Foreclosure sob story of the morning
- Thread starter Keeko
- Start date
nah i would go with Foreclosure Phil (McCains economic chief. Imagine that:shrug: ). By the way where does Texas get all these scumbags. Its like they breed them and then a majority of their shills in the state believe every word out of their corrupt mouths.
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.
There was never this "bundling" of credit (or mortgages) in the past by lending institutions and other banks?
I got my current mortgage during the Clinton administration. I was told my mortgage would be resold and resold, and that the papers I was signing with my lender would soon be owned by another. I know this is not what Eddie is referring to, but wanted to bring it up.
I got my current mortgage during the Clinton administration. I was told my mortgage would be resold and resold, and that the papers I was signing with my lender would soon be owned by another. I know this is not what Eddie is referring to, but wanted to bring it up.
Think this one from the end of '07 has a little of what everyone is saying in it.
not one word of politics in the entire article (outside of Greenspan being the head of the Reserve Bank)
Part 1: Deutsche Bank?s painful lesson
Even experienced banker friends tell me that they think the worst of the US banking troubles are over and that things are slowly getting back to normal. What is lacking in their rosy optimism is the realization of the scale of the ongoing deterioration in credit markets globally, centered in the American asset-backed securities market, and especially in the market for CDO?s?Collateralized Debt Obligations and CMO?s?Collateralized Mortgage Obligations. By now every serious reader has heard the term ?It?s a crisis in Sub-Prime US home mortgage debt.? What almost no one I know understands is that the Sub-Prime problem is but the tip of a colossal iceberg that is in a slow meltdown. I offer one recent example to illustrate my point that the ?Financial Tsunami? is only beginning.
Deutsche Bank got a hard shock a few days ago when a judge in the state of Ohio in the USA made a ruling that the bank had no legal right to foreclose on 14 homes whose owners had failed to keep current in their monthly mortgage payments. Now this might sound like small beer for Deutsche Bank, one of the world?s largest banks with over ?1.1 trillion (Billionen) in assets worldwide. As Hilmar Kopper used to say, ?peanuts.? It?s not at all peanuts, however, for the Anglo-Saxon banking world and its European allies like Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Barclays Bank, HSBC or others. Why?
A US Federal Judge, C.A. Boyko in Federal District Court in Cleveland Ohio ruled to dismiss a claim by Deutsche Bank National Trust Company. DB?s US subsidiary was seeking to take possession of 14 homes from Cleveland residents living in them, in order to claim the assets.
Here comes the hair in the soup. The Judge asked DB to show documents proving legal title to the 14 homes. DB could not. All DB attorneys could show was a document showing only an ?intent to convey the rights in the mortgages.? They could not produce the actual mortgage, the heart of Western property rights since the Magna Charta of not longer.
Again why could Deutsche Bank not show the 14 mortgages on the 14 homes? Because they live in the exotic new world of ?global securitization?, where banks like DB or Citigroup buy tens of thousands of mortgages from small local lending banks, ?bundle? them into Jumbo new securities which then are rated by Moody?s or Standard & Poors or Fitch, and sell them as bonds to pension funds or other banks or private investors who naively believed they were buying bonds rated AAA, the highest, and never realized that their ?bundle? of say 1,000 different home mortgages, contained maybe 20% or 200 mortgages rated ?sub-prime,? i.e. of dubious credit quality.
Indeed the profits being earned in the past seven years by the world?s largest financial players from Goldman Sachs to Morgan Stanley to HSBC, Chase, and yes, Deutsche Bank, were so staggering, few bothered to open the risk models used by the professionals who bundled the mortgages. Certainly not the Big Three rating companies who had a criminal conflict of interest in giving top debt ratings. That changed abruptly last August and since then the major banks have issued one after another report of disastrous ?sub-prime? losses.
A new unexpected factor
The Ohio ruling that dismissed DB?s claim to foreclose and take back the 14 homes for non-payment, is far more than bad luck for the bank of Josef Ackermann. It is an earth-shaking precedent for all banks holding what they had thought were collateral in form of real estate property.
How this? Because of the complex structure of asset-backed securities and the widely dispersed ownership of mortgage securities (not actual mortgages but the securities based on same) no one is yet able to identify who precisely holds the physical mortgage document. Oops! A tiny legal detail our Wall Street Rocket Scientist derivatives experts ignored when they were bundling and issuing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of CMO?s in the past six or seven years. As of January 2007 some $6.5 trillion of securitized mortgage debt was outstanding in the United States. That?s a lot by any measure!
In the Ohio case Deutsche Bank is acting as ?Trustee? for ?securitization pools? or groups of disparate investors who may reside anywhere. But the Trustee never got the legal document known as the mortgage. Judge Boyko ordered DB to prove they were the owners of the mortgages or notes and they could not. DB could only argue that the banks had foreclosed on such cases for years without challenge. The Judge then declared that the banks ?seem to adopt the attitude that since they have been doing this for so long, unchallenged, this practice equates with legal compliance. Finally put to the test,? the Judge concluded, ?their weak legal arguments compel the court to stop them at the gate.? Deutsche Bank has refused comment.
What next?
As news of this legal precedent spreads across the USA like a California brushfire, hundreds of thousands of struggling homeowners who took the bait in times of historically low interest rates to buy a home with often, no money paid down, and the first 2 years with extremely low interest rate in what are known as ?interest only? Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs), now face exploding mortgage monthly payments at just the point the US economy is sinking into severe recession. (I regret the plethora of abbreviations used here but it is the fault of Wall Street bankers not this author).
The peak period of the US real estate bubble which began in about 2002 when Alan Greenspan began the most aggressive series of rate cuts in Federal Reserve history was 2005-2006. Greenspan?s intent, as he admitted at the time, was to replace the Dot.com internet stock bubble with a real estate home investment and lending bubble. He argued that was the only way to keep the US economy from deep recession. In retrospect a recession in 2002 would have been far milder and less damaging than what we now face.
Of course, Greenspan has since safely retired, written his memoirs and handed the control (and blame) of the mess over to a young ex-Princeton professor, Ben Bernanke. As a Princeton graduate, I can say I would never trust monetary policy for the world?s most powerful central bank in the hands of a Princeton economics professor. Keep them in their ivy-covered towers.
Now the last phase of every speculative bubble is the one where the animal juices get the most excited. This has been the case with every major speculative bubble since the Holland Tulip speculation of the 1630?s to the South Sea Bubble of 1720 to the 1929 Wall Street crash. It was true as well with the US 2002-2007 Real Estate bubble. In the last two years of the boom in selling real estate loans, banks were convinced they could resell the mortgage loans to a Wall Street financial house who would bundle it with thousands of good better and worse quality mortgage loans and resell them as Collateralized Mortgage Obligation bonds. In the flush of greed, banks became increasingly reckless of the credit worthiness of the prospective home owners. In many cases they did not even bother to check if the person was employed. Who cares? It will be resold and securitized and the risk of mortgage default was historically low.
That was in 2005. The most Sub-prime mortgages written with Adjustable Rate Mortgage contracts were written between 2005-2006, the last and most furious phase of the US bubble. Now a whole new wave of mortgage defaults is about to explode onto the scene beginning January 2008. Between December 2007 and July 1, 2008 more than $690 Billion in mortgages will face an interest rate jump according to the contract terms of the ARMs written two years before. That means market interest rates for those mortgages will explode monthly payments just as recession drives incomes down. Hundreds of thousands of homeowners will be forced to do the last resort of any homeowner: stop monthly mortgage payments.
Here is where the Ohio court decision guarantees that the next phase of the US mortgage crisis will assume Tsunami dimension. If the Ohio Deutsche Bank precedent holds in the appeal to the Supreme Court, millions of homes will be in default but the banks prevented from seizing them as collateral assets to resell. Robert Shiller of Yale, the controversial and often correct author of the book, Irrational Exuberance, predicting the 2001-2 Dot.com stock crash, estimates US housing prices could fall as much as 50% in some areas given how home prices have diverged relative to rents.
The $690 billion worth of ?interest only? ARMs due for interest rate hike between now and July 2008 are by and large not Sub-prime but a little higher quality, but only just. There are a total of $1.4 trillion in ?interest only? ARMs according to the US research firm, First American Loan Performance. A recent study calculates that, as these ARMs face staggering higher interest costs in the next 9 months, more than $325 billion of the loans will default leaving 1 million property owners in technical mortgage default. But if banks are unable to reclaim the homes as assets to offset the non-performing mortgages, the US banking system and a chunk of the global banking system faces a financial gridlock that will make events to date truly ?peanuts? by comparison. We will discuss the global geo-political implications of this in our next report, The Financial Tsunami: Part 2.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7413
not one word of politics in the entire article (outside of Greenspan being the head of the Reserve Bank)
Part 1: Deutsche Bank?s painful lesson
Even experienced banker friends tell me that they think the worst of the US banking troubles are over and that things are slowly getting back to normal. What is lacking in their rosy optimism is the realization of the scale of the ongoing deterioration in credit markets globally, centered in the American asset-backed securities market, and especially in the market for CDO?s?Collateralized Debt Obligations and CMO?s?Collateralized Mortgage Obligations. By now every serious reader has heard the term ?It?s a crisis in Sub-Prime US home mortgage debt.? What almost no one I know understands is that the Sub-Prime problem is but the tip of a colossal iceberg that is in a slow meltdown. I offer one recent example to illustrate my point that the ?Financial Tsunami? is only beginning.
Deutsche Bank got a hard shock a few days ago when a judge in the state of Ohio in the USA made a ruling that the bank had no legal right to foreclose on 14 homes whose owners had failed to keep current in their monthly mortgage payments. Now this might sound like small beer for Deutsche Bank, one of the world?s largest banks with over ?1.1 trillion (Billionen) in assets worldwide. As Hilmar Kopper used to say, ?peanuts.? It?s not at all peanuts, however, for the Anglo-Saxon banking world and its European allies like Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Barclays Bank, HSBC or others. Why?
A US Federal Judge, C.A. Boyko in Federal District Court in Cleveland Ohio ruled to dismiss a claim by Deutsche Bank National Trust Company. DB?s US subsidiary was seeking to take possession of 14 homes from Cleveland residents living in them, in order to claim the assets.
Here comes the hair in the soup. The Judge asked DB to show documents proving legal title to the 14 homes. DB could not. All DB attorneys could show was a document showing only an ?intent to convey the rights in the mortgages.? They could not produce the actual mortgage, the heart of Western property rights since the Magna Charta of not longer.
Again why could Deutsche Bank not show the 14 mortgages on the 14 homes? Because they live in the exotic new world of ?global securitization?, where banks like DB or Citigroup buy tens of thousands of mortgages from small local lending banks, ?bundle? them into Jumbo new securities which then are rated by Moody?s or Standard & Poors or Fitch, and sell them as bonds to pension funds or other banks or private investors who naively believed they were buying bonds rated AAA, the highest, and never realized that their ?bundle? of say 1,000 different home mortgages, contained maybe 20% or 200 mortgages rated ?sub-prime,? i.e. of dubious credit quality.
Indeed the profits being earned in the past seven years by the world?s largest financial players from Goldman Sachs to Morgan Stanley to HSBC, Chase, and yes, Deutsche Bank, were so staggering, few bothered to open the risk models used by the professionals who bundled the mortgages. Certainly not the Big Three rating companies who had a criminal conflict of interest in giving top debt ratings. That changed abruptly last August and since then the major banks have issued one after another report of disastrous ?sub-prime? losses.
A new unexpected factor
The Ohio ruling that dismissed DB?s claim to foreclose and take back the 14 homes for non-payment, is far more than bad luck for the bank of Josef Ackermann. It is an earth-shaking precedent for all banks holding what they had thought were collateral in form of real estate property.
How this? Because of the complex structure of asset-backed securities and the widely dispersed ownership of mortgage securities (not actual mortgages but the securities based on same) no one is yet able to identify who precisely holds the physical mortgage document. Oops! A tiny legal detail our Wall Street Rocket Scientist derivatives experts ignored when they were bundling and issuing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of CMO?s in the past six or seven years. As of January 2007 some $6.5 trillion of securitized mortgage debt was outstanding in the United States. That?s a lot by any measure!
In the Ohio case Deutsche Bank is acting as ?Trustee? for ?securitization pools? or groups of disparate investors who may reside anywhere. But the Trustee never got the legal document known as the mortgage. Judge Boyko ordered DB to prove they were the owners of the mortgages or notes and they could not. DB could only argue that the banks had foreclosed on such cases for years without challenge. The Judge then declared that the banks ?seem to adopt the attitude that since they have been doing this for so long, unchallenged, this practice equates with legal compliance. Finally put to the test,? the Judge concluded, ?their weak legal arguments compel the court to stop them at the gate.? Deutsche Bank has refused comment.
What next?
As news of this legal precedent spreads across the USA like a California brushfire, hundreds of thousands of struggling homeowners who took the bait in times of historically low interest rates to buy a home with often, no money paid down, and the first 2 years with extremely low interest rate in what are known as ?interest only? Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs), now face exploding mortgage monthly payments at just the point the US economy is sinking into severe recession. (I regret the plethora of abbreviations used here but it is the fault of Wall Street bankers not this author).
The peak period of the US real estate bubble which began in about 2002 when Alan Greenspan began the most aggressive series of rate cuts in Federal Reserve history was 2005-2006. Greenspan?s intent, as he admitted at the time, was to replace the Dot.com internet stock bubble with a real estate home investment and lending bubble. He argued that was the only way to keep the US economy from deep recession. In retrospect a recession in 2002 would have been far milder and less damaging than what we now face.
Of course, Greenspan has since safely retired, written his memoirs and handed the control (and blame) of the mess over to a young ex-Princeton professor, Ben Bernanke. As a Princeton graduate, I can say I would never trust monetary policy for the world?s most powerful central bank in the hands of a Princeton economics professor. Keep them in their ivy-covered towers.
Now the last phase of every speculative bubble is the one where the animal juices get the most excited. This has been the case with every major speculative bubble since the Holland Tulip speculation of the 1630?s to the South Sea Bubble of 1720 to the 1929 Wall Street crash. It was true as well with the US 2002-2007 Real Estate bubble. In the last two years of the boom in selling real estate loans, banks were convinced they could resell the mortgage loans to a Wall Street financial house who would bundle it with thousands of good better and worse quality mortgage loans and resell them as Collateralized Mortgage Obligation bonds. In the flush of greed, banks became increasingly reckless of the credit worthiness of the prospective home owners. In many cases they did not even bother to check if the person was employed. Who cares? It will be resold and securitized and the risk of mortgage default was historically low.
That was in 2005. The most Sub-prime mortgages written with Adjustable Rate Mortgage contracts were written between 2005-2006, the last and most furious phase of the US bubble. Now a whole new wave of mortgage defaults is about to explode onto the scene beginning January 2008. Between December 2007 and July 1, 2008 more than $690 Billion in mortgages will face an interest rate jump according to the contract terms of the ARMs written two years before. That means market interest rates for those mortgages will explode monthly payments just as recession drives incomes down. Hundreds of thousands of homeowners will be forced to do the last resort of any homeowner: stop monthly mortgage payments.
Here is where the Ohio court decision guarantees that the next phase of the US mortgage crisis will assume Tsunami dimension. If the Ohio Deutsche Bank precedent holds in the appeal to the Supreme Court, millions of homes will be in default but the banks prevented from seizing them as collateral assets to resell. Robert Shiller of Yale, the controversial and often correct author of the book, Irrational Exuberance, predicting the 2001-2 Dot.com stock crash, estimates US housing prices could fall as much as 50% in some areas given how home prices have diverged relative to rents.
The $690 billion worth of ?interest only? ARMs due for interest rate hike between now and July 2008 are by and large not Sub-prime but a little higher quality, but only just. There are a total of $1.4 trillion in ?interest only? ARMs according to the US research firm, First American Loan Performance. A recent study calculates that, as these ARMs face staggering higher interest costs in the next 9 months, more than $325 billion of the loans will default leaving 1 million property owners in technical mortgage default. But if banks are unable to reclaim the homes as assets to offset the non-performing mortgages, the US banking system and a chunk of the global banking system faces a financial gridlock that will make events to date truly ?peanuts? by comparison. We will discuss the global geo-political implications of this in our next report, The Financial Tsunami: Part 2.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7413
sponge, I put your 2 sources here so no one would think you actually had a unique thought of your own. Wouldn't want anybody "gullible" here to be deceived into thinking you could formulate your own ideas. gl!
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2008/Foreclosure-Phil-Gramm28may08.htm
with this snippet thrown in the middle http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/07/subprime-1-2-3.html
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2008/Foreclosure-Phil-Gramm28may08.htm
with this snippet thrown in the middle http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/07/subprime-1-2-3.html
it's almost always the first maybe second hit on google, and it takes about 15 seconds to find his plagerized source and post. I'm fine with posting stories, but do it like everybody else here (except RAYMOND :mj07: ) and post your source; you know, kind of like you did in this same thread... Sponge tries to make it look like he's posting his own thoughts.
What thoughts are you looking for? I said the guy is a scumbag what more you need? Not sure i saw anyone bring up this scumbag and how he is link to this fiasco. And of course like usual he is a scumbag on the side you blindly support. I also was the first one wondering why guys like you have no problem with socializing losses for billionaires but cry socialism every chance you get. Im first with a lot of these thoughts. Not sure what your problem is :shrug: Let me know when you hear the term socializing losses (Bear Sterns) but capitalizing profit (oil companies). I said that. Im just trying to make my critics into believers. :mj07: The naive ones are the toughest. (spelling and grammar not reviewed)
such a focking tool, but you meant privatizing, not capitalizing... you can't even plagiarize correctly! :mj07: http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewarticlepaged+articleid_2467038~pageid_1.html
Sixfive i got it now. You think that long post i put up about that douchebag from Texas was me trying to pawn it off like those were my words? Sixfool listen to me. The first part which are a couple of sentences, are my thoughts. When did i say those were my words or when have i claimed every post was my words? I read them and if i agree with them, i post them. I have heard that about that douchebag more then once so i googled an article about your hero and that is what i came up with. Next time i will put up the site okay. I didn't see it in the rulebook.:shrug: Now this obsession you have with me is getting a little creepy. I hope you don't have to go on blood pressure medicine like that other idiot. Chill out a bit. Life is to short.
who is my hero? you're such a focking idiot if you think I like GWB or McCain. You're such an idiot. I'm laughing, not having B/P issues, toolboy! :mj07: :stfu:
You do not have original thoughts, and that's what you constantly accuse others of here who don't agree with you. I've proved it again about your "original thoughts"; another hack-job by you. Too easy!
Sponge, in all fairness, you are trying to pigeonhole 6'5 into something he clearly is not. I find 6'5 to be a reasoning, level headed centrist. You need to go lay into skullfuk, keeko, or some other idiotic neocon shill. 6'5 is not your guy.
Maybe he needs to do that since he is basically accusing me of the same stuff they do. Imagine that. He doesn''t say a word to those two. Maybe if you had this clown obsessing over all your post you would think differently. You can't be nice to people like this because i have tried and eventually they go right back to back stabbing because a guy like this knows he can get away with it. He is a grudge holder to the tenth degree. Their are tons of guys like him littered all over these type of sites. There is nobody i repeat nobody who gets more crap from me then Weasel but when we are in another sports related thread we hang out and don't carry over ill feelings from the political site. Its like we completely forget everything and move on untill we get back here. Try this with Six Five. Impossible. OH and i never once thought he was a neocon. Maybe a confused conservative.:shrug:
I hear you sponge. I am just saying no need to fuel the fire with him. My guess is if you stop yanking his chain he will stop yanking yours.
fwiw
Starting to see more for sale signs on property in these parts. I don't know if the time of the year has something to do with it or people are just tired of waiting in a hold position. Real "change" might be in the air.
also
just came off my highest volume week in 2 decades of my little mickey mouse operation, and this is historically one of the slower times of the year in retail of any kind
Starting to see more for sale signs on property in these parts. I don't know if the time of the year has something to do with it or people are just tired of waiting in a hold position. Real "change" might be in the air.
also
just came off my highest volume week in 2 decades of my little mickey mouse operation, and this is historically one of the slower times of the year in retail of any kind
if you can't take it, stop dishing it out. This started long ago with your constant bashing and pigeonholing. If you didn't think I was a neocon, you sure called me that plenty of times! :mj07: Grudge holder?? :mj07: lmfao!! Also, Sherlock, it's nth degree, not tenth degree. :mj07:
I do congratulate you and making a post without reference to Fox News or the word gullible. See, it's not that hard, is it?
