How can our country still Work?
I was taking a writing class at a prominent university and we were discussing political correctness. There was a bevy of words that could not be used today. Asian instead of Oriental, African American instead of Black. Seniors vs old people. It got me to thinking....we as a society are spending all of our time trying to be non-offensive to everyone and we look at that as one of our highest priorities. It dovetailed nicely with a movie I saw the other night called Idiocity. The premise of the movie was that poor stupid people procreate more than rich smart people. This , in the movie led to a general dilution in the general intelligence. This led to words losing their meaning and an general downward spiral.

Which was exactly the point about the class. Lets not offend instead of lets solve. How can we fix the health care in this country if we cannot talk about costs and benefits? This is all against the backdrop of a congress that is morally bereft than any I can remember. As lobbyists plow money into the system making spending bills so complicated no one understands them.

The first step is to understand that we need to be able to talk to each other before we can make the choices we need to make.

The Housing Rip Off

I recently worked at one of the largest software providers for CDO's and CLO's. The very stuff this "Liquidity" crisis is involved with. Let me tell you this is another wall street scam. The people who took out mortgages, without income verification do not deserve the loans the got.

I don't know about you but in dealing with banks I always have to show them everything, like pay stubs etc. I think it is unrealistic to expect a $300,000 loan with no documentation. They then and this is a big then...Wait this deserves some explanation

When dealing with wall street people haven't you all heard this phrase:

"Past performance is no indicator of future return."

We have all read that before right?

What did the rating agencies do when they looked at the CDO's and CLOs? They assumed the opposite and rated the CDO's as AAA(The highest rating.) Why did they do this because in the past it had worked that way.

This reminds me of long term capital (An oxymoron if I ever heard one) where the pointed headed PhD's knew there was a relationship between bonds that had always worked in the past so it had to work going forward. Those guys were so smart they won a Noble prize for economics. yet again they forgot that pesky little phrase:

"Past performance is no indicator of future return"

Now how did that happen. This whole debacle has now been turned in those mean people want to take that poor little house away.

My First Entry

as Jackie Gleason said....."and away we go"