You were up at 3 in the morning to watch it?

Look who's stupid now? The people who regulated very badly, those European banks. Not only are they on average leveraged nearly twice as much as American banks, but are in a taught straightjacket of regulation.

The problem in America is that the federal government did nothing to contain Fannie and Freddie when they were using their capacity as a buyer of mortgages to encourage bad loan-making. Those bad loans were made to engage in a social engineering excercise that should not have been.

It's just as bad to have 0% down home loans in the US as it is to have 40-50% down home loans in Germany, where people have to try to borrow the difference from a relative who is more likely to be able to deal with a default.

To my knowledge, only Connerzbank was doing a 60%-of-sale-price loan, byt in general, the arrangement does more to stifle potential homebuyers, even if they're doing well financially.

That aside, the European are teetering due to loans NOT made to the populus, but to businesses and one another - people who have access to professionals who should know better.

I don't take any satisfaction in what happened, but the past can't be changed.

As for your own assets, don't make yourself crazy - you'll be fine. The entire world has been through these kinds of things.

The overwhelming bulk of the HIDEOUSLY STUPID lending was legal, and enabled by Fannie & Freddie for the simple purpose of getting people into homes at all costs. It was social engineering and intervention at it's core and in its' intent.

The rules that came out of congressional law were not structured to set up predatory lending. Not in the least. If loan officers practiced predatory lending that was a function of the loan brokerage companies that they worked for and their own actions. Not the law.

I once got ACORN's 'advice' on home ownership given to me as a handbill on the way to the subway. It was a 2 page sheet which amounted to an instruction sheet on how to get a no-money-down mortgage with a description on how to impute your income upward under the mortgate interest deduction. Nothing more.

They handed them out at my city's periodic "home ownership fair". It was hosted by the City government.

Our Congressman, a Democrat with an apple-blossom nose who's always sending mailers about how much he's accomplishing because he cares, endorses it on the postcard I get anually to promote the home-ownership fair.

I would imagine that the Commodity Futures Act would have to do with commodity futures, not Credit Default Swaps and mortgage lending practices. Either way, people will trot out a stale and implausible class-struggle argument, demanding conditions that will scuttle conditions needed for recovery.

N.B.- I'll be cashing in on my dollar bullish fund, and shed my bozos this week to balance it out, and then buy into US equity index funds. Whole market down means whole market up... someday.

I just read part of it over, skimming, and doing word searches. The act would have limited single-stock futures, and it's only effect on Credit default swaps would be to regulate their trading and ban the private clearinghouse in which they could be traded as a market, as opposed to each holder seeking out each potential buyer individually. It may have banned their regulation, but the existence of CDSs didn't bring the credit market down - they were a hedge against them and would be a symptom of a credit failure, and are worthless to an investor because they're being called in by their offerors. The clearinghouse for these things is at the end of October, by the way.

The people who cite Enron as a precedent to spur regulation, as though the private trading, something done on and outside of the commodities exchange and other bourses, would somehow have stopped something from going wrong in the economy. It wouldn't have.
Calling it "the Enron loophole" in retrospect. The Enron scandal broke in October 2001.

This is recycling - recycling the recitaton of some canned complaint used to rail for partisan political purposes over the Enron Scandal, which tried to pin on a president who took office in 2001 something that started (in the case of Enron) in the mid 90s, even though congress makes laws and Clinton was president. If they wanted to repetatively bang-bang-bang as they do with blame, it would have been more accurately on the republican, but because it seems useful, it's faised to presidential status and attributed in roundabout fashion to Bush even though it ocurred under Clinton. The usual tripe.

To reuse that old complaint now with people expected to believe that the chronology and attribution are irrelevant is weak and mendatious, just like reusing vague-non-specific allegations from the 80s about the S&L bailout.

So in effect, all you're telling me is that there has to be some sort of controversy out there that you can pin on anyone that the charlatan you support disagrees with - nothing more. Especially becuase of the left-leaning nature of Fannie and Freddie which was like blood the in the water that attracted the wall street sharks, who, after all, were only trying to make a tradable instruments our of the bad loans that social intervention had created.

The existence of Credit Default Swaps distributes the risk of an investment over a larger number of investors in order to stabilize them - it like a voluntary form of securitization. Like any investment, it might also go down. You know that. Stop trying to throw spaghetti at the wall.

To say that something specific that happened in 2000 is cause by an atmospheric attribution that you want to give it - "the [uel=http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2008/09/bush-called-for-reform-of-fannie-mae.html]Bush era[/url]" - when HE WAS ELECTED IN 2001 - is specious. What's worse, is that it's meant to provide political cover.

Weren't you, after all, the one who wanted so badly to attribute illegality to the trading and making of bad loans? What about looking for rule-bending and arm-twisting of the people who permitted it? What about that congress that has a 9% approval rating - one lower than Bush's?

The fact remains that you'd never do such a thing. Nor, would you get into any level of detail knowing that Obama has taken more money from Wall Street than any candidate in history - probably on the theory that they will either be quietly shaken down anyway or that he's malleable and has a history if being easily manipulated by donors.
Since 2006 he's received $112 000 from Fannie Mae where McCain as taken $22 500 in his 26 year congression career from them.

Yes, they will decide on November 4th - but I'm "unhinged"? I'm not the one who will evasively promote the idea that events in 1995 and 2000 are caused by someone elected in 2001.

"Luxus fuer alle"? You call that a plausible policy position?

I understand why this election is so special, but I do not share this huge interest and excitement.

That ALWAYS say that. The last one came with warninings that the world would end. Get a hold of yourself.

I am probably even less excited than my fellow Germans.

An Election in the US doesn't matter as much to Europeans as it does to Americans. They have issues bordering frequently on the atmospheric and image oriented with respect to the US, whereas Americans are practicing their citizenship.

WE are electing OUR president. In fact the impact is no greater than the moves of the EU are to Americans, but unlike the US election, there is no transparent side to take in Europe as a function of policy direction - if one cane even discern policy direction in the European political environment.
Europeans on the other hand can "pick a side" in our elections, for what almost always seem like reasons based on thin and weak information which has a bias in favor of anything that seems marginally familiar to them. Most usually simplistic, passion-filled tirades about demanding "peace" without knowing why or how.