Randy, from what I have heard and read, you are right about five years. I am hearing five years to reverse the recession and restore the housing market, if and only if the United States replaces Obama and puts conservatives in both houses of Congress, so that the most damaging components of Sarbanes-Oxley and Frank-Dodd can be repealed or revised.

I also agree that the banks must be broken up, but only in the context of the restoration of Glass-Steagall. Currently the banks are being killed by gratuitously punitive measures that are purely reactive/vindictive and have no rhyme or reason, whatsoever (for example the Durbin amendment to Frank-Dodd, and his recent b.s. smokescreen on the house floor, in which he advised the entire country to make a run on Bank of America).

The U.S. is in witch hunt mode right now. No one wants to hear about, or even contemplate, causes and their repercussions.

Yet we can watch a similar scenario unfolding in Europe. The riots over there are going to get worse, and they are going to spread.

Sarkozy/France opposes bailing out Spain and Greece via the E.U. Yet if Greece defaults, French banks will fail.

Merkel/Greece also opposes bailing out Spain and Greece via the E.U., because to do so will require consolidation of the Euro into a unified currency (in which case Germany would effectively assume the debt of all the weaker nations).

Both Merkel and Sarkozy are doing nothing, and waiting for the ECB to buy Greek and Spanish debt.

What we are seeing in Europe, before our very eyes, is a Randian nightmare, where three distinct power structures are playing brinksmanship and waiting for the other to do the impossible.

A year from now, if they go over the brink, no one will recall this time, right now, this opportunity Europe has had to take its bitter medicine and heal itself.

Next year, if the riots are a hundred times worse and if they spread beyond Greece into the rest of the E.U., no one will care about causes, repercussions, the consequences of both acting in half-measures and in failing to act.

They will just blame the banks that have failed, and attribute the failures to greed, and will brand the banks as enemies of the people. Because the banks have, and the people have not.

I think it is accurate to say that most do not have the education to understand the underlying causes, and that most of the people who are capable of understanding it do not have the patience to step back and think it through.

Easier to blame the banks and the filthy Jews who run Wall Street.

Even though the banks are failing, and Wall Street has lost 30,000 employees since 2009, and the New York Stock Exchange is no longer the New York Stock Exchange, and the world's financial center is no longer New York.

Occupy Wall Street is not a movement for reform. Occupy Wall Street is America, looking down at its own freshly dug grave and spitting with contempt at the hole.

 

Sarbanes-oxely...is ineffective but it is killing small business with unnecessary expenses that should not be a burden....needs to be revised

Frank-Dodd..power revenge play that some of it is needed..

Obama Health Plan has to go also..but our health system needs to be retooled

****as to conservatives, that can be either Democrat or Republican....they are both to blame for the mess and they could have stopped it. republicans are suppose to be Conservatives but after what they let happen it is like the fox guarding the hen house.

as we are going now, I see years of pain for a lot of folks and maybe full blow ruin for the country....

The answers are out there but if we will acknowledge them and act is the question.

 

Sarbox is not only choking small/medium sized businesses. Section 404 has also become an almost insurmountable obstacle to going public.

People want jobs, and yet Sarbox has dried up IPO's, making it nearly impossible for medium sized companies to go public and expand.

Obamacare has also dried up expansion. It is no longer possible to accurately project the cost-side of payroll benefits.

Yet more than half the country thinks that the solution is bigger government and more regulation and wants the executive branch to wave the magic wand that creates jobs. We have a president who demonizes every private sector business category that is still solvent.

And in the wings, we have a Republican party establishment that is no better.

The Bush administration gave us Sarbox. And now the Republicans are trying to pimp a Bush croney (Perry) and the father of Obamacare (Romney).


That is why I say: Obama. Four more years. Resume descent. Sanity lies at rock bottom. We gotta get there. At the bottom is the way out.

 

LOL Sarbox......yeah I know as I am a major stockholder in an otcbb company and the costs to comply are killing us...

ENRON gave us that....

I blame Obama for being elected on Bush and republicans killing the trust of the country.

Obama had a chance to be a hero but fucked up....I can see he is not the answer...

it looks dim....maybe you are right like an alcoholic we have to hit total bottom before we can recover....however I always like to say you can stop the elevator on any floor on the way down...no need to go to the basement.

Well I am off to the Pub to see if the cowboys can find a way to win a game against a team that has lost every game...LOL

 

Does anyone really think that we can climb out of this hole without pain and bloodshed (metaphorically)?

There is no way to undo the damage without causing further pain to everyone of us. But I am afraid that the fools in Congress will first make sure that the wealth of this country gets pushed to the top even more.

 

Where is the top?

If you can answer that question, you will also know why Congress has no choice, and why it does not matter which country takes power next year.

The top is no longer here. Not anymore.

 

Do you think we can pay off a $14 Trillion and counting deficit and not raise taxes?

 

Of course not.


But if you think you can get away with only raising taxes on the rich, you are being delusional. So far that is all I've heard you say.

 

The wealth of this nation is still intact, it is simply not being utilized in a way that employs people.

The top is not gone, it is just dormant.

 

Absolutely we can pay off the $14 trillion debt without raising taxes;

1) create permanent jobs

2) cut/reduce government spending

3) reform entitlements/tax policies

I believe it is just that simple.

 

So the producers have gone on strike? As Ayn Rand said they would, in Atlas Shrugged? (Sorry. I love needling the people who have not read the book yet insist that the novel's portrayal of the future does not describe our present.)

Would that it were true.

To some extent it is true that our wealth and producers are dormant. For instance, we could repeal Obama-era disincentives to repatriate capital, which could encourage corporations to bring approximately two trillion back to these shores.

But it would not make a dent.

The entirety of the nation's wealth, including the expatriated capital of corporations and their shareholders, is less than its liabilities.

And the $14.2 trillion deficit is now closer to $15 trillion, just one quarter after the raising of the debt ceiling.

Approximately $1 trillion deeper in the hole. After one quarter. Sounds crazy, doesn't it? Until one reflects that the deficit has risen $9 trillion in the first three years of Obama's presidency, and is accelerating, not slowing. At this rate, the deficit could reach $19 trillion by January 2012.

Raising taxes on the "wealthy" won't solve it.

Repatriating capital won't solve it.

Nationalizing and liquidating the entire manufacturing base (what is left it of it) will not solve it.

The "top" is not lying dormant. The "top" is our biggest creditor.

China.

Why spoil the sentiment, by qualifying it with "metaphorically?" Do you really think the OWS nutjobs will peacefully disperse when the inclement weather arrives? Sooner or later, the U.S. will need to slash entitlements across the board- most likely around January, after we have left Iraq and opened the doors wide for Iran to march in. That is when everyone will ask what has happened to the promised "Peace Dividend" and will finally realize that entitlement spending in this country is more than three times higher than total military spending.

When that happens, we will see Greek-style protest rallies. But here in the U.S., we will not be throwing stones. We, in America, are armed to the teeth with guns.

Doom and gloom, I know. Sorry. Don't worry. Be happy. Re-Elect Obama. Four more years. Resume descent.

 

Oh clarise...clarise....

Is this really how you like to waste your time?

I'd say it was definitely a waste of your smartness........

but then again....smartness is a complete waste of intelligence.

Want surprise me otherwise?

 

Nope - mostly wrong. :-|

If you dig a bit deeper than your tired anti-moonbat prejudice, you'll find that by the time Glass-Steagall was put to pasture formally in 1999, it had become nearly toothless due to a long series of decisions by the Federal Reserve Board, and a couple of other laws enacted by Congress through the 1980s and early 1990s.

When Clinton signed Gramm-Leach-Bliley into law, the banking act of 1933 was a quaint and pointless little piece of legislation that had been almost completely undermined after 30+ years of intensive lobbying by the banking industry. They paid handsomely to get everyone moving the right direction over a couple of decades and there were only a handful that warned against it. Sad, really.

 

No, 25 years of chipping away at it. As I said. 25... 30... what's the difference? For how long before 1977 did banks take heat for "redlining?"

Glass-Steagall was progressively weakened ever since Johnson, and perhaps before him. It was full of holes, but it held.

Quaint and pointless? Christ. Could a bank have bought Merrill Lynch prior to 1999?

What a bunch of revisionist crap.

 

Oh? We bought all our debt back from China? When did I miss that? Must have been Uganda.

 

Of course they could - especially with buddies on the Federal Reserve Board to assist. How did that Travelers-Citicorp merger work out in 1998? Oh, that's right - it went through without a hitch, despite being blatantly in violation of major portions of the banking act of 1933.

It could, and did, happen - no revisionist carp, just the crappy facts. Would you like to see all of the other acts through the 1980s that occured in direct violation of Glass-Steagall as well?

 

How do we create those permanent Jobs Ace? Because your plan won't work without them now will it?

 

Bottom line is what?

That the politicians were bought and paid for, right?

Now tell me why some defend these greedy mf's with such passion. The career politician and greedy short-termers in DC is who I am referring to,in case you were wondering.

 

Not the point at all. The politicians (read: Congress) had very little to do with the steady demolition of the banking act of 1933, except that they turned a blind eye to the horrific decision making of the Federal Reserve Board over a period of 2 decades.

I was simply correcting clarise on its assumption that Clinton (an ideological political enemy) was the one responsible for the demise of the law(s) separating church and state (as it were) in the financial sector. His signature on the Gramm-Leach-Bliley law was just formal processing fluff and meant almost nothing to the realities of what was already going on.

 

and this thread has made it to 4 digits - congratulations, thread! :laughing: