My Usual Charming Self | Bernie Reeves

Reversal of Fortune

By Bernie Reeves

Frankly, I’m furious after paying property taxes with rates and valuations raised during the real estate spike. Now home prices are down significantly as we suffer through an economic collapse you’d expect in a banana republic or an African kleptocracy. It’s as if the socialists have come back to win the day riding the wave of grossly unfair tax increases that will make government employees the highest paid middle class workers in America – and on the backs of the productivity of the citizens they allegedly serve. How’s that for irony? We now really do work for a government that rarely works for us.

Relatively speaking, Zimbabwe could be faring better economically than our so-called Western democracies in the wake of the big meltdown. But at least in the former British-run Rhodesia there is only one Mugabe. The deranged African crook is mortal and surely will pass away, but in the US our schools are breeding thousands of graduates looking to be care-givers for the government or petty criminals heading for Wall Street. Granted, we haven’t suffered a cholera outbreak now inflicting Zimbabweans, but our “provider” society and the cutpurses and their criminal conspiracies in finance continue to infect the common weal as the current economic pandemic continues to wobble searching for a bottom.

Those howling in the wilderness of the coming consequences might as well have been eating locusts and wearing loincloths for all the attention they received. Who was listening were the moneychangers in the temple of the American financial system who exacerbated the crisis by doing what they do best – jumping in the fray with both feet to manufacture a basically illegal investment instrument out of the bad mortgages.

Already we have enough unindicted crooks to fill Leavenworth from this mortgage-induced scandal, but aren’t the moronic bankers and investment advisors who bought these instruments as guilty as the investment bankers who sold them? Ever met a mid-level analyst for a huge pension-profit sharing firm? I have, so take my word they represent the glittering heights of mediocrity.

Ensconced in their ivory towers – surrounded by computers, flow charts and MBA degrees – they resemble professors who think they know everything because they’ve never been tested in the real world where they would last about three hours in a confrontation with a normal human. A coal miner or a hair stylist would know better than to purchase investment units comprised of bad mortgage loans, simply because they would ask why are the interest returns so high: because most of the loans in the packages carry high rates because they are risky and probably no good.
But the petty apparatchiks at huge banks and investment firms failed to ask that basic question and bought them in the billions because the high returns looked good to their bosses Then everything hit the fan as the packages became unstrung by massive loan defaults. But there’s more. As this ponsy scheme unfolded, we discovered that respected names on Wall Street were also engaged in criminal short-selling to line their own pockets by driving good companies out of business. As if that wasn’t enough, the same crowd – and others – were making illegal bets with other people’s money with credit default swaps, basically a gambling operation outlawed 75 years ago in which fast and loose executives make a market out of betting on the demise of stocks, new issues and insurance claims. The icing on the corrupt cake is made of executive salaries in the financial sector that would embarrass even Mugabe who thought he knew how to steal money – until he heard of the obscene amounts burgled by our crowd.

All the king’s men and the all the king’s horses are trying to put the splat from Humpty-Dumpty’s fall back together again, but success is spotty. Hell-bent to save the financial system first, the Feds have gorged up more cash than the Gross Domestic Product of a medium-sized country to feed the banks who are supposed to feed the system with credit to jump-start the economy. But the banks aren’t lending, and they aren’t saying what they are doing with our money. Of course banks haven’t been lending to customers in the conventional sense in 15 years anyway, a shock I’m sure to federal financial officials and the White House – but not to the majority of Americans who can’t land a 90-day note. No, banks have been nabbing deposits and new investor money willy-nilly and then leveraging deposits 30 to 1 and acting like an investment bank – ie. Lehman Brothers (RIP) by trading in global investment interests. And you thought banks took in deposits from local customers and lent it out to other local customers. You are misinformed.

Instead of lift-off to recovery, the “bail-out” has left the rocket on the launch pad all gassed and nowhere to go. Banks are holding dollars our financial grandees proffered (derived from our taxes), the stock market is looking more like a Keno Board than an investment option, interest rates are so low no one can save money (and whatever happened to compound interest anyway?) and the cash you place in a bank is a deteriorating asset eroded by inflation anyway. And underneath any option the dazed citizens chooses there lurks some of the sleaziest and incompetent financial manipulators since the Italian bankers of the Renaissance.

In other words, you can’t trust anyone anymore. And now you we see why Christians were forbidden to lend money for centuries. Money made off money – when there is no tangible product created – creates an immoral edifice of greed and unethical behavior. At least the auto makers actually produce something, yet our financial elite stated firmly the “bail-out” was for financial institutions only. While we don’t want to save the Detroit 3 just to protect the corrupt unions who actually control the industry, it makes better sense than dishing out more money to the felons who have disrupted and distressed just about every person and company in this country.
And as I wrote before, why aren’t the Wall Street crooks, the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac profiteers and the complicit elected government officials hauled up before a televised Congressional hearing like the Kefauver Committee of the 1950s that exposed organized crime to the world? The mafia seems like wayward children compared to the crime syndicate that brought down the greatest economy in history – and kept most of the money for themselves.

Notes From La-La Land
Thanks to the News & Observer for their series on the scandal at the parole division where incompetency served as an accomplice to the death of UNC student body president Eve Carson. Has anyone been fired?

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And if the Durham police can “sweep” the town for deadbeat dads, why can’t they round up gang members?

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Two Wake County School Board members were shot down in their tracks for simply asking for a study to ascertain the effectiveness of the Board’s “diversity” policy that hauls kids all over creation to create ersatz busing. I’m sure they are now listed as enemies of the people by the Wake Schools Politburo. Beware the knock in the night.