory, the capital structure is key.
Malinvestments wreck the economy

The boom gets started with an expansion of credit
The Fed sets rates low, are you starting to get it?
That new money is confused for real loanable funds
But it’s just inflation that’s driving the ones

Who invest in new projects like housing construction
The boom plants the seeds for its future destruction
The savings aren’t real, consumption’s up too
And the grasping for resources reveals there’s too few

So the boom turns to bust as the interest rates rise
With the costs of production, price signals were lies
The boom was a binge that’s a matter of fact
Now its devalued capital that makes up the slack.

[Clinton Huxley]

Rick Santorum just popped up in a book I'm reading, about apocalyptic fundagelicals in the US. Helping some loon called Hagee raise money for Israel. Hagee leads some demented church and believes that Russia and a pan-Islamic alliance will attack Israel and then be destroyed. This is during the tribulation, of course. You can judge a man by the company he keeps, as they say.

[JimC]

Can we do a swap of right wing politicians around the world, sort of an exchange program? Give us, say, Newt Gringich for a year, and you can have Tony Abbott...

[Warren Dew]

You can have Gingrich only after he gets a term or two to straighten our economy out from the damage Obama has done to it.

[Schneibster]

Libertarians don't know anything about economics.

[Warren Dew]

If he'd asked for Ron Paul, I'd have been okay with it.

[amused]

Real estate bubbles are intentionally created because they infuse so much money into the largest number of pockets. Carpenters, plumbers, home owners, appraisers, real estate agents, lending officers, title companies and all the way up to mortgage bankers and big investors. This exact scenario played out in the 1980's with the Savings and Loan bubble. The Republicans deregulate the regulations, the Democrats promote prosperity for all, chaos ensues. Rinse, repeat.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

You can have Gingrich only after he gets a term or two to straighten our economy out from the damage Obama has done to it.

A t-shirt of my own design.