To listen to our MSM, it sure is…unemployment isn’t rising as fast as it was, things aren’t as bad as some predicted…you know, the whole slew of things which tend to indicate a boom is right around the corner, right? Well, no. In fact, the sort of economic news we’re getting today would be painted in stark, hideous terms…if a Republican were in the White House. Since this is the Age of Obamunism, the party line is that things are double-plus-good while un-good news is down the Memory Hole. Here’s a story to indicate that things are, in fact, continuing to get worse:
This morning, Fannie Mae (FNM) announced that it had lost another $23 billion in the quarter, and would have to call down $19 billion more in taxpayer support. It also said that it would face losses as far as the eye can see.
Do you know how much we’ve committed to backstopping Fannie and its partner-in-crime Freddie Mac (FRE)? $400 BILLION! Back in February that was doubled from the original $200 billion.
But the news of the quarterly loss is getting hardly any attention. Nothing here at the NYT business section, for example. Nothing at the blogs that were going nuts when AIG was revealed to have paid out bonuses back in March.
The problem is that the Fannie and Freddie disasters don’t fit into any conventional media narrative…
And neither does such things as the continuing rapid collapse of home values in, say, Las Vegas. I figure my $400,000 home is now worth about $125,000, in theory. The “in theory” bit is because I don’t think I could actually sell my home if I had to put it on the market – sure, homes are being sold in Las Vegas but they are invariably foreclosed homes and they are going for a song. No one is going to buy my house when a better, larger house can be had on “please take this off my hands” terms. Fannie and Freddie, of course, are integral to the housing business and thus the $23 billion loss last quarter and the projected, un-ending losses to come tell the true story of our economy. Its collapsed, boys and girls…we’re not trying for a soft landing, we’re not trying to turn things around…we’re just masturbating economically while the Fed fires up the printing presses and Obama begs the Chinese to buy US bonds.
I can already hear our liberal friends – “no! You have to give Obama time! It took Bush 8 years to mess the economy up.” Its impossible to talk a liberal out of his view, given their views are built on invincible ignorance, but I will say this: the problem we’re in is not Obama’s fault but it is the fault of the very sorts of policies that Obama is enacting. In other words, Obama’s prescription for arsenic poisoning is to give us a dose of cyanide. The doctors gave my Dad a blood transfusion a few weeks before he died and for a while there he was looking a lot better – but that sheen of health was temporary as the organism, in its fundamentals, was shut down. We’re shut down – Obama is going to shove some ersatz blood into our system; it might make us glow for a bit, but it won’t change the fundamentals.
We have to cut spending, cut taxes, free up regulation and do all we can to encourage people to make, mine and grow things. We need, not more bridges to nowhere, but more farms, more factories, more mines. And for crying out loud, we don’t need them in the form of corrupt, complacent dinosaurs like GM! We need, in the end, a whole, new economy – all Obama promises us is a blood transfusion into the corpse of the old economy.
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