I first wrote this commentary way back in September of 2008 - even before Barack Obama was crowned emperor! Take a look and tell me what you think. Was I mainly right?
commentary by Bob Barney
Today we have witnessed what I wrote about last spring about the eventual demise of the United States as a superpower and the Biblical outlook that we are destined to be destroyed by aliens among us as well as our dishonest leaders in Washington, with the nationalization of Fannie and Freddie, comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke has begun the conversion of the USA into the USSA (United Socialist State of America). This metamorphosis of the United States into a country where there is socialism for only the rich and well connected. Wall Street (i.e. where profits are privatized and losses are socialized) continues today with the nationalization of AIG as being owned by Uncle Sam!
This most recent exploit on AIG accompanies a diversity of many other policy actions that suggest a massive government intrusion in the financial markets and the economy: the bailout of the Bear Stearns; the bailout of Fannie and Freddie; the use of the Fed balance sheet (hundreds of billions of safe US Treasuries swapped for junk toxic private securities); the use of the other GSEs (the Federal Home Loan Bank system) to provide hundreds of billions of dollars of "liquidity" to hard-pressed, illiquid and bankrupt mortgage lenders; the use of the SEC to falsify the stock market (restrictions on short sales); the use of the US Treasury to juggle with the mortgage market (Treasury will now for the first time outright buy agency MBS to manipulate and prop up this market); the invention of a whole host of new bailout facilities (TAF, TSLF, PDCF) to prop and rescue crooked banks and, for the first time since the Great Depression, to bail out non-bank financial institutions; the recent extension of the collateral available for the TSLF and PDCF facilities to a much wider range of toxic securities including equities and thus allowing the Fed to effectively manipulate even the stock market; Furthermore, a whole range of other executive and legislative actions (including the recent bill to provide a public guarantee to mortgages for banks willing to reduce their face value).
