Prayer, God and War: The Media Elites vs. Palin, Clinton, JFK, FDR, and Lincoln

Shame on you, Charlie Gibson!



God bless Sarah Palin!

Video courtesy of Newt Gingrich

Nikki

The Used Car Mortgage

The Used Car Mortgage is one phase of the current credit crisis that I have always found incredibly hard to believe. Having purchased several homes, I'm familiar with the required documentation and the required amount of money for a down payment or an equity sale. I'm very aware of the relationship between the amount of money paid up front and how it relates to the monthly payment and the financing of the balance. The Used Car Mortgage, however, is something else entirely.

I've never understood how companies like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae – the companies once headed by Obama advisers Jim Johnson and Franklin Raines -- could be publicly traded while at the same time being government sponsored. But they are and they're legal. A bit of history sheds some light on how it came to be this way.

In 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed the Community Reinvestment Act that pushed Freddie and Fannie into aggressively lending to impoverished minority communities with what Carter said were hopes of raising them to middle class. History shows that poor minorities would have been better served if they had been offered jobs and education instead of mortgages they couldn't afford to pay, but Carter didn't see it that way.

Fast forward to 1995 -- President Clinton directed Robert Rubin, his Secretary of the Treasury, to re-write the rules for Freddie and Fannie, and by 1997 Clinton, using his HUD Secretary, Mario Cuomo, double-teamed the process. In so doing, Clinton turned the quasi-private mortgage-funding firms into semi-nationalized monopolies that not only dealt in mortgage paper but they also began making loans to large Democratic voting blocks, and handing out jobs and money to political allies. Corruption was inevitable.

Clinton had put Freddie and Fannie into the subprime market in a huge way. They now had immense leverage due to government guarantees that allowed them to hold only 2.5% of capital to back their investments. Banks were required to hold 10%.

Business boomed for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae as they dumped billions of dollars into loans in poor communities. They became the used car salesmen of the mortgage market, generating the "No job -- No income documentation = No problem" loans. If you had a pulse you could get a mortgage. The insanity had begun.

By 2007, Freddie and Fannie owned and guaranteed nearly half of the $12 Trillion US mortgage market. This was an overwhelming exposure of taxpayer money into private equity and it was doomed to fail.

It was only a matter of time.

Nikki

Congratulation to the American Taxpayer

Congratulations to the American taxpayer! Like it or not, all of us will soon own over $700 billion in bad mortgages – mortgage paper that isn’t worth its face value. And to add insult to injury, the Feds want us to believe they will be able to sell it for profit. So much for fairy tales.

And if that doesn’t make you mad, add this comment from Dem VP hopeful, Sen. Joe Biden on ABC’s Good Morning America: “Raising taxes is patriotic. We want to take money and put it back in the pocket of the middle class.”

Maybe ol’ Joe would be happy if I just endorse my check and send it all to the government. Would that make me more patriotic? Sorry, that’s not change I can believe in.

I'm furious and you should be too!

I’m a strong advocate for free enterprise. Our capitalistic system is by far the best in the world because it causes us to rise to our best – no, it demands our best and it rewards our entrepreneurial efforts, hard work and ingenuity with a good living and our share of the American dream.

I don't like what's happening to our free market economy. I don't like what's happening to the survival of the fittest in the rough and tumble market where he who builds the better mouse trap wins, and he who builds an inferior one re-groups his resources and tries again or falls by the wayside.

Free markets must have overseers, and they do, a body known as the Securities and Exchange Commission, but it failed to do its job for whatever reason. We cannot afford to have failure at such levels, but the SEC is not the only culprit in this crisis.

Regulatory bodies must be tough minded watch dogs with the highest degree of integrity and moral character, guardians of the public trust who aren’t afraid to bark when something doesn’t smell right, when something goes bump or when things simply feel wrong. There’s a fine line between not enough regulation and too much, and the overseerer must walk that tightrope constantly because a slip in either direction can be fatal. Our own history, as well as that of Europe, is proof that too much regulation hinders growth and kills business.

In 2003, President Bush called for a full investigation and re-regulating of the SEC. He said it was tottering on the brink of disaster but he was shot down by Congressmen Barney Frank and Chris Dodd of the powerful Federal Banking Committee. Frank claimed there were no looming problems. The story was reported in the liberal New York Times on September 11, 2003, but got little attention. On May 23, 2006, Sen. John McCain stood on the floor of the Senate and called for a full investigation of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and he too was blocked.

For those who don't follow the stock market, the type of bailout we're witnessing began under former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, along with the monetary policy that led to the imploding credit crisis. Greenspan was an advocate of the Adjustable Rate Mortgage in all of its insanity, as well as ridiculously low interest rates that encouraged the creation of severely underfunded credit policies. I truly believe Greenspan will go down as one of the worst central bankers in history. But again, there is no sole culprit.

This much I know -- if, on the day of disaster, you were long the stock of either Fannie or Freddie, you lost your money. If you were short the stock (betting it would go down), you won and pocketed profits. It's legal and I've done it a few times in years past, but there’s something very un-American about it.

I’m beginning to question what country I'm living in. Since when are profits private and losses public? This doesn't sound like America, Toto.

We're fast becoming a Socialist nation. What’s next -- socialized health care, a socialized auto industry? And while they're at it, they could socialize the credit card industry too. And how about Sallie Mae and student loans? Maybe I'll send them my utility bill.

The whole mess is a travesty of woefully inadequate monetary policies, graft, corruption and greed, and now that the inmates are running the asylum, they want a blank check drawn on the taxpayers' account to spend as they see fit. This must not be allowed to happen!

It's true that something must be done to rescue the credit markets, and soon, but no blank checks for anyone -- not now, not ever! It would be a terrible injustice to the taxpayer -- a dagger into the heart of every honest, hard working American.

Memo to Washington: Be very careful with our money. Proceed with great caution, for when free market capitalism goes away, the American dream will go with it.

Nikki

Welcome to The Shepherd Report

I have no agenda other than to satisfy my own desire to write – to force myself to think, to research and assimilate facts, and to reason and form my own conclusions. Next is the ultimate step where I put my thoughts into a public forum where they risk the reader’s criticism and rejection or perhaps, only the damning of faint praise. But I welcome it all. I’ve done it before and I’m relatively free from battle scars.

It was in the late 1980’s when I first aimed my modem tones toward the then-largest online service at a blazing 600 baud. A few short years later I was writing a monthly column where I interviewed and wrote about the CEO’s and technology visionaries who were bringing the internet to Everytown, USA. These were the people running the companies that made up the technology boom in the stock market. It was an exciting time and I enjoyed the gig tremendously. But that’s enough history for now.

I'm a Southerner, born and bred. I’m opinionated. I am also tolerant, and I hope you will feel free to state your views on any given subject within the confines of good taste and proper language. Click on the comment button and talk back to me.

You, the reader, won’t always agree with what I write and that’s okay. I won’t always hit one out of the park, but I’ll usually take a swing.

More later…

Nikki Shepherd