"FAMILY-PURSE" para eles: 24.5 percent of all Americans earn poverty wages ($9.60 or less) – texto em inglês, seus monoglotas!!

An Emergency Bailout Plan That Americans Will Love

By Jonathan Tasini

30/09/08 “Working Life” — There is a great economic emergency looming in our country. But, it seems to me that we—or at least our elected leaders—have only looked at one side of the crisis, that of the housing bubble-inspired financial credit crunch. By doing so, we’ve missed the bigger picture and the solutions needed. So, here is one person’s take on the Emergency Economic Bailout package that will heal the economy.
As quick background, let’s consider this:
24.5 percent of all Americans earn poverty wages ($9.60 or less)
10 percent of all Americans—15 million Americans—earn $6.79 or less
33.3 percent of African American works and 39.3 of Hispanic workers earn poverty wages.
The share of our entire national income hoarded by the top one percent is, as of 2005, 21.8 percent. The last time it was that high was in 1928 (23.9)—just as the Great Depression was about to hit with its full fury.
We accept poverty as a fact of life in this country—partly because workers have not gotten the fair share of their hard work over the past three decades (in Republican and Democratic Administrations). If productivity and wages had kept their historic link (meaning, as workers were more productive, that translated into higher paychecks), the MINIMUM WAGE in the country would be $19.12. Yes, $19.12.
At the recent new minimum wage of $6.55 an hour, if you worked every single day, 40 hours a week, with no vacations, no holidays, no health care and no pension, you would earn the grand sum of $13.624. The POVERTY LEVEL for a family of three is $17,600.
47 million Americans have no health care and tens of millions more have inadequate or costly health care that can bankrupt them.
Since 1978, the number of defined-benefit plans—that means, pensions that give retirees a promised monthly amount—plummeted from 128,041 plans covering some 41 percent of private-sector workers to only 26,000 today. It’s a Dog Food Retirement future for millions of people.
All those numbers above do relate to the more narrow crisis in a very specific way: without being able to rely on their paychecks to survive, a lot of people got sucked into the housing bubble mania as an economic coping mechanism. Home equity credit lines substituted for decent pay, retirement and affordable, quality health care. And we know the rest.
So, here is what I think is a more comprehensive economic rescue plan, all of which should be attached to any new “bailout” proposal:
1. Immediately raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour, with additional increases over the fives years following raising the minimum wage to $20, which will begin to return some justice and return to workers’ sweat of the brow.
2. Pass HR676, Medicare for All legislation to (Rep. John Conyers is the main sponsor of the bill). Aside from the moral issue of covering every single American and making health care a right not a privilege, it would save the economy hundreds of billions of dollars and immediately make American-based companies competitive around the world with companies operating from countries with national health care.
3. Create a national guaranteed universal pension plan, backed by the government, so people can be sure that their retirement years will not be threatened by the wild swings of Wall Street.
4. Repeal the Bush tax cuts now and raise the top two income tax rates to 40% and 45%, add a new 50% income tax bracket for those with taxable income over $1 million, and tax investment income as ordinary income. Frankly, that is pretty modest and should only be the first step in rediscovering a progressive taxation system—but it will still raise several hundred billion dollars this year to finance a variety of public investments. The very people who have enriched themselves in the deregulation orgy of the past couple of decades should pay to repair the country.
5. A couple of years ago, when I was involved in a little political race of my own, I latched on to this idea: a tiny transactions tax on stock sales. It would be so miniscule that the small investors would never feel it, say, 0.25 percent of the sale. It would raise about $150 billion. Wall Street benefits from government protections, not the least of which is a regulatory system (oh, there I go using that “regulation” word, which now seems to be back in vogue) that prevents, in theory, fraud and crazy speculation (ok, so that doesn’t always work out well). Plus, such a tax might also exercise some restraint, perhaps modest, on the wild and crazy big trades made on rumors and the thirst for a quick buck. But, the main point is shared responsibility. You live in this society and, so, you make a contribution. And that contribution is relatively modest and relatively painless.
6. The Employee Free Choice Act. There is no better middle-class jobs program than unionization. Period.
The point of these suggestions is not just moral but common, economic sense. The way to avoid, to some extent, speculation and crazy amounts of debt is to take away the victims that are preyed on by banks, unscrupulous investors and free-market pirates. If a person has a decent income, real health care, a secure retirement and a government that can invest in the country, he or she is less likely to feel the need to latch on to risky investments and get-rich-quick schemes (also known as day-trading).
My guess is the American people would feel pretty good about a deal that included the above. To those, I’d add two specific pieces about the current mess:
First, any investment of money in banks is done on a debt-for-equity swap. No bailouts. As Nouriel Roubini and my friend Dean Baker have both pointed out, there is no justification or economic logic to bailout banks as a solution to the crisis we find ourselves in. Roubini writes, in arguing that the buying up bad assets is the exception, not the rule, and:
So this rescue plan is a huge and massive bailout of the shareholders and the unsecured creditors of the financial firms ( not just banks but also other non bank financial institutions ); with $700 billion of taxpayer money the pockets of reckless bankers and investors have been made fatter under the fake argument that bailing out Wall Street was necessary to rescue Main Street from a severe recession. Instead, the restoration of the financial health of distressed financial firms could have been achieved with a cheaper and better use of public money.
Second, as I’ve argued, we should own Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. We need those two huge institutions to be boring and predictable, not participating in crazy leveraging and speculation. The only we guarantee that is by installing publicly accountable board members who will run the companies for the benefit of homeowners, not profiteers.

___B.F.I – O CORREIO DA ELITE____
-”NÓS QUEREMOS O MELHOR PARA VOCÊ”-

"FAMILY-PURSE" para eles: 24.5 percent of all Americans earn poverty wages ($9.60 or less) – texto em inglês, seus monoglotas!!

An Emergency Bailout Plan That Americans Will Love

By Jonathan Tasini

30/09/08 “Working Life” — There is a great economic emergency looming in our country. But, it seems to me that we—or at least our elected leaders—have only looked at one side of the crisis, that of the housing bubble-inspired financial credit crunch. By doing so, we’ve missed the bigger picture and the solutions needed. So, here is one person’s take on the Emergency Economic Bailout package that will heal the economy.
As quick background, let’s consider this:
24.5 percent of all Americans earn poverty wages ($9.60 or less)
10 percent of all Americans—15 million Americans—earn $6.79 or less
33.3 percent of African American works and 39.3 of Hispanic workers earn poverty wages.
The share of our entire national income hoarded by the top one percent is, as of 2005, 21.8 percent. The last time it was that high was in 1928 (23.9)—just as the Great Depression was about to hit with its full fury.
We accept poverty as a fact of life in this country—partly because workers have not gotten the fair share of their hard work over the past three decades (in Republican and Democratic Administrations). If productivity and wages had kept their historic link (meaning, as workers were more productive, that translated into higher paychecks), the MINIMUM WAGE in the country would be $19.12. Yes, $19.12.
At the recent new minimum wage of $6.55 an hour, if you worked every single day, 40 hours a week, with no vacations, no holidays, no health care and no pension, you would earn the grand sum of $13.624. The POVERTY LEVEL for a family of three is $17,600.
47 million Americans have no health care and tens of millions more have inadequate or costly health care that can bankrupt them.
Since 1978, the number of defined-benefit plans—that means, pensions that give retirees a promised monthly amount—plummeted from 128,041 plans covering some 41 percent of private-sector workers to only 26,000 today. It’s a Dog Food Retirement future for millions of people.
All those numbers above do relate to the more narrow crisis in a very specific way: without being able to rely on their paychecks to survive, a lot of people got sucked into the housing bubble mania as an economic coping mechanism. Home equity credit lines substituted for decent pay, retirement and affordable, quality health care. And we know the rest.
So, here is what I think is a more comprehensive economic rescue plan, all of which should be attached to any new “bailout” proposal:
1. Immediately raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour, with additional increases over the fives years following raising the minimum wage to $20, which will begin to return some justice and return to workers’ sweat of the brow.
2. Pass HR676, Medicare for All legislation to (Rep. John Conyers is the main sponsor of the bill). Aside from the moral issue of covering every single American and making health care a right not a privilege, it would save the economy hundreds of billions of dollars and immediately make American-based companies competitive around the world with companies operating from countries with national health care.
3. Create a national guaranteed universal pension plan, backed by the government, so people can be sure that their retirement years will not be threatened by the wild swings of Wall Street.
4. Repeal the Bush tax cuts now and raise the top two income tax rates to 40% and 45%, add a new 50% income tax bracket for those with taxable income over $1 million, and tax investment income as ordinary income. Frankly, that is pretty modest and should only be the first step in rediscovering a progressive taxation system—but it will still raise several hundred billion dollars this year to finance a variety of public investments. The very people who have enriched themselves in the deregulation orgy of the past couple of decades should pay to repair the country.
5. A couple of years ago, when I was involved in a little political race of my own, I latched on to this idea: a tiny transactions tax on stock sales. It would be so miniscule that the small investors would never feel it, say, 0.25 percent of the sale. It would raise about $150 billion. Wall Street benefits from government protections, not the least of which is a regulatory system (oh, there I go using that “regulation” word, which now seems to be back in vogue) that prevents, in theory, fraud and crazy speculation (ok, so that doesn’t always work out well). Plus, such a tax might also exercise some restraint, perhaps modest, on the wild and crazy big trades made on rumors and the thirst for a quick buck. But, the main point is shared responsibility. You live in this society and, so, you make a contribution. And that contribution is relatively modest and relatively painless.
6. The Employee Free Choice Act. There is no better middle-class jobs program than unionization. Period.
The point of these suggestions is not just moral but common, economic sense. The way to avoid, to some extent, speculation and crazy amounts of debt is to take away the victims that are preyed on by banks, unscrupulous investors and free-market pirates. If a person has a decent income, real health care, a secure retirement and a government that can invest in the country, he or she is less likely to feel the need to latch on to risky investments and get-rich-quick schemes (also known as day-trading).
My guess is the American people would feel pretty good about a deal that included the above. To those, I’d add two specific pieces about the current mess:
First, any investment of money in banks is done on a debt-for-equity swap. No bailouts. As Nouriel Roubini and my friend Dean Baker have both pointed out, there is no justification or economic logic to bailout banks as a solution to the crisis we find ourselves in. Roubini writes, in arguing that the buying up bad assets is the exception, not the rule, and:
So this rescue plan is a huge and massive bailout of the shareholders and the unsecured creditors of the financial firms ( not just banks but also other non bank financial institutions ); with $700 billion of taxpayer money the pockets of reckless bankers and investors have been made fatter under the fake argument that bailing out Wall Street was necessary to rescue Main Street from a severe recession. Instead, the restoration of the financial health of distressed financial firms could have been achieved with a cheaper and better use of public money.
Second, as I’ve argued, we should own Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. We need those two huge institutions to be boring and predictable, not participating in crazy leveraging and speculation. The only we guarantee that is by installing publicly accountable board members who will run the companies for the benefit of homeowners, not profiteers.

Holding blogística “ENCALHE / BFI – O Correio da Elite”
OBRIGADO PELA PREFERÊNCIA E VOLTE SEMPRE QUE DER NA TELHA

"FAMILY-PURSE" para eles: 24.5 percent of all Americans earn poverty wages ($9.60 or less) – texto em inglês, seus monoglotas!!

An Emergency Bailout Plan That Americans Will Love

By Jonathan Tasini

30/09/08 “Working Life” — There is a great economic emergency looming in our country. But, it seems to me that we—or at least our elected leaders—have only looked at one side of the crisis, that of the housing bubble-inspired financial credit crunch. By doing so, we’ve missed the bigger picture and the solutions needed. So, here is one person’s take on the Emergency Economic Bailout package that will heal the economy.
As quick background, let’s consider this:
24.5 percent of all Americans earn poverty wages ($9.60 or less)
10 percent of all Americans—15 million Americans—earn $6.79 or less
33.3 percent of African American works and 39.3 of Hispanic workers earn poverty wages.
The share of our entire national income hoarded by the top one percent is, as of 2005, 21.8 percent. The last time it was that high was in 1928 (23.9)—just as the Great Depression was about to hit with its full fury.
We accept poverty as a fact of life in this country—partly because workers have not gotten the fair share of their hard work over the past three decades (in Republican and Democratic Administrations). If productivity and wages had kept their historic link (meaning, as workers were more productive, that translated into higher paychecks), the MINIMUM WAGE in the country would be $19.12. Yes, $19.12.
At the recent new minimum wage of $6.55 an hour, if you worked every single day, 40 hours a week, with no vacations, no holidays, no health care and no pension, you would earn the grand sum of $13.624. The POVERTY LEVEL for a family of three is $17,600.
47 million Americans have no health care and tens of millions more have inadequate or costly health care that can bankrupt them.
Since 1978, the number of defined-benefit plans—that means, pensions that give retirees a promised monthly amount—plummeted from 128,041 plans covering some 41 percent of private-sector workers to only 26,000 today. It’s a Dog Food Retirement future for millions of people.
All those numbers above do relate to the more narrow crisis in a very specific way: without being able to rely on their paychecks to survive, a lot of people got sucked into the housing bubble mania as an economic coping mechanism. Home equity credit lines substituted for decent pay, retirement and affordable, quality health care. And we know the rest.
So, here is what I think is a more comprehensive economic rescue plan, all of which should be attached to any new “bailout” proposal:
1. Immediately raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour, with additional increases over the fives years following raising the minimum wage to $20, which will begin to return some justice and return to workers’ sweat of the brow.
2. Pass HR676, Medicare for All legislation to (Rep. John Conyers is the main sponsor of the bill). Aside from the moral issue of covering every single American and making health care a right not a privilege, it would save the economy hundreds of billions of dollars and immediately make American-based companies competitive around the world with companies operating from countries with national health care.
3. Create a national guaranteed universal pension plan, backed by the government, so people can be sure that their retirement years will not be threatened by the wild swings of Wall Street.
4. Repeal the Bush tax cuts now and raise the top two income tax rates to 40% and 45%, add a new 50% income tax bracket for those with taxable income over $1 million, and tax investment income as ordinary income. Frankly, that is pretty modest and should only be the first step in rediscovering a progressive taxation system—but it will still raise several hundred billion dollars this year to finance a variety of public investments. The very people who have enriched themselves in the deregulation orgy of the past couple of decades should pay to repair the country.
5. A couple of years ago, when I was involved in a little political race of my own, I latched on to this idea: a tiny transactions tax on stock sales. It would be so miniscule that the small investors would never feel it, say, 0.25 percent of the sale. It would raise about $150 billion. Wall Street benefits from government protections, not the least of which is a regulatory system (oh, there I go using that “regulation” word, which now seems to be back in vogue) that prevents, in theory, fraud and crazy speculation (ok, so that doesn’t always work out well). Plus, such a tax might also exercise some restraint, perhaps modest, on the wild and crazy big trades made on rumors and the thirst for a quick buck. But, the main point is shared responsibility. You live in this society and, so, you make a contribution. And that contribution is relatively modest and relatively painless.
6. The Employee Free Choice Act. There is no better middle-class jobs program than unionization. Period.
The point of these suggestions is not just moral but common, economic sense. The way to avoid, to some extent, speculation and crazy amounts of debt is to take away the victims that are preyed on by banks, unscrupulous investors and free-market pirates. If a person has a decent income, real health care, a secure retirement and a government that can invest in the country, he or she is less likely to feel the need to latch on to risky investments and get-rich-quick schemes (also known as day-trading).
My guess is the American people would feel pretty good about a deal that included the above. To those, I’d add two specific pieces about the current mess:
First, any investment of money in banks is done on a debt-for-equity swap. No bailouts. As Nouriel Roubini and my friend Dean Baker have both pointed out, there is no justification or economic logic to bailout banks as a solution to the crisis we find ourselves in. Roubini writes, in arguing that the buying up bad assets is the exception, not the rule, and:
So this rescue plan is a huge and massive bailout of the shareholders and the unsecured creditors of the financial firms ( not just banks but also other non bank financial institutions ); with $700 billion of taxpayer money the pockets of reckless bankers and investors have been made fatter under the fake argument that bailing out Wall Street was necessary to rescue Main Street from a severe recession. Instead, the restoration of the financial health of distressed financial firms could have been achieved with a cheaper and better use of public money.
Second, as I’ve argued, we should own Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. We need those two huge institutions to be boring and predictable, not participating in crazy leveraging and speculation. The only we guarantee that is by installing publicly accountable board members who will run the companies for the benefit of homeowners, not profiteers.

OBRIGADO PELA PREFERÊNCIA. SERVIMOS BEM PARA SERVIRMOS SEMPRE. QUEM NÃO VIVE PARA SERVIR, NÃO SERVE PARA VIVER. SE AMAR É VIVER, EU VIVO PORQUE AMO VOCÊ.

"FAMILY-PURSE" para eles: 24.5 percent of all Americans earn poverty wages ($9.60 or less) – texto em inglês, seus monoglotas!!

An Emergency Bailout Plan That Americans Will Love

By Jonathan Tasini

30/09/08 “Working Life” — There is a great economic emergency looming in our country. But, it seems to me that we—or at least our elected leaders—have only looked at one side of the crisis, that of the housing bubble-inspired financial credit crunch. By doing so, we’ve missed the bigger picture and the solutions needed. So, here is one person’s take on the Emergency Economic Bailout package that will heal the economy.
As quick background, let’s consider this:
24.5 percent of all Americans earn poverty wages ($9.60 or less)
10 percent of all Americans—15 million Americans—earn $6.79 or less
33.3 percent of African American works and 39.3 of Hispanic workers earn poverty wages.
The share of our entire national income hoarded by the top one percent is, as of 2005, 21.8 percent. The last time it was that high was in 1928 (23.9)—just as the Great Depression was about to hit with its full fury.
We accept poverty as a fact of life in this country—partly because workers have not gotten the fair share of their hard work over the past three decades (in Republican and Democratic Administrations). If productivity and wages had kept their historic link (meaning, as workers were more productive, that translated into higher paychecks), the MINIMUM WAGE in the country would be $19.12. Yes, $19.12.
At the recent new minimum wage of $6.55 an hour, if you worked every single day, 40 hours a week, with no vacations, no holidays, no health care and no pension, you would earn the grand sum of $13.624. The POVERTY LEVEL for a family of three is $17,600.
47 million Americans have no health care and tens of millions more have inadequate or costly health care that can bankrupt them.
Since 1978, the number of defined-benefit plans—that means, pensions that give retirees a promised monthly amount—plummeted from 128,041 plans covering some 41 percent of private-sector workers to only 26,000 today. It’s a Dog Food Retirement future for millions of people.
All those numbers above do relate to the more narrow crisis in a very specific way: without being able to rely on their paychecks to survive, a lot of people got sucked into the housing bubble mania as an economic coping mechanism. Home equity credit lines substituted for decent pay, retirement and affordable, quality health care. And we know the rest.
So, here is what I think is a more comprehensive economic rescue plan, all of which should be attached to any new “bailout” proposal:
1. Immediately raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour, with additional increases over the fives years following raising the minimum wage to $20, which will begin to return some justice and return to workers’ sweat of the brow.
2. Pass HR676, Medicare for All legislation to (Rep. John Conyers is the main sponsor of the bill). Aside from the moral issue of covering every single American and making health care a right not a privilege, it would save the economy hundreds of billions of dollars and immediately make American-based companies competitive around the world with companies operating from countries with national health care.
3. Create a national guaranteed universal pension plan, backed by the government, so people can be sure that their retirement years will not be threatened by the wild swings of Wall Street.
4. Repeal the Bush tax cuts now and raise the top two income tax rates to 40% and 45%, add a new 50% income tax bracket for those with taxable income over $1 million, and tax investment income as ordinary income. Frankly, that is pretty modest and should only be the first step in rediscovering a progressive taxation system—but it will still raise several hundred billion dollars this year to finance a variety of public investments. The very people who have enriched themselves in the deregulation orgy of the past couple of decades should pay to repair the country.
5. A couple of years ago, when I was involved in a little political race of my own, I latched on to this idea: a tiny transactions tax on stock sales. It would be so miniscule that the small investors would never feel it, say, 0.25 percent of the sale. It would raise about $150 billion. Wall Street benefits from government protections, not the least of which is a regulatory system (oh, there I go using that “regulation” word, which now seems to be back in vogue) that prevents, in theory, fraud and crazy speculation (ok, so that doesn’t always work out well). Plus, such a tax might also exercise some restraint, perhaps modest, on the wild and crazy big trades made on rumors and the thirst for a quick buck. But, the main point is shared responsibility. You live in this society and, so, you make a contribution. And that contribution is relatively modest and relatively painless.
6. The Employee Free Choice Act. There is no better middle-class jobs program than unionization. Period.
The point of these suggestions is not just moral but common, economic sense. The way to avoid, to some extent, speculation and crazy amounts of debt is to take away the victims that are preyed on by banks, unscrupulous investors and free-market pirates. If a person has a decent income, real health care, a secure retirement and a government that can invest in the country, he or she is less likely to feel the need to latch on to risky investments and get-rich-quick schemes (also known as day-trading).
My guess is the American people would feel pretty good about a deal that included the above. To those, I’d add two specific pieces about the current mess:
First, any investment of money in banks is done on a debt-for-equity swap. No bailouts. As Nouriel Roubini and my friend Dean Baker have both pointed out, there is no justification or economic logic to bailout banks as a solution to the crisis we find ourselves in. Roubini writes, in arguing that the buying up bad assets is the exception, not the rule, and:
So this rescue plan is a huge and massive bailout of the shareholders and the unsecured creditors of the financial firms ( not just banks but also other non bank financial institutions ); with $700 billion of taxpayer money the pockets of reckless bankers and investors have been made fatter under the fake argument that bailing out Wall Street was necessary to rescue Main Street from a severe recession. Instead, the restoration of the financial health of distressed financial firms could have been achieved with a cheaper and better use of public money.
Second, as I’ve argued, we should own Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. We need those two huge institutions to be boring and predictable, not participating in crazy leveraging and speculation. The only we guarantee that is by installing publicly accountable board members who will run the companies for the benefit of homeowners, not profiteers.

"FAMILY-PURSE" para eles: 24.5 percent of all Americans earn poverty wages ($9.60 or less) – texto em inglês, seus monoglotas!!

An Emergency Bailout Plan That Americans Will Love

By Jonathan Tasini

30/09/08 “Working Life” — There is a great economic emergency looming in our country. But, it seems to me that we—or at least our elected leaders—have only looked at one side of the crisis, that of the housing bubble-inspired financial credit crunch. By doing so, we’ve missed the bigger picture and the solutions needed. So, here is one person’s take on the Emergency Economic Bailout package that will heal the economy.
As quick background, let’s consider this:
24.5 percent of all Americans earn poverty wages ($9.60 or less)
10 percent of all Americans—15 million Americans—earn $6.79 or less
33.3 percent of African American works and 39.3 of Hispanic workers earn poverty wages.
The share of our entire national income hoarded by the top one percent is, as of 2005, 21.8 percent. The last time it was that high was in 1928 (23.9)—just as the Great Depression was about to hit with its full fury.
We accept poverty as a fact of life in this country—partly because workers have not gotten the fair share of their hard work over the past three decades (in Republican and Democratic Administrations). If productivity and wages had kept their historic link (meaning, as workers were more productive, that translated into higher paychecks), the MINIMUM WAGE in the country would be $19.12. Yes, $19.12.
At the recent new minimum wage of $6.55 an hour, if you worked every single day, 40 hours a week, with no vacations, no holidays, no health care and no pension, you would earn the grand sum of $13.624. The POVERTY LEVEL for a family of three is $17,600.
47 million Americans have no health care and tens of millions more have inadequate or costly health care that can bankrupt them.
Since 1978, the number of defined-benefit plans—that means, pensions that give retirees a promised monthly amount—plummeted from 128,041 plans covering some 41 percent of private-sector workers to only 26,000 today. It’s a Dog Food Retirement future for millions of people.
All those numbers above do relate to the more narrow crisis in a very specific way: without being able to rely on their paychecks to survive, a lot of people got sucked into the housing bubble mania as an economic coping mechanism. Home equity credit lines substituted for decent pay, retirement and affordable, quality health care. And we know the rest.
So, here is what I think is a more comprehensive economic rescue plan, all of which should be attached to any new “bailout” proposal:
1. Immediately raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour, with additional increases over the fives years following raising the minimum wage to $20, which will begin to return some justice and return to workers’ sweat of the brow.
2. Pass HR676, Medicare for All legislation to (Rep. John Conyers is the main sponsor of the bill). Aside from the moral issue of covering every single American and making health care a right not a privilege, it would save the economy hundreds of billions of dollars and immediately make American-based companies competitive around the world with companies operating from countries with national health care.
3. Create a national guaranteed universal pension plan, backed by the government, so people can be sure that their retirement years will not be threatened by the wild swings of Wall Street.
4. Repeal the Bush tax cuts now and raise the top two income tax rates to 40% and 45%, add a new 50% income tax bracket for those with taxable income over $1 million, and tax investment income as ordinary income. Frankly, that is pretty modest and should only be the first step in rediscovering a progressive taxation system—but it will still raise several hundred billion dollars this year to finance a variety of public investments. The very people who have enriched themselves in the deregulation orgy of the past couple of decades should pay to repair the country.
5. A couple of years ago, when I was involved in a little political race of my own, I latched on to this idea: a tiny transactions tax on stock sales. It would be so miniscule that the small investors would never feel it, say, 0.25 percent of the sale. It would raise about $150 billion. Wall Street benefits from government protections, not the least of which is a regulatory system (oh, there I go using that “regulation” word, which now seems to be back in vogue) that prevents, in theory, fraud and crazy speculation (ok, so that doesn’t always work out well). Plus, such a tax might also exercise some restraint, perhaps modest, on the wild and crazy big trades made on rumors and the thirst for a quick buck. But, the main point is shared responsibility. You live in this society and, so, you make a contribution. And that contribution is relatively modest and relatively painless.
6. The Employee Free Choice Act. There is no better middle-class jobs program than unionization. Period.
The point of these suggestions is not just moral but common, economic sense. The way to avoid, to some extent, speculation and crazy amounts of debt is to take away the victims that are preyed on by banks, unscrupulous investors and free-market pirates. If a person has a decent income, real health care, a secure retirement and a government that can invest in the country, he or she is less likely to feel the need to latch on to risky investments and get-rich-quick schemes (also known as day-trading).
My guess is the American people would feel pretty good about a deal that included the above. To those, I’d add two specific pieces about the current mess:
First, any investment of money in banks is done on a debt-for-equity swap. No bailouts. As Nouriel Roubini and my friend Dean Baker have both pointed out, there is no justification or economic logic to bailout banks as a solution to the crisis we find ourselves in. Roubini writes, in arguing that the buying up bad assets is the exception, not the rule, and:
So this rescue plan is a huge and massive bailout of the shareholders and the unsecured creditors of the financial firms ( not just banks but also other non bank financial institutions ); with $700 billion of taxpayer money the pockets of reckless bankers and investors have been made fatter under the fake argument that bailing out Wall Street was necessary to rescue Main Street from a severe recession. Instead, the restoration of the financial health of distressed financial firms could have been achieved with a cheaper and better use of public money.
Second, as I’ve argued, we should own Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. We need those two huge institutions to be boring and predictable, not participating in crazy leveraging and speculation. The only we guarantee that is by installing publicly accountable board members who will run the companies for the benefit of homeowners, not profiteers.

NÓS QUEREMOS O MELHOR PARA VOCÊ.
NÓS QUEREMOS O MELHOR PARA VOCÊ.
NÓS QUEREMOS O MELHOR PARA VOCÊ.
NÓS QUEREMOS O MELHOR PARA VOCÊ.
NÓS QUEREMOS O MELHOR PARA VOCÊ.

"Como fica o Brasil?", por PAULO NOGUEIRA BATISTA JR.

A economia está bastante sólida e deve atravessar a crise razoavelmente bem, mas todo o cuidado é pouco
A CRISE aqui nos Estados Unidos afetará o Brasil? Essa é a pergunta mais importante para nós. Os mercados financeiros brasileiros já estão acusando o golpe, mas a questão é saber se a turbulência contaminará a economia real. A resposta depende, evidentemente, dos desdobramentos da crise. Há muitas incógnitas. Por exemplo: o resgate de até US$ 700 bilhões será rapidamente aprovado pelo Congresso dos Estados Unidos? E, se aprovado, poderá evitar o colapso do sistema financeiro? Não se pode excluir um cenário-catástrofe, mas parece razoável admitir que o resgate venha a ser aceito sem grande demora pelos parlamentares, ainda que com modificações importantes. O custo para o contribuinte americano será provavelmente estratosférico. Por isso mesmo, predomina a expectativa de que o plano do secretário do Tesouro norte-americano, Henry Paulson, será capaz de salvar Wall Street. A instabilidade persistirá, não só nos Estados Unidos como em outros países, mas a gigantesca intervenção do Estado deve evitar o pior: a desintegração do sistema financeiro, a exemplo do que ocorreu na década de 1930. Nesse cenário, o Brasil deve atravessar a crise razoavelmente bem. A economia do país está bastante sólida. No exterior, as avaliações sobre o Brasil continuam positivas. A maioria dos indicadores parece dar razão a essas avaliações. A economia está em expansão, e os investimentos produtivos cresceram no passado recente. O déficit fiscal é pequeno ( apesar da carga de juros ) e a dívida pública vem diminuindo como proporção do PIB (Produto Interno Bruto) e da receita tributária. Como o governo é credor líquido em moeda estrangeira, a depreciação cambial ajuda a melhorar as suas contas. A inflação está aparentemente sob controle. As expectativas de inflação vêm caindo há várias semanas, de acordo com o relatório de mercado publicado pelo Banco Central. Entre os países que adotam o regime de metas, o Brasil é um dos poucos, talvez o único, a manter a inflação abaixo do teto da meta. Além disso, o sistema financeiro nacional parece seguro. Nunca se sabe com total certeza, posto que a opacidade é a regra nesse terreno. Mas não há evidências de que os bancos brasileiros tenham se envolvido nas aventuras financeiras que vitimaram seus congêneres americanos. Uma razão é que o mercado local, com suas taxas de juro exorbitantes, sempre proporcionou amplas oportunidades de lucro para as instituições brasileiras. O nosso ponto fraco talvez seja a rápida deterioração do balanço de pagamentos em conta corrente. Essa deterioração se deve em parte à própria crise externa. A remessa de lucros e dividendos para o exterior, por exemplo, aumentou de maneira extraordinária. O Banco Central calcula que ela possa chegar a nada menos que US$ 34 bilhões em 2008. Vários setores, notadamente bancos e montadoras de automóveis, estão remetendo grandes montantes para cobrir resultados negativos em suas matrizes. O Banco Central projeta um déficit em conta corrente de US$ 33 bilhões em 2009. Com o agravamento da situação financeira mundial, será mais difícil financiá-lo. A instabilidade externa pode levar também a saídas de capitais do país, tensionando o mercado cambial e os mercados financeiros domésticos. Em resumo, ainda que a posição brasileira seja basicamente forte, todo cuidado é pouco.

PAULO NOGUEIRA BATISTA JR

pnbjr@attglobal.net

OBRIGADO PELA PREFERÊNCIA. SERVIMOS BEM PARA SERVIRMOS SEMPRE. QUEM NÃO VIVE PARA SERVIR, NÃO SERVE PARA VIVER. SE AMAR É VIVER, EU VIVO PORQUE AMO VOCÊ.

OS BUSHEVIQUES: SOCIALISMO TOMA EUA. AGORA, FIM DA HISTÓRIA MESMO… ( 2 artigos em inglês )

Comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke Welcome You to the USSRA ( United Socialist State Republic of America )
By Nouriel Roubini
09/09/08 “Roubini Global Economics” — – The now inevitable nationalization of Fannie and Freddie is the most radical regime change in global economic and financial affairs in decades. For the last twenty years after the collapse of the USSR, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the economic reforms in China and other emerging market economies the world economy has moved away from state ownership of the economy and towards privatization of previously stated owned enterprises. This trends was aggressively supported the United States that preached right and left the benefits of free markets and free private enterprise.

Today instead the US has performed the greatest nationalization in the history of humanity. By nationalizing Fannie and Freddie the US has increased its public assets by almost $6 trillion and has increased its public debt/liabilities by another $6 trillion. The US has also turned itself into the largest government-owned hedge fund in the world: by injecting a likely $200 billion of capital into Fannie and Freddie and taking on almost $6 trillion of liabilities of such GSEs the US has also undertaken the biggest and most levered LBO (“leveraged buy-out”) in human history that has a debt to equity ratio of 30 ($6,000 billion of debt against $200 billion of equity).

So now Comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke ( as originally nicknamed by Willem Buiter ) have now turned the USA into the USSRA (the United Socialist State Republic of America). Socialism is indeed alive and well in America; but this is socialism for the rich, the well connected and Wall Street. A socialism where profits are privatized and losses are socialized with the US tax-payer being charged the bill of $300 billion.

This biggest bailout and nationalization in human history comes from the most fanatically and ideologically zealot free-market laissez-faire administration in US history. These are the folks who for years spewed the rhetoric of free markets and cutting down government intervention in economic affairs. But they were so fanatically ideological about free markets that they did not realize that financial and other markets without proper rules, supervision and regulation are like a jungle where greed – untempered by fear of loss or of punishment – leads to credit bubbles and asset bubbles and manias and eventual bust and panics.

The ideologue “regulators” who literally held a chain saw at a public event to smash “unnecessary regulations” are now communists nationalizing private firms and socializing their losses: the bailout of the Bear Stearns creditors, the bailout of Fannie and Freddie, the use of the Fed balance sheet (hundreds of billions of safe US Treasuries swapped for junk toxic illiquid private securities), the use of the other GSEs (the Federal Home Loan Bank system) to provide hundreds of billions of dollars of “liquidity” to distressed, illiquid and insolvent mortgage lenders, the use of the SEC to manipulate the stock market (restrictions on short sales), the use of the US Treasury to manipulate the mortgage market (Treasury will now for the first time outright buy agency MBS to manipulate and prop up this market), the creation of a whole host of new bailout facilities (TAF, TSLF, PDCF) to prop and rescue banks and, for the first time since the Great Depression,to bail out non-bank financial institutions, and a whole range of other executive and legislative actions (including the recent bill to provide a public guarantee to mortgage for banks willing to reduce their face value).

This is the biggest and most socialist government intervention in economic affairs since the formation of the Soviet Union and Communist China. So foreign investors are now welcome to the USSRA (the United Socialist State Republic of America) where they can earn fat spreads relative to Treasuries on agency debt and never face any credit risks (not even the subordinated debt holders who made a fortune yesterday as those claims were also made whole).

Like scores of evangelists and hypocrites and moralists who spew and praise family values and pretend to be holier than thou and are then regularly caught cheating or cross dressing or found to be perverts these Bush hypocrites who spewed for years the glory of unfettered wild west laissez faire jungle capitalism (and never believed in any sensible and appropriate regulation and supervision of financial markets) allowed the biggest debt bubble ever to fester without any control, have caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and are now forced to perform the biggest government intervention and nationalizations in the recent history of humanity, all for the benefit of the rich and the well connected. So Comrades Bush and Paulson and Bernanke will rightly pass to the history books as a troika of Bolsheviks who turned the USA into the USSRA. Fanatic zealots of any religion are always pests that cause havoc and destruction with their inflexible fanaticism; but they usually don’t run the biggest economy in the world. But these laissez faire voodoo-economics zealots in charge of the USA have now caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and the nastiest economic crisis in decades. So let them be shamed in public for their hypocrisy and zealotry that has caused so much financial and economic damage.
Copyright © 2008 Roubini Global Economics

American Socialism

US Is “More Communist than China”: Jim Rogers

By CNBC.com

08/09/08 “CNBC” — –

The nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shows that the U.S. is “more communist than China right now” but its brand of socialism is meant only for the rich, investor Jim Rogers, CEO of Rogers Holdings, told CNBC Europe on Monday.”America is more communist than China is right now. You can see that this is welfare of the rich, it is socialism for the rich… it’s just bailing out financial institutions,” Rogers said.
Stock markets jumped after the U.S. government’s decision to launch what could be its biggest federal bailout ever, in a bid to support the housing market and ward off more global financial market turbulence.
But Rogers said in the long term the move spelled trouble.
“This is madness, this is insanity, they have more than doubled the American national debt in one weekend for a bunch of crooks and incompetents. I’m not quite sure why I or anybody else should be paying for this,” Rogers told “Squawk Box Europe.”
European stocks soared on Monday, led by banks. UBS was up 11 percent, BNP Paribas up 8 percent, Credit Agricole up 11.1 percent and HBOS up 13.8 percent.
“You certainly gonna see a huge jump in any financial institutions which owned a lot of Fannie
cnbc_comboQuoteMove(‘popup_fnm_ID0EQF15839609′);
[FNM 0.73 -6.31 (-89.63%) ]
cnbc_quoteComponent_init_getData(“fnm”,”WSODQ_COMPONENT_FNM_ID0EQF15839609″,”WSODQ”,”true”,”ID0EQF15839609″,”off”,”false”);

or Freddie
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… because they don’t have to worry about going bankrupt all of a sudden,” Rogers said. (Watch the video on the left for the full interview)

“Bank stocks around the world are going through the roof, that’s ’cause they’ve all been bailed out. You don’t see the homeowners in Kansas going through the roof ’cause they’re not being bailed out,” he added.
“A Huge Mess”
However, despite the rally in Asian and European markets, the decision to take over Fannie and Freddie is likely to cause more volatility and needs careful consideration by investors, according to Rogers.
It’s rarely good to jump in a moving bus and right now you got a lot of buses moving. I might short some more investment banks in the US, depending on how they rally over the next week, but other than that, I’ll just sit and watch,” he said.
Rogers, who is short on U.S. bonds, said these are likely to fall while commodities may rally. The two government-sponsored enterprises don’t have good loans on their books, because “everybody else took the good stuff and dumped the bad stuff onto Fannie and Freddie,” he said.
From 2010, Fannie and Freddie will have to shrink their portfolios by 10 percent a year until they reach $250 billion, to reduce the risk to the taxpayer, according to the Treasury plan. But this may put additional pressure on the housing market, Rogers said.
“That’s going to also ensure that house prices continue to go down. It’s going to be harder and harder to get a mortgage.”
Investors should not pin their hopes on this year’s presidential election for a solution to the problems, as none of the candidates is likely to find one, Rogers said.
“This is a big huge mess and neither one of them has a clue what to do next year. It’s going to be a mess.”
© 2008 CNBC.com

___B.F.I – O CORREIO DA ELITE____
-”NÓS QUEREMOS O MELHOR PARA VOCÊ”-

OS BUSHEVIQUES: SOCIALISMO TOMA EUA. AGORA, FIM DA HISTÓRIA MESMO… ( 2 artigos em inglês )

Comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke Welcome You to the USSRA ( United Socialist State Republic of America )
By Nouriel Roubini
09/09/08 “Roubini Global Economics” — – The now inevitable nationalization of Fannie and Freddie is the most radical regime change in global economic and financial affairs in decades. For the last twenty years after the collapse of the USSR, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the economic reforms in China and other emerging market economies the world economy has moved away from state ownership of the economy and towards privatization of previously stated owned enterprises. This trends was aggressively supported the United States that preached right and left the benefits of free markets and free private enterprise.

Today instead the US has performed the greatest nationalization in the history of humanity. By nationalizing Fannie and Freddie the US has increased its public assets by almost $6 trillion and has increased its public debt/liabilities by another $6 trillion. The US has also turned itself into the largest government-owned hedge fund in the world: by injecting a likely $200 billion of capital into Fannie and Freddie and taking on almost $6 trillion of liabilities of such GSEs the US has also undertaken the biggest and most levered LBO (“leveraged buy-out”) in human history that has a debt to equity ratio of 30 ($6,000 billion of debt against $200 billion of equity).

So now Comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke ( as originally nicknamed by Willem Buiter ) have now turned the USA into the USSRA (the United Socialist State Republic of America). Socialism is indeed alive and well in America; but this is socialism for the rich, the well connected and Wall Street. A socialism where profits are privatized and losses are socialized with the US tax-payer being charged the bill of $300 billion.

This biggest bailout and nationalization in human history comes from the most fanatically and ideologically zealot free-market laissez-faire administration in US history. These are the folks who for years spewed the rhetoric of free markets and cutting down government intervention in economic affairs. But they were so fanatically ideological about free markets that they did not realize that financial and other markets without proper rules, supervision and regulation are like a jungle where greed – untempered by fear of loss or of punishment – leads to credit bubbles and asset bubbles and manias and eventual bust and panics.

The ideologue “regulators” who literally held a chain saw at a public event to smash “unnecessary regulations” are now communists nationalizing private firms and socializing their losses: the bailout of the Bear Stearns creditors, the bailout of Fannie and Freddie, the use of the Fed balance sheet (hundreds of billions of safe US Treasuries swapped for junk toxic illiquid private securities), the use of the other GSEs (the Federal Home Loan Bank system) to provide hundreds of billions of dollars of “liquidity” to distressed, illiquid and insolvent mortgage lenders, the use of the SEC to manipulate the stock market (restrictions on short sales), the use of the US Treasury to manipulate the mortgage market (Treasury will now for the first time outright buy agency MBS to manipulate and prop up this market), the creation of a whole host of new bailout facilities (TAF, TSLF, PDCF) to prop and rescue banks and, for the first time since the Great Depression,to bail out non-bank financial institutions, and a whole range of other executive and legislative actions (including the recent bill to provide a public guarantee to mortgage for banks willing to reduce their face value).

This is the biggest and most socialist government intervention in economic affairs since the formation of the Soviet Union and Communist China. So foreign investors are now welcome to the USSRA (the United Socialist State Republic of America) where they can earn fat spreads relative to Treasuries on agency debt and never face any credit risks (not even the subordinated debt holders who made a fortune yesterday as those claims were also made whole).

Like scores of evangelists and hypocrites and moralists who spew and praise family values and pretend to be holier than thou and are then regularly caught cheating or cross dressing or found to be perverts these Bush hypocrites who spewed for years the glory of unfettered wild west laissez faire jungle capitalism (and never believed in any sensible and appropriate regulation and supervision of financial markets) allowed the biggest debt bubble ever to fester without any control, have caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and are now forced to perform the biggest government intervention and nationalizations in the recent history of humanity, all for the benefit of the rich and the well connected. So Comrades Bush and Paulson and Bernanke will rightly pass to the history books as a troika of Bolsheviks who turned the USA into the USSRA. Fanatic zealots of any religion are always pests that cause havoc and destruction with their inflexible fanaticism; but they usually don’t run the biggest economy in the world. But these laissez faire voodoo-economics zealots in charge of the USA have now caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and the nastiest economic crisis in decades. So let them be shamed in public for their hypocrisy and zealotry that has caused so much financial and economic damage.
Copyright © 2008 Roubini Global Economics

American Socialism

US Is “More Communist than China”: Jim Rogers

By CNBC.com

08/09/08 “CNBC” — –

The nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shows that the U.S. is “more communist than China right now” but its brand of socialism is meant only for the rich, investor Jim Rogers, CEO of Rogers Holdings, told CNBC Europe on Monday.”America is more communist than China is right now. You can see that this is welfare of the rich, it is socialism for the rich… it’s just bailing out financial institutions,” Rogers said.
Stock markets jumped after the U.S. government’s decision to launch what could be its biggest federal bailout ever, in a bid to support the housing market and ward off more global financial market turbulence.
But Rogers said in the long term the move spelled trouble.
“This is madness, this is insanity, they have more than doubled the American national debt in one weekend for a bunch of crooks and incompetents. I’m not quite sure why I or anybody else should be paying for this,” Rogers told “Squawk Box Europe.”
European stocks soared on Monday, led by banks. UBS was up 11 percent, BNP Paribas up 8 percent, Credit Agricole up 11.1 percent and HBOS up 13.8 percent.
“You certainly gonna see a huge jump in any financial institutions which owned a lot of Fannie
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cnbc_quoteComponent_init_getData(“fnm”,”WSODQ_COMPONENT_FNM_ID0EQF15839609″,”WSODQ”,”true”,”ID0EQF15839609″,”off”,”false”);

or Freddie
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[FRE 0.88 -4.22 (-82.75%) ]
cnbc_quoteComponent_init_getData(“fre”,”WSODQ_COMPONENT_FRE_ID0EPCAC15839609″,”WSODQ”,”true”,”ID0EPCAC15839609″,”off”,”false”);

… because they don’t have to worry about going bankrupt all of a sudden,” Rogers said. (Watch the video on the left for the full interview)

“Bank stocks around the world are going through the roof, that’s ’cause they’ve all been bailed out. You don’t see the homeowners in Kansas going through the roof ’cause they’re not being bailed out,” he added.
“A Huge Mess”
However, despite the rally in Asian and European markets, the decision to take over Fannie and Freddie is likely to cause more volatility and needs careful consideration by investors, according to Rogers.
It’s rarely good to jump in a moving bus and right now you got a lot of buses moving. I might short some more investment banks in the US, depending on how they rally over the next week, but other than that, I’ll just sit and watch,” he said.
Rogers, who is short on U.S. bonds, said these are likely to fall while commodities may rally. The two government-sponsored enterprises don’t have good loans on their books, because “everybody else took the good stuff and dumped the bad stuff onto Fannie and Freddie,” he said.
From 2010, Fannie and Freddie will have to shrink their portfolios by 10 percent a year until they reach $250 billion, to reduce the risk to the taxpayer, according to the Treasury plan. But this may put additional pressure on the housing market, Rogers said.
“That’s going to also ensure that house prices continue to go down. It’s going to be harder and harder to get a mortgage.”
Investors should not pin their hopes on this year’s presidential election for a solution to the problems, as none of the candidates is likely to find one, Rogers said.
“This is a big huge mess and neither one of them has a clue what to do next year. It’s going to be a mess.”
© 2008 CNBC.com

OBRIGADO PELA PREFERÊNCIA. SERVIMOS BEM PARA SERVIRMOS SEMPRE. QUEM NÃO VIVE PARA SERVIR, NÃO SERVE PARA VIVER. SE AMAR É VIVER, EU VIVO PORQUE AMO VOCÊ.

OS BUSHEVIQUES: SOCIALISMO TOMA EUA. AGORA, FIM DA HISTÓRIA MESMO… ( 2 artigos em inglês )

Comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke Welcome You to the USSRA ( United Socialist State Republic of America )
By Nouriel Roubini
09/09/08 “Roubini Global Economics” — – The now inevitable nationalization of Fannie and Freddie is the most radical regime change in global economic and financial affairs in decades. For the last twenty years after the collapse of the USSR, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the economic reforms in China and other emerging market economies the world economy has moved away from state ownership of the economy and towards privatization of previously stated owned enterprises. This trends was aggressively supported the United States that preached right and left the benefits of free markets and free private enterprise.

Today instead the US has performed the greatest nationalization in the history of humanity. By nationalizing Fannie and Freddie the US has increased its public assets by almost $6 trillion and has increased its public debt/liabilities by another $6 trillion. The US has also turned itself into the largest government-owned hedge fund in the world: by injecting a likely $200 billion of capital into Fannie and Freddie and taking on almost $6 trillion of liabilities of such GSEs the US has also undertaken the biggest and most levered LBO (“leveraged buy-out”) in human history that has a debt to equity ratio of 30 ($6,000 billion of debt against $200 billion of equity).

So now Comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke ( as originally nicknamed by Willem Buiter ) have now turned the USA into the USSRA (the United Socialist State Republic of America). Socialism is indeed alive and well in America; but this is socialism for the rich, the well connected and Wall Street. A socialism where profits are privatized and losses are socialized with the US tax-payer being charged the bill of $300 billion.

This biggest bailout and nationalization in human history comes from the most fanatically and ideologically zealot free-market laissez-faire administration in US history. These are the folks who for years spewed the rhetoric of free markets and cutting down government intervention in economic affairs. But they were so fanatically ideological about free markets that they did not realize that financial and other markets without proper rules, supervision and regulation are like a jungle where greed – untempered by fear of loss or of punishment – leads to credit bubbles and asset bubbles and manias and eventual bust and panics.

The ideologue “regulators” who literally held a chain saw at a public event to smash “unnecessary regulations” are now communists nationalizing private firms and socializing their losses: the bailout of the Bear Stearns creditors, the bailout of Fannie and Freddie, the use of the Fed balance sheet (hundreds of billions of safe US Treasuries swapped for junk toxic illiquid private securities), the use of the other GSEs (the Federal Home Loan Bank system) to provide hundreds of billions of dollars of “liquidity” to distressed, illiquid and insolvent mortgage lenders, the use of the SEC to manipulate the stock market (restrictions on short sales), the use of the US Treasury to manipulate the mortgage market (Treasury will now for the first time outright buy agency MBS to manipulate and prop up this market), the creation of a whole host of new bailout facilities (TAF, TSLF, PDCF) to prop and rescue banks and, for the first time since the Great Depression,to bail out non-bank financial institutions, and a whole range of other executive and legislative actions (including the recent bill to provide a public guarantee to mortgage for banks willing to reduce their face value).

This is the biggest and most socialist government intervention in economic affairs since the formation of the Soviet Union and Communist China. So foreign investors are now welcome to the USSRA (the United Socialist State Republic of America) where they can earn fat spreads relative to Treasuries on agency debt and never face any credit risks (not even the subordinated debt holders who made a fortune yesterday as those claims were also made whole).

Like scores of evangelists and hypocrites and moralists who spew and praise family values and pretend to be holier than thou and are then regularly caught cheating or cross dressing or found to be perverts these Bush hypocrites who spewed for years the glory of unfettered wild west laissez faire jungle capitalism (and never believed in any sensible and appropriate regulation and supervision of financial markets) allowed the biggest debt bubble ever to fester without any control, have caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and are now forced to perform the biggest government intervention and nationalizations in the recent history of humanity, all for the benefit of the rich and the well connected. So Comrades Bush and Paulson and Bernanke will rightly pass to the history books as a troika of Bolsheviks who turned the USA into the USSRA. Fanatic zealots of any religion are always pests that cause havoc and destruction with their inflexible fanaticism; but they usually don’t run the biggest economy in the world. But these laissez faire voodoo-economics zealots in charge of the USA have now caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and the nastiest economic crisis in decades. So let them be shamed in public for their hypocrisy and zealotry that has caused so much financial and economic damage.
Copyright © 2008 Roubini Global Economics

American Socialism

US Is “More Communist than China”: Jim Rogers

By CNBC.com

08/09/08 “CNBC” — –

The nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shows that the U.S. is “more communist than China right now” but its brand of socialism is meant only for the rich, investor Jim Rogers, CEO of Rogers Holdings, told CNBC Europe on Monday.”America is more communist than China is right now. You can see that this is welfare of the rich, it is socialism for the rich… it’s just bailing out financial institutions,” Rogers said.
Stock markets jumped after the U.S. government’s decision to launch what could be its biggest federal bailout ever, in a bid to support the housing market and ward off more global financial market turbulence.
But Rogers said in the long term the move spelled trouble.
“This is madness, this is insanity, they have more than doubled the American national debt in one weekend for a bunch of crooks and incompetents. I’m not quite sure why I or anybody else should be paying for this,” Rogers told “Squawk Box Europe.”
European stocks soared on Monday, led by banks. UBS was up 11 percent, BNP Paribas up 8 percent, Credit Agricole up 11.1 percent and HBOS up 13.8 percent.
“You certainly gonna see a huge jump in any financial institutions which owned a lot of Fannie
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or Freddie
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[FRE 0.88 -4.22 (-82.75%) ]
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… because they don’t have to worry about going bankrupt all of a sudden,” Rogers said. (Watch the video on the left for the full interview)

“Bank stocks around the world are going through the roof, that’s ’cause they’ve all been bailed out. You don’t see the homeowners in Kansas going through the roof ’cause they’re not being bailed out,” he added.
“A Huge Mess”
However, despite the rally in Asian and European markets, the decision to take over Fannie and Freddie is likely to cause more volatility and needs careful consideration by investors, according to Rogers.
It’s rarely good to jump in a moving bus and right now you got a lot of buses moving. I might short some more investment banks in the US, depending on how they rally over the next week, but other than that, I’ll just sit and watch,” he said.
Rogers, who is short on U.S. bonds, said these are likely to fall while commodities may rally. The two government-sponsored enterprises don’t have good loans on their books, because “everybody else took the good stuff and dumped the bad stuff onto Fannie and Freddie,” he said.
From 2010, Fannie and Freddie will have to shrink their portfolios by 10 percent a year until they reach $250 billion, to reduce the risk to the taxpayer, according to the Treasury plan. But this may put additional pressure on the housing market, Rogers said.
“That’s going to also ensure that house prices continue to go down. It’s going to be harder and harder to get a mortgage.”
Investors should not pin their hopes on this year’s presidential election for a solution to the problems, as none of the candidates is likely to find one, Rogers said.
“This is a big huge mess and neither one of them has a clue what to do next year. It’s going to be a mess.”
© 2008 CNBC.com

OS BUSHEVIQUES: SOCIALISMO TOMA EUA. AGORA, FIM DA HISTÓRIA MESMO… ( 2 artigos em inglês )

Comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke Welcome You to the USSRA ( United Socialist State Republic of America )
By Nouriel Roubini
09/09/08 “Roubini Global Economics” — – The now inevitable nationalization of Fannie and Freddie is the most radical regime change in global economic and financial affairs in decades. For the last twenty years after the collapse of the USSR, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the economic reforms in China and other emerging market economies the world economy has moved away from state ownership of the economy and towards privatization of previously stated owned enterprises. This trends was aggressively supported the United States that preached right and left the benefits of free markets and free private enterprise.

Today instead the US has performed the greatest nationalization in the history of humanity. By nationalizing Fannie and Freddie the US has increased its public assets by almost $6 trillion and has increased its public debt/liabilities by another $6 trillion. The US has also turned itself into the largest government-owned hedge fund in the world: by injecting a likely $200 billion of capital into Fannie and Freddie and taking on almost $6 trillion of liabilities of such GSEs the US has also undertaken the biggest and most levered LBO (“leveraged buy-out”) in human history that has a debt to equity ratio of 30 ($6,000 billion of debt against $200 billion of equity).

So now Comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke ( as originally nicknamed by Willem Buiter ) have now turned the USA into the USSRA (the United Socialist State Republic of America). Socialism is indeed alive and well in America; but this is socialism for the rich, the well connected and Wall Street. A socialism where profits are privatized and losses are socialized with the US tax-payer being charged the bill of $300 billion.

This biggest bailout and nationalization in human history comes from the most fanatically and ideologically zealot free-market laissez-faire administration in US history. These are the folks who for years spewed the rhetoric of free markets and cutting down government intervention in economic affairs. But they were so fanatically ideological about free markets that they did not realize that financial and other markets without proper rules, supervision and regulation are like a jungle where greed – untempered by fear of loss or of punishment – leads to credit bubbles and asset bubbles and manias and eventual bust and panics.

The ideologue “regulators” who literally held a chain saw at a public event to smash “unnecessary regulations” are now communists nationalizing private firms and socializing their losses: the bailout of the Bear Stearns creditors, the bailout of Fannie and Freddie, the use of the Fed balance sheet (hundreds of billions of safe US Treasuries swapped for junk toxic illiquid private securities), the use of the other GSEs (the Federal Home Loan Bank system) to provide hundreds of billions of dollars of “liquidity” to distressed, illiquid and insolvent mortgage lenders, the use of the SEC to manipulate the stock market (restrictions on short sales), the use of the US Treasury to manipulate the mortgage market (Treasury will now for the first time outright buy agency MBS to manipulate and prop up this market), the creation of a whole host of new bailout facilities (TAF, TSLF, PDCF) to prop and rescue banks and, for the first time since the Great Depression,to bail out non-bank financial institutions, and a whole range of other executive and legislative actions (including the recent bill to provide a public guarantee to mortgage for banks willing to reduce their face value).

This is the biggest and most socialist government intervention in economic affairs since the formation of the Soviet Union and Communist China. So foreign investors are now welcome to the USSRA (the United Socialist State Republic of America) where they can earn fat spreads relative to Treasuries on agency debt and never face any credit risks (not even the subordinated debt holders who made a fortune yesterday as those claims were also made whole).

Like scores of evangelists and hypocrites and moralists who spew and praise family values and pretend to be holier than thou and are then regularly caught cheating or cross dressing or found to be perverts these Bush hypocrites who spewed for years the glory of unfettered wild west laissez faire jungle capitalism (and never believed in any sensible and appropriate regulation and supervision of financial markets) allowed the biggest debt bubble ever to fester without any control, have caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and are now forced to perform the biggest government intervention and nationalizations in the recent history of humanity, all for the benefit of the rich and the well connected. So Comrades Bush and Paulson and Bernanke will rightly pass to the history books as a troika of Bolsheviks who turned the USA into the USSRA. Fanatic zealots of any religion are always pests that cause havoc and destruction with their inflexible fanaticism; but they usually don’t run the biggest economy in the world. But these laissez faire voodoo-economics zealots in charge of the USA have now caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and the nastiest economic crisis in decades. So let them be shamed in public for their hypocrisy and zealotry that has caused so much financial and economic damage.
Copyright © 2008 Roubini Global Economics

American Socialism

US Is “More Communist than China”: Jim Rogers

By CNBC.com

08/09/08 “CNBC” — –

The nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shows that the U.S. is “more communist than China right now” but its brand of socialism is meant only for the rich, investor Jim Rogers, CEO of Rogers Holdings, told CNBC Europe on Monday.”America is more communist than China is right now. You can see that this is welfare of the rich, it is socialism for the rich… it’s just bailing out financial institutions,” Rogers said.
Stock markets jumped after the U.S. government’s decision to launch what could be its biggest federal bailout ever, in a bid to support the housing market and ward off more global financial market turbulence.
But Rogers said in the long term the move spelled trouble.
“This is madness, this is insanity, they have more than doubled the American national debt in one weekend for a bunch of crooks and incompetents. I’m not quite sure why I or anybody else should be paying for this,” Rogers told “Squawk Box Europe.”
European stocks soared on Monday, led by banks. UBS was up 11 percent, BNP Paribas up 8 percent, Credit Agricole up 11.1 percent and HBOS up 13.8 percent.
“You certainly gonna see a huge jump in any financial institutions which owned a lot of Fannie
cnbc_comboQuoteMove(‘popup_fnm_ID0EQF15839609′);
[FNM 0.73 -6.31 (-89.63%) ]
cnbc_quoteComponent_init_getData(“fnm”,”WSODQ_COMPONENT_FNM_ID0EQF15839609″,”WSODQ”,”true”,”ID0EQF15839609″,”off”,”false”);

or Freddie
cnbc_comboQuoteMove(‘popup_fre_ID0EPCAC15839609′);
[FRE 0.88 -4.22 (-82.75%) ]
cnbc_quoteComponent_init_getData(“fre”,”WSODQ_COMPONENT_FRE_ID0EPCAC15839609″,”WSODQ”,”true”,”ID0EPCAC15839609″,”off”,”false”);

… because they don’t have to worry about going bankrupt all of a sudden,” Rogers said. (Watch the video on the left for the full interview)

“Bank stocks around the world are going through the roof, that’s ’cause they’ve all been bailed out. You don’t see the homeowners in Kansas going through the roof ’cause they’re not being bailed out,” he added.
“A Huge Mess”
However, despite the rally in Asian and European markets, the decision to take over Fannie and Freddie is likely to cause more volatility and needs careful consideration by investors, according to Rogers.
It’s rarely good to jump in a moving bus and right now you got a lot of buses moving. I might short some more investment banks in the US, depending on how they rally over the next week, but other than that, I’ll just sit and watch,” he said.
Rogers, who is short on U.S. bonds, said these are likely to fall while commodities may rally. The two government-sponsored enterprises don’t have good loans on their books, because “everybody else took the good stuff and dumped the bad stuff onto Fannie and Freddie,” he said.
From 2010, Fannie and Freddie will have to shrink their portfolios by 10 percent a year until they reach $250 billion, to reduce the risk to the taxpayer, according to the Treasury plan. But this may put additional pressure on the housing market, Rogers said.
“That’s going to also ensure that house prices continue to go down. It’s going to be harder and harder to get a mortgage.”
Investors should not pin their hopes on this year’s presidential election for a solution to the problems, as none of the candidates is likely to find one, Rogers said.
“This is a big huge mess and neither one of them has a clue what to do next year. It’s going to be a mess.”
© 2008 CNBC.com

NÓS QUEREMOS O MELHOR PARA VOCÊ.
NÓS QUEREMOS O MELHOR PARA VOCÊ.
NÓS QUEREMOS O MELHOR PARA VOCÊ.
NÓS QUEREMOS O MELHOR PARA VOCÊ.
NÓS QUEREMOS O MELHOR PARA VOCÊ.

OS BUSHEVIQUES: SOCIALISMO TOMA EUA. AGORA, FIM DA HISTÓRIA MESMO… ( 2 artigos em inglês )

Comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke Welcome You to the USSRA ( United Socialist State Republic of America )
By Nouriel Roubini
09/09/08 “Roubini Global Economics” — – The now inevitable nationalization of Fannie and Freddie is the most radical regime change in global economic and financial affairs in decades. For the last twenty years after the collapse of the USSR, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the economic reforms in China and other emerging market economies the world economy has moved away from state ownership of the economy and towards privatization of previously stated owned enterprises. This trends was aggressively supported the United States that preached right and left the benefits of free markets and free private enterprise.

Today instead the US has performed the greatest nationalization in the history of humanity. By nationalizing Fannie and Freddie the US has increased its public assets by almost $6 trillion and has increased its public debt/liabilities by another $6 trillion. The US has also turned itself into the largest government-owned hedge fund in the world: by injecting a likely $200 billion of capital into Fannie and Freddie and taking on almost $6 trillion of liabilities of such GSEs the US has also undertaken the biggest and most levered LBO (“leveraged buy-out”) in human history that has a debt to equity ratio of 30 ($6,000 billion of debt against $200 billion of equity).

So now Comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke ( as originally nicknamed by Willem Buiter ) have now turned the USA into the USSRA (the United Socialist State Republic of America). Socialism is indeed alive and well in America; but this is socialism for the rich, the well connected and Wall Street. A socialism where profits are privatized and losses are socialized with the US tax-payer being charged the bill of $300 billion.

This biggest bailout and nationalization in human history comes from the most fanatically and ideologically zealot free-market laissez-faire administration in US history. These are the folks who for years spewed the rhetoric of free markets and cutting down government intervention in economic affairs. But they were so fanatically ideological about free markets that they did not realize that financial and other markets without proper rules, supervision and regulation are like a jungle where greed – untempered by fear of loss or of punishment – leads to credit bubbles and asset bubbles and manias and eventual bust and panics.

The ideologue “regulators” who literally held a chain saw at a public event to smash “unnecessary regulations” are now communists nationalizing private firms and socializing their losses: the bailout of the Bear Stearns creditors, the bailout of Fannie and Freddie, the use of the Fed balance sheet (hundreds of billions of safe US Treasuries swapped for junk toxic illiquid private securities), the use of the other GSEs (the Federal Home Loan Bank system) to provide hundreds of billions of dollars of “liquidity” to distressed, illiquid and insolvent mortgage lenders, the use of the SEC to manipulate the stock market (restrictions on short sales), the use of the US Treasury to manipulate the mortgage market (Treasury will now for the first time outright buy agency MBS to manipulate and prop up this market), the creation of a whole host of new bailout facilities (TAF, TSLF, PDCF) to prop and rescue banks and, for the first time since the Great Depression,to bail out non-bank financial institutions, and a whole range of other executive and legislative actions (including the recent bill to provide a public guarantee to mortgage for banks willing to reduce their face value).

This is the biggest and most socialist government intervention in economic affairs since the formation of the Soviet Union and Communist China. So foreign investors are now welcome to the USSRA (the United Socialist State Republic of America) where they can earn fat spreads relative to Treasuries on agency debt and never face any credit risks (not even the subordinated debt holders who made a fortune yesterday as those claims were also made whole).

Like scores of evangelists and hypocrites and moralists who spew and praise family values and pretend to be holier than thou and are then regularly caught cheating or cross dressing or found to be perverts these Bush hypocrites who spewed for years the glory of unfettered wild west laissez faire jungle capitalism (and never believed in any sensible and appropriate regulation and supervision of financial markets) allowed the biggest debt bubble ever to fester without any control, have caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and are now forced to perform the biggest government intervention and nationalizations in the recent history of humanity, all for the benefit of the rich and the well connected. So Comrades Bush and Paulson and Bernanke will rightly pass to the history books as a troika of Bolsheviks who turned the USA into the USSRA. Fanatic zealots of any religion are always pests that cause havoc and destruction with their inflexible fanaticism; but they usually don’t run the biggest economy in the world. But these laissez faire voodoo-economics zealots in charge of the USA have now caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and the nastiest economic crisis in decades. So let them be shamed in public for their hypocrisy and zealotry that has caused so much financial and economic damage.
Copyright © 2008 Roubini Global Economics

American Socialism

US Is “More Communist than China”: Jim Rogers

By CNBC.com

08/09/08 “CNBC” — –

The nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shows that the U.S. is “more communist than China right now” but its brand of socialism is meant only for the rich, investor Jim Rogers, CEO of Rogers Holdings, told CNBC Europe on Monday.”America is more communist than China is right now. You can see that this is welfare of the rich, it is socialism for the rich… it’s just bailing out financial institutions,” Rogers said.
Stock markets jumped after the U.S. government’s decision to launch what could be its biggest federal bailout ever, in a bid to support the housing market and ward off more global financial market turbulence.
But Rogers said in the long term the move spelled trouble.
“This is madness, this is insanity, they have more than doubled the American national debt in one weekend for a bunch of crooks and incompetents. I’m not quite sure why I or anybody else should be paying for this,” Rogers told “Squawk Box Europe.”
European stocks soared on Monday, led by banks. UBS was up 11 percent, BNP Paribas up 8 percent, Credit Agricole up 11.1 percent and HBOS up 13.8 percent.
“You certainly gonna see a huge jump in any financial institutions which owned a lot of Fannie
cnbc_comboQuoteMove(‘popup_fnm_ID0EQF15839609′);
[FNM 0.73 -6.31 (-89.63%) ]
cnbc_quoteComponent_init_getData(“fnm”,”WSODQ_COMPONENT_FNM_ID0EQF15839609″,”WSODQ”,”true”,”ID0EQF15839609″,”off”,”false”);

or Freddie
cnbc_comboQuoteMove(‘popup_fre_ID0EPCAC15839609′);
[FRE 0.88 -4.22 (-82.75%) ]
cnbc_quoteComponent_init_getData(“fre”,”WSODQ_COMPONENT_FRE_ID0EPCAC15839609″,”WSODQ”,”true”,”ID0EPCAC15839609″,”off”,”false”);

… because they don’t have to worry about going bankrupt all of a sudden,” Rogers said. (Watch the video on the left for the full interview)

“Bank stocks around the world are going through the roof, that’s ’cause they’ve all been bailed out. You don’t see the homeowners in Kansas going through the roof ’cause they’re not being bailed out,” he added.
“A Huge Mess”
However, despite the rally in Asian and European markets, the decision to take over Fannie and Freddie is likely to cause more volatility and needs careful consideration by investors, according to Rogers.
It’s rarely good to jump in a moving bus and right now you got a lot of buses moving. I might short some more investment banks in the US, depending on how they rally over the next week, but other than that, I’ll just sit and watch,” he said.
Rogers, who is short on U.S. bonds, said these are likely to fall while commodities may rally. The two government-sponsored enterprises don’t have good loans on their books, because “everybody else took the good stuff and dumped the bad stuff onto Fannie and Freddie,” he said.
From 2010, Fannie and Freddie will have to shrink their portfolios by 10 percent a year until they reach $250 billion, to reduce the risk to the taxpayer, according to the Treasury plan. But this may put additional pressure on the housing market, Rogers said.
“That’s going to also ensure that house prices continue to go down. It’s going to be harder and harder to get a mortgage.”
Investors should not pin their hopes on this year’s presidential election for a solution to the problems, as none of the candidates is likely to find one, Rogers said.
“This is a big huge mess and neither one of them has a clue what to do next year. It’s going to be a mess.”
© 2008 CNBC.com

Holding blogística “ENCALHE / BFI – O Correio da Elite”
OBRIGADO PELA PREFERÊNCIA E VOLTE SEMPRE QUE DER NA TELHA

OS BUSHEVIQUES: SOCIALISMO TOMA EUA. AGORA, FIM DA HISTÓRIA MESMO… ( 2 artigos em inglês )

Comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke Welcome You to the USSRA ( United Socialist State Republic of America )
By Nouriel Roubini
09/09/08 “Roubini Global Economics” — – The now inevitable nationalization of Fannie and Freddie is the most radical regime change in global economic and financial affairs in decades. For the last twenty years after the collapse of the USSR, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the economic reforms in China and other emerging market economies the world economy has moved away from state ownership of the economy and towards privatization of previously stated owned enterprises. This trends was aggressively supported the United States that preached right and left the benefits of free markets and free private enterprise.

Today instead the US has performed the greatest nationalization in the history of humanity. By nationalizing Fannie and Freddie the US has increased its public assets by almost $6 trillion and has increased its public debt/liabilities by another $6 trillion. The US has also turned itself into the largest government-owned hedge fund in the world: by injecting a likely $200 billion of capital into Fannie and Freddie and taking on almost $6 trillion of liabilities of such GSEs the US has also undertaken the biggest and most levered LBO (“leveraged buy-out”) in human history that has a debt to equity ratio of 30 ($6,000 billion of debt against $200 billion of equity).

So now Comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke ( as originally nicknamed by Willem Buiter ) have now turned the USA into the USSRA (the United Socialist State Republic of America). Socialism is indeed alive and well in America; but this is socialism for the rich, the well connected and Wall Street. A socialism where profits are privatized and losses are socialized with the US tax-payer being charged the bill of $300 billion.

This biggest bailout and nationalization in human history comes from the most fanatically and ideologically zealot free-market laissez-faire administration in US history. These are the folks who for years spewed the rhetoric of free markets and cutting down government intervention in economic affairs. But they were so fanatically ideological about free markets that they did not realize that financial and other markets without proper rules, supervision and regulation are like a jungle where greed – untempered by fear of loss or of punishment – leads to credit bubbles and asset bubbles and manias and eventual bust and panics.

The ideologue “regulators” who literally held a chain saw at a public event to smash “unnecessary regulations” are now communists nationalizing private firms and socializing their losses: the bailout of the Bear Stearns creditors, the bailout of Fannie and Freddie, the use of the Fed balance sheet (hundreds of billions of safe US Treasuries swapped for junk toxic illiquid private securities), the use of the other GSEs (the Federal Home Loan Bank system) to provide hundreds of billions of dollars of “liquidity” to distressed, illiquid and insolvent mortgage lenders, the use of the SEC to manipulate the stock market (restrictions on short sales), the use of the US Treasury to manipulate the mortgage market (Treasury will now for the first time outright buy agency MBS to manipulate and prop up this market), the creation of a whole host of new bailout facilities (TAF, TSLF, PDCF) to prop and rescue banks and, for the first time since the Great Depression,to bail out non-bank financial institutions, and a whole range of other executive and legislative actions (including the recent bill to provide a public guarantee to mortgage for banks willing to reduce their face value).

This is the biggest and most socialist government intervention in economic affairs since the formation of the Soviet Union and Communist China. So foreign investors are now welcome to the USSRA (the United Socialist State Republic of America) where they can earn fat spreads relative to Treasuries on agency debt and never face any credit risks (not even the subordinated debt holders who made a fortune yesterday as those claims were also made whole).

Like scores of evangelists and hypocrites and moralists who spew and praise family values and pretend to be holier than thou and are then regularly caught cheating or cross dressing or found to be perverts these Bush hypocrites who spewed for years the glory of unfettered wild west laissez faire jungle capitalism (and never believed in any sensible and appropriate regulation and supervision of financial markets) allowed the biggest debt bubble ever to fester without any control, have caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and are now forced to perform the biggest government intervention and nationalizations in the recent history of humanity, all for the benefit of the rich and the well connected. So Comrades Bush and Paulson and Bernanke will rightly pass to the history books as a troika of Bolsheviks who turned the USA into the USSRA. Fanatic zealots of any religion are always pests that cause havoc and destruction with their inflexible fanaticism; but they usually don’t run the biggest economy in the world. But these laissez faire voodoo-economics zealots in charge of the USA have now caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and the nastiest economic crisis in decades. So let them be shamed in public for their hypocrisy and zealotry that has caused so much financial and economic damage.
Copyright © 2008 Roubini Global Economics

American Socialism

US Is “More Communist than China”: Jim Rogers

By CNBC.com

08/09/08 “CNBC” — –

The nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shows that the U.S. is “more communist than China right now” but its brand of socialism is meant only for the rich, investor Jim Rogers, CEO of Rogers Holdings, told CNBC Europe on Monday.”America is more communist than China is right now. You can see that this is welfare of the rich, it is socialism for the rich… it’s just bailing out financial institutions,” Rogers said.
Stock markets jumped after the U.S. government’s decision to launch what could be its biggest federal bailout ever, in a bid to support the housing market and ward off more global financial market turbulence.
But Rogers said in the long term the move spelled trouble.
“This is madness, this is insanity, they have more than doubled the American national debt in one weekend for a bunch of crooks and incompetents. I’m not quite sure why I or anybody else should be paying for this,” Rogers told “Squawk Box Europe.”
European stocks soared on Monday, led by banks. UBS was up 11 percent, BNP Paribas up 8 percent, Credit Agricole up 11.1 percent and HBOS up 13.8 percent.
“You certainly gonna see a huge jump in any financial institutions which owned a lot of Fannie
cnbc_comboQuoteMove(‘popup_fnm_ID0EQF15839609′);
[FNM 0.73 -6.31 (-89.63%) ]
cnbc_quoteComponent_init_getData(“fnm”,”WSODQ_COMPONENT_FNM_ID0EQF15839609″,”WSODQ”,”true”,”ID0EQF15839609″,”off”,”false”);

or Freddie
cnbc_comboQuoteMove(‘popup_fre_ID0EPCAC15839609′);
[FRE 0.88 -4.22 (-82.75%) ]
cnbc_quoteComponent_init_getData(“fre”,”WSODQ_COMPONENT_FRE_ID0EPCAC15839609″,”WSODQ”,”true”,”ID0EPCAC15839609″,”off”,”false”);

… because they don’t have to worry about going bankrupt all of a sudden,” Rogers said. (Watch the video on the left for the full interview)

“Bank stocks around the world are going through the roof, that’s ’cause they’ve all been bailed out. You don’t see the homeowners in Kansas going through the roof ’cause they’re not being bailed out,” he added.
“A Huge Mess”
However, despite the rally in Asian and European markets, the decision to take over Fannie and Freddie is likely to cause more volatility and needs careful consideration by investors, according to Rogers.
It’s rarely good to jump in a moving bus and right now you got a lot of buses moving. I might short some more investment banks in the US, depending on how they rally over the next week, but other than that, I’ll just sit and watch,” he said.
Rogers, who is short on U.S. bonds, said these are likely to fall while commodities may rally. The two government-sponsored enterprises don’t have good loans on their books, because “everybody else took the good stuff and dumped the bad stuff onto Fannie and Freddie,” he said.
From 2010, Fannie and Freddie will have to shrink their portfolios by 10 percent a year until they reach $250 billion, to reduce the risk to the taxpayer, according to the Treasury plan. But this may put additional pressure on the housing market, Rogers said.
“That’s going to also ensure that house prices continue to go down. It’s going to be harder and harder to get a mortgage.”
Investors should not pin their hopes on this year’s presidential election for a solution to the problems, as none of the candidates is likely to find one, Rogers said.
“This is a big huge mess and neither one of them has a clue what to do next year. It’s going to be a mess.”
© 2008 CNBC.com

Holding blogística “ENCALHE / BFI – O Correio da Elite”
OBRIGADO PELA PREFERÊNCIA E VOLTE SEMPRE QUE DER NA TELHA