7/16/08

From the Financial Times (author: Willem Buiter)

.........So let’s call a spade a bloody shovel: nationalise Freddie Mac and Fannie May. They should never have been privatised in the first place. Cost the exercise. Increase taxes or cut other public spending to finance the exercise. But stop pretending. Stop lying about the financial viability of institutions designed to hand out subsidies to favoured constituencies. These GSEs were designed to make losses. They are expected to make losses. If they don’t make losses they are not serving their political purpose.

So I call on Secretary Paulson, Chairman Bernanke and Director Lockhart to drop the market-friendly fig-leaf. Be a socialist and proud of it. Come out of the red closet. The Soviet Union may have collapsed, but the cause of socialism is alive and well in the USA. Granted, the US version of socialism is imperfect thus far. The federal authorities have mainly intervened to socialise the losses in the financial sector while allowing the profits to continue to be drained off into selected private pockets. But that is bound to be an oversight. It surely cannot be the intention of such committed Marxists to target taxpayer-funded largesse solely at the very rich and at a few favoured, electorally sensitive constituencies. Fannie and Freddie are, or will be, safe in the hands of comrades Paulson, Bernanke and Lockhart.

Wow! I totally agree. What is going on in our country? It's simply incredible we are changing so much from the script of our founding fathers. And then we tell China they should have more open markets. Simply incredible! Simply incredible!

And then you wonder why the dollar keeps sinking. The weakness of the dollar, as I have been saying for a very long time, is the harbinger of major socio-political changes in the USA.

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George Dagnino, PhD
Editor, The Peter Dag Portfolio
Since 1977

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