GOP Sabotaging America, Ctd...

July 26th, 2011

You can call Trump a clown all you want. But he's a dangerous clown. Also, he has openly iterated what I think a lot of the "stop-Obama-at-all-costs" crowd is actually thinking. They are more than willing to destroy America in order to "save" it.

From McClatchy:

"Donald Trump has some advice for the Republican Party. The New York real estate tycoon went on "Fox & Friends" Monday morning and told the hosts that if the GOP wants to ensure that President Barack Obama isn't re-elected, all it has to do is not make any deals with Democrats and default on Aug. 2.

Trump seems to think that using the country's sparkling AAA credit rating as a sacrificial lamb and letting the nation default would damage Obama, who has been willing to put everything including entitlements on the table, more than it would hurt Republicans, who have refused to raise revenues on the richest Americans and companies during the debt ceiling negotiations.

"When it comes time to default, they're not going to remember any of the Republicans' names. They are going to remember in history books one name, and that's Obama," Trump said.

The billionaire doesn't seem at all concerned about the damage such an unprecedented U.S. default could do to Wall Street and other financial markets. Trump's casual approach is not shared by financial experts.

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, said that if Congress can't get it together, the results could be tragic as banks would slow down on lending and investors might pull their money out of the market.

"If we got to a crush point where we couldn't come to a deal, that would wipe out the financial sector," Baker said."

Reagan On Default

July 22nd, 2011

If you have not yet heard this Reagan speech from 1987, it's eerily familiar. Of course, as President Obama has made the exact same arguments, members of the so-called "Party of Reagan" have called him a "fear-mongering"  "liar". Go figure.

Quote Of The Day - Here and Now Edition

July 20th, 2011

Oh.. we will be following up on contemporary GOP critique of this sort of debt limit "rhetoric..."

"The full consequences of a default – or even the serious prospect of default – by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate. Denigration of the full faith and credit of the United States would have substantial effects on the domestic financial markets and the value of the dollar."


-- President Ronald Reagan in a once forgotten 1983 letter to Howard Baker

What About Derivatives?

July 20th, 2011
F. Grey Parker

The foggy world of derivatives, the same non-transparent mechanisms that nearly led to a global rollover three years ago, is still fundamentally opaque. They almost drove us into total depression before and that was without the intentional brinkmanship and economic sabotage now being seen from some of our own "conservative" representatives.