Damn, I feel better already. I just won't pay the bills.

If calling people justifiably upset about the economy "whiners" is constructive dialogue, I'm the Joker.

"Foreclosure Phil" having a whining hissy fit? Ahhh, poor baby. He should be more concerned about his company being under investigation for being an illegal tax shelter.

“It is clear to me that Democrats want to attack me rather than debate Senator McCain on important economic issues facing the country,” Gramm said

Aww, stop yer whining!

But the truth is, John McCain threw Phil Gramm under the bus for saying, less artfully, what he himself has said repeatedly.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

Stay tuned for news from UBS. Its not real good when your chief economics adviser takes down two huge corporations in the span of 6 years.

disclaimer---I have no insider knowledge of UBS, but I am a longtime observer of Repulicon politics.

"important economic issues facing the country,”

WHAT important economic issues? I thought everything was going great and people trying to find money for food or quitting their jobs because they can't afford gas to get to work should just stop complaining, now he admits we've got real problems?

McCain and Gramm are both retarded sock-puppets of the cynical "I've got mine and f-u" crowd. The Gramm boy apparently ate more lead paint chips and actually failed a grade in school. Neither knows jack about economics or financial hardship.

Wow, that's exactly the type of attack ad I'd like to see Obama and the DNC use to sink McCain's presidential bid.

Why aren't they?

Phil Gramm did his part to help create a nation of whiners http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/07/foreclosure-phil.html

What they're saying is absolutely true. America's problems are all psychological.
Let's face it. If Americans weren't crazy (or stupid), could Bush ever have become President, or McCain a serious candidate for the Presidency? It's all psychological, don't you see? So, settle back with a beer and watch something on TV.
You'll feel better.

Phil Gramm's feelings are hurt? Was he fired or did he quit? Oh, he quit? He's a quitter!! Poor guy. Must feel really bad. and feelings are psychological. He's got to move on to some better psychology.

I think neocons felt a lot better when we unquestioningly swallowed all their BS hook line and sinker. Now that the country has finally figured out The Con, we're whiners.

What a bunch of jerks.

Gramm & Co. never stop insulting our intelligence.

For those of you who don't know why he is called "Foreclosure Phil" or "Enron Gramm" here is a bit of explanation for you... (But do read the whole article).

This is the man who shaped McCain's economic Plan!

Foreclosure Phil

Excerpt:

As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Written with the help of financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the chairman of the agriculture committee, the measure had been considered dead—even by Gramm. Few lawmakers had either the opportunity or inclination to read the version of the bill Gramm inserted. "Nobody in either chamber had any knowledge of what was going on or what was in it," says a congressional aide familiar with the bill's history.

SNIP!

For starters, the legislation contained a provision—lobbied for by Enron, a generous contributor to Gramm—that exempted energy trading from regulatory oversight, allowing Enron to run rampant, wreck the California electricity market, and cost consumers billions before it collapsed. (For Gramm, Enron was a family affair. Eight years earlier, his wife, Wendy Gramm, as cftc chairwoman, had pushed through a rule excluding Enron's energy futures contracts from government oversight. Wendy later joined the Houston-based company's board, and in the following years her Enron salary and stock income brought between $915,000 and $1.8 million into the Gramm household.)

But the Enron loophole was small potatoes compared to the devastation that unregulated swaps would unleash. Credit default swaps are essentially insurance policies covering the losses on securities in the event of a default. Financial institutions buy them to protect themselves if an investment they hold goes south. It's like bookies trading bets, with banks and hedge funds gambling on whether an investment (say, a pile of subprime mortgages bundled into a security) will succeed or fail. Because of the swap-related provisions of Gramm's bill—which were supported by Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury secretary Larry Summers—a $62 trillion market (nearly four times the size of the entire US stock market) remained utterly unregulated, meaning no one made sure the banks and hedge funds had the assets to cover the losses they guaranteed.

In essence, Wall Street's biggest players (which, thanks to Gramm's earlier banking deregulation efforts, now incorporated everything from your checking account to your pension fund) ran a secret casino. "Tens of trillions of dollars of transactions were done in the dark," says University of San Diego law professor Frank Partnoy, an expert on financial markets and derivatives. "No one had a picture of where the risks were flowing."

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/07/foreclosure-phil.html

Obama’s campaign says: “Gramm's remarks and his policy work are a pretty accurate REFLECTION of McCain's worldview."

If this is true, why can't it be said that “Reverend Wright's remarks and work are a pretty accurate REFLECTION of Obama's worldview??”

It can be said, but some things seem to be more acceptable than others. Obama believed Wright for 20 years! Obama would rather lie or flip-flop than admit his faults and sordid past.

“GOD DAMN AMERICA” VS. “WHINING'?”

Hear me whine!

I’m voting for John McCain in November.

Rasputin @26.

That's a pretty good moniker you have there, because the stuff you present about Gramm cannot be repeated enough! So keep repeating it until it sinks into everyone's consciousness. Phil Gramm is a contemptuous crook.

much appreciated.

Which is more bizzare... Gramm calling us a nation of whiners or Bush insisting that the economy is sound?

Commercial bankruptcies soar, reflecting widening economic woes

By Tony Pugh | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Driven by a sour economy and skittish consumers, U.S. business bankruptcies saw their sharpest quarterly rise in two years, jumping 17 percent in the second quarter of 2008, according to an analysis by McClatchy.

Commercial filings for the first half of 2008 are up 45 percent from last year, as the national climate for commerce continues to deteriorate amid rising energy and food costs, mounting job losses, tighter credit and a reticence among consumers to part with discretionary income.

From April through June, 15,471 U.S. businesses called it quits, according to data from Automated Access to Court Electronic Records, an Oklahoma City bankruptcy management and data company.

States that saw the biggest increase in filings were Delaware, Montana, Oregon, Maryland and Connecticut, suggesting that the economic gloom is spreading beyond large population centers.

It was the 10th straight quarter that business bankruptcy filings have increased. Nearly 29,000 companies filed in the first half of 2008.

Another 60,000 to 90,000 others probably have closed, because roughly two to three businesses fold for every one that files for bankruptcy, said Jack Williams, resident scholar at the American Bankruptcy Institute.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/44717.html

I love the arrogance, the self-importance, essentially saying, "Attacking ME hurts America."

I just can't quite figure out how these people keep shooting themselves in the foot... and keep getting elected at the same time.

Oh, yea... GREAT AD, Move On! Hope it sees a bunch of air time.

mcC*nt is right about America's psychological problems. boosh is still president.

What difference does it make he's gone! McCain still shares his views and will continue his and Bush's policies! Oh and you know, he still will be advising McCain on the low! They have been friends for years and believe me he is still in the picture! And if McCain does win then get ready Gramm will be the treasurer of state! If you think we're screwed now!!!

It worked for Reagan. Wasn't most of his campaign about making the nation "feel good" about it’s self again.

They know the American public can be had with only cheap platitudes instead of more difficult solutions.

Gramm & Co. never stop insulting our intelligence.

-----------

All polititians never stop doing so.

Interesting how McBush didn't care about Gramms comments or his role in the collapse of housing crisis but I'd bet $$ that Philthy's softcore porn production is what the real reason is

Ron.j @ 45:

It worked for Reagan. Wasn’t most of his campaign about making the nation “feel good” about it’s self again.

They know the American public can be had with only cheap platitudes instead of more difficult solutions.

--------------

There aren't really any solutions. Nothing is static.

========

No... there aren't any easy solutions is the truth of it, but stopping the expenditure of $10 Billion to $12 Billion a month into Iraq would be a excellent start!

As Abe Lincoln said in a debate:

"The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. "

Ron.j @ 47:

It worked for Reagan. Wasn’t most of his campaign about making the nation “feel good” about it’s self again.

They know the American public can be had with only cheap platitudes instead of more difficult solutions.

————–

There aren’t really any solutions. Nothing is static.

========

No… there aren’t any easy solutions is the truth of it, but stopping the expenditure of $10 Billion to $12 Billion a month into Iraq would be a excellent start!

------------

There aren't any solutions. I never used the word easy.

The FDIC just spent up to 1/5th of its money bailing out depositors of IndyMac Bank. More banks failures are going to follow. 50 billion will not be enough. Thus creating the FDIC did not solve the problem.

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae did not solve the problem. The government has plans to lend money to them.

"solutions" create new problems to be "solved".

They weren't "problems" until the GOP congress allowed hedge funds to operate without regulators at all!

Not to mention the GOP congress served up the repeal of the Glass-Stegall Act of 1933 that had been put into place to prevent savings banks from acting as brokerages and issuing securities at the same time... thereby assuming too much risk. That was one of the main "firewalls" against banks melting down and Clinton was stupid enough to listen to Rubin and signed it.

Then there was the little matter of Bush using the Office of the Currency Comptroller to invoke an 1863 law to nullify the State of New York's predatory lending laws in the run up to the 2004 elections so he could say, "We're the ownership society. You see we haves and the have mores. More people own their own homes than ever before."

And that of course brings us back to Foreclosure Phil...

Foreclosure Phil

Excerpt:

As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Written with the help of financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the chairman of the agriculture committee, the measure had been considered dead—even by Gramm. Few lawmakers had either the opportunity or inclination to read the version of the bill Gramm inserted. “Nobody in either chamber had any knowledge of what was going on or what was in it,” says a congressional aide familiar with the bill’s history.

SNIP!

For starters, the legislation contained a provision—lobbied for by Enron, a generous contributor to Gramm—that exempted energy trading from regulatory oversight, allowing Enron to run rampant, wreck the California electricity market, and cost consumers billions before it collapsed. (For Gramm, Enron was a family affair. Eight years earlier, his wife, Wendy Gramm, as cftc chairwoman, had pushed through a rule excluding Enron’s energy futures contracts from government oversight. Wendy later joined the Houston-based company’s board, and in the following years her Enron salary and stock income brought between $915,000 and $1.8 million into the Gramm household.)

But the Enron loophole was small potatoes compared to the devastation that unregulated swaps would unleash. Credit default swaps are essentially insurance policies covering the losses on securities in the event of a default. Financial institutions buy them to protect themselves if an investment they hold goes south. It’s like bookies trading bets, with banks and hedge funds gambling on whether an investment (say, a pile of subprime mortgages bundled into a security) will succeed or fail. Because of the swap-related provisions of Gramm’s bill—which were supported by Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury secretary Larry Summers—a $62 trillion market (nearly four times the size of the entire US stock market) remained utterly unregulated, meaning no one made sure the banks and hedge funds had the assets to cover the losses they guaranteed.

In essence, Wall Street’s biggest players (which, thanks to Gramm’s earlier banking deregulation efforts, now incorporated everything from your checking account to your pension fund) ran a secret casino. “Tens of trillions of dollars of transactions were done in the dark,” says University of San Diego law professor Frank Partnoy, an expert on financial markets and derivatives. “No one had a picture of where the risks were flowing.”

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/07/foreclosure-phil.html

The FDIC and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae weren't problems until Gramm and the rest of the "K street" cabal in congress began "deregulating" the market.

Enron, Tyco, Global Crossings, the rape of California in Enron's constructed "energy crisis" and now... the "Subprime mortgage meltdown", Bear Stearns failure, IndyMac's failure.... Those "Free market" forces at work.

Yesiree! Phil Gramm and the GOP certainly have wracked up quite a record... and he's the architect of McCain's financial plans and is being considered for a cabinet level appointment in his administration?

It worked for Reagan. Wasn’t most of his campaign about making the nation “feel good” about it’s self again.

They know the American public can be had with only cheap platitudes instead of more difficult solutions.

————–

There aren’t really any solutions. Nothing is static.

========

No… there aren’t any easy solutions is the truth of it, but stopping the expenditure of $10 Billion to $12 Billion a month into Iraq would be a excellent start!

————

There aren’t any solutions. I never used the word easy.

The FDIC just spent up to 1/5th of its money bailing out depositors of IndyMac Bank. More banks failures are going to follow. 50 billion will not be enough. Thus creating the FDIC did not solve the problem.

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae did not solve the problem. The government has plans to lend money to them.

“solutions” create new problems to be “solved”.

They weren’t “problems” until the GOP congress allowed hedge funds to operate without regulators at all!

-------------------

They were problems regardless. Japanese real estate has fallen for more than a decade. Housing bubbles exist in Britain and Spain and Canada.

The bursting of the stock market bubble, would have marked the beginning of deflation, except for the creation of the housing bubble. Freddie and Fannie would have been in trouble sooner, rather than later, except for the housing bubble.

A credit bubble needs to continuously expand or it will burst and deflate. There was a credit bubble in the 90's, which fueled the stock bubble. The medicine should have been taken in 2001. The problem is that no one wanted to take the medicine. That still holds true today, with government bailouts of Bear Stearns and the GSE's.

Ron.j @ 52:

It worked for Reagan. Wasn’t most of his campaign about making the nation “feel good” about it’s self again.

They know the American public can be had with only cheap platitudes instead of more difficult solutions.

————–

There aren’t really any solutions. Nothing is static.

========

No… there aren’t any easy solutions is the truth of it, but stopping the expenditure of $10 Billion to $12 Billion a month into Iraq would be a excellent start!

————

There aren’t any solutions. I never used the word easy.

The FDIC just spent up to 1/5th of its money bailing out depositors of IndyMac Bank. More banks failures are going to follow. 50 billion will not be enough. Thus creating the FDIC did not solve the problem.

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae did not solve the problem. The government has plans to lend money to them.

“solutions” create new problems to be “solved”.

They weren’t “problems” until the GOP congress allowed hedge funds to operate without regulators at all!

-------------------

They were problems regardless. Japanese real estate has fallen for more than a decade. Housing bubbles exist in Britain and Spain and Canada.

The bursting of the stock market bubble, would have marked the beginning of deflation, except for the creation of the housing bubble. Freddie and Fannie would have been in trouble sooner, rather than later, except for the housing bubble.

A credit bubble needs to continuously expand or it will burst and deflate. There was a credit bubble in the 90's, which fueled the stock bubble. The medicine should have been taken in 2001. The problem is that no one wanted to take the medicine. That still holds true today, with government bailouts of Bear Stearns and the GSE's.

Japan learned the hard way that asset inflation and bubbles are not a good way to run an economy from their real estate bubble in the late 80's so they leaned out their manufacturing and modernized it, cleaned up their debt, and restored the link between productivity and wages... translation: a healthy manufacturing center for their economy...

Japan May Escape Recession on Chinese Export Demand (Update1)

Excerpt from Bloomberg.com:

Japan has followed the U.S. into every recession in the past three decades. This time may be different.

Since 1970, when the U.S. accounted for 30 percent of Japanese exports, each of its five recessions triggered a decline in Japan's shipments abroad. Now, that figure is only 20 percent, reflecting the success of companies including Toyota Motor Corp. and Hitachi Construction Machinery Co. to take advantage of the opening of Chinese and Russian markets.

Japanese companies have also streamlined production and reduced debt since the bursting of the late-1980s stock and property-price bubbles that ushered in more than 10 years of stagnation. The result: The world's second-largest economy is better positioned to withstand a slump in the biggest economy.

``The U.S. is no longer the absolutely dominant market it used to be,'' said Julian Jessop, chief international economist at Capital Economics Ltd. in London. ``Japan itself is in much better health. It's transformed itself after the lost decade.''

This month the two most bearish brokers on Japan -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley -- backed off from predictions that Japan would slide into a recession this year.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601080&sid=aeRbfCwGLVqw

Americans selling houses to each other at vastly inflated prices isn't a stable base for a healthy economy, or do you think this is just the "free market" correcting itself? LOL!

In essence, Wall Street’s biggest players (which, thanks to Gramm’s earlier banking deregulation efforts, now incorporated everything from your checking account to your pension fund) ran a secret casino. “Tens of trillions of dollars of transactions were done in the dark,” says University of San Diego law professor Frank Partnoy, an expert on financial markets and derivatives. “No one had a picture of where the risks were flowing.”

—————

yet, except for IndyMac Bank, no one is running to get their money out of the banking system. In fact most Indymac’ers are just sticking it in another bank.

It is all one big confidence game, by both political parties.

Not exactly right either…

Investors rate American banks in trouble
LOUISE STORY; The New York Times

Published: July 14th, 2008 01:00 AM | Updated: July 14th, 2008 06:02 AM
As home prices continue to decline and loan defaults mount, federal regulators are bracing for dozens of American banks to fail over the next year.

-------------

The story says nothing about anyone running to get their money out of the banking system, only investor concerns about certain banks. As i said, the people lined up outside IndyMac bank are most likely placing the money in another bank, thus keeping it in the banking system.

As for shoes to drop, it is going to look like the Imelda Marcos closet.

Japan learned the hard way that asset inflation and bubbles are not a good way to run an economy from their real estate bubble in the late 80’s so they leaned out their manufacturing and modernized it, cleaned up their debt, and restored the link between productivity and wages… translation: a healthy manufacturing center for their economy…

--------------

That is how cycles work. Asset bubbles occur in the disinflation phase of the inflation/deflation cycle. Debt becomes cheaper and with anything cheap, people buy a lot of it. At 4.5% FED rate, Greensppan got American consumers to become the consumer of last resort, to bail out the Asian contagion in 1999. The nasdaq jumped 85%. At 1% FED rate, Greenspan and the banks got people to borrow a lot of money to buy or borrow out of their homes.

We will learn the hard way, as well as Britain, Spain, etc. Then the cycle begins again.

Americans selling houses to each other at vastly inflated prices isn’t a stable base for a healthy economy, or do you think this is just the “free market” correcting itself? LOL!

--------------

What you don't want to understand is that there is no stable basis for an economy, which is why the business cycle exists. Of coarse selling homes to each other at vastly inflated prices is not a stable basis for an economy, nor is 70 dollars an hour in wages and benefits to build cars, a stable basis for an economy.
Car loans run upwards of 5 years, when they should not be more than 3, just as a home loan should be no more than 80% of the value of the house and no more than 36% debt to income.

The market always corrects itself, whether it is free or manipulated. The Chinese people got tired of being deprived of an economy that which we take for granted.
A vaccuum is being suddenly filled in. There was a vaccuum after WW2, which left the U.S. as the manufacturer to the world, which allowed for the great middleclass boom. Those conditions don't exist anymore, as the market corrected itself, by the re-industrialization of Europe and Japan and now the re-industrialization of China, THE 800 pound gorilla in the economic room.

Ron.j @ 60:

Americans selling houses to each other at vastly inflated prices isn’t a stable base for a healthy economy, or do you think this is just the “free market” correcting itself? LOL!

--------------

What you don't want to understand is that there is no stable basis for an economy, which is why the business cycle exists. Of coarse selling homes to each other at vastly inflated prices is not a stable basis for an economy, nor is 70 dollars an hour in wages and benefits to build cars, a stable basis for an economy.
Car loans run upwards of 5 years, when they should not be more than 3, just as a home loan should be no more than 80% of the value of the house and no more than 36% debt to income.

The market always corrects itself, whether it is free or manipulated. The Chinese people got tired of being deprived of an economy that which we take for granted.
A vaccuum is being suddenly filled in. There was a vaccuum after WW2, which left the U.S. as the manufacturer to the world, which allowed for the great middleclass boom. Those conditions don't exist anymore, as the market corrected itself, by the re-industrialization of Europe and Japan and now the re-industrialization of China, THE 800 pound gorilla in the economic room.

What you don't understand is economics. If you take the linkage out between productivity and wages and rely solely on debt and asset inflation... you get bubbles and that is unstable.

What you don’t understand is economics. If you take the linkage out between productivity and wages and rely solely on debt and asset inflation… you get bubbles and that is unstable.

----------------

I understand economics just fine. As i said, nothing is stable. You cannot prove me wrong, due to the law of cycles. There is no such thing as a perpetual motion economy.

No linkage is permanent. Commodity prices fell last week, but gold, a commodity was going up. The dollar generally goes the opposite direction of gold, but under certain circumstances the linkage is broken. Stocks go up, bond prices go down, and vice versa, except under certain circumstances. Productivity and wages are going to delink during disinflation, as prices fall. The rate of inflation does not only go up, except maybe in Zimbabwe, where a 100 billion dollar note was just printed.

Bubbles are unstable and democrats long for the Clinton era boom, which occured during a bubble. In fact, the longest economic expansion was the Bush Sr./Clinton expansion- during which a stock bubble occured. Thus the Clinton economy was unstable, but so are all economies, as the end of every economic expansion is a recession.

Really. Phil Gramm IS as stupid as he looks. Phil - Go away and shut the fuck up - you lying POS!

Ron.j @ 64:

What you don’t understand is economics. If you take the linkage out between productivity and wages and rely solely on debt and asset inflation… you get bubbles and that is unstable.

----------------

I understand economics just fine. As i said, nothing is stable. You cannot prove me wrong, due to the law of cycles. There is no such thing as a perpetual motion economy.

No linkage is permanent. Commodity prices fell last week, but gold, a commodity was going up. The dollar generally goes the opposite direction of gold, but under certain circumstances the linkage is broken. Stocks go up, bond prices go down, and vice versa, except under certain circumstances. Productivity and wages are going to delink during disinflation, as prices fall. The rate of inflation does not only go up, except maybe in Zimbabwe, where a 100 billion dollar note was just printed.

Bubbles are unstable and democrats long for the Clinton era boom, which occured during a bubble. In fact, the longest economic expansion was the Bush Sr./Clinton expansion- during which a stock bubble occured. Thus the Clinton economy was unstable, but so are all economies, as the end of every economic expansion is a recession.

Now your just making up crap! "Law of Cycles" indeed! They have never been able to explain or predict economic cycles, oh economist have tried but to no avail. Even their supercomputer models have no more that a 50%-50% probability of being accurate and that statistically is no more than chance... throwing a dart at a dart board has the same degree of probability.

Ron.j @ 63:

Gramm’s “Deregulation” of the energy markets and the Commodities Futures Modernization Act directly opened the door to:

-------------

What did regulation of energy markets open the door to? There is always another side to the coin. A government manipulated market is also corrected, just as a free market is.

Yes there is another side to the coin and regulation of the commodities market were part of the "firewall" that was put in after the great Depression it led to what economist call "The Golden Age of Capitalism." The long stable period that had the fastest rate of GDP growth in our economic history... the years between 1945 and 1972.

As I said before "Triangulating Billy Clinton" played a role in this mess as I pointed out above but the "deregulation" and "Free trade" bullshit were ushered in by Ronald Reagan and the GOP.

Phil Gramm and the "K Street" crowd did the heavy lifting in congresss:

"Later in his Senate career, Gramm spearheaded efforts to pass banking reform laws, including the landmark Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, which modernized Depression-era laws separating banking, insurance and brokerage activities. Between 1995 and 2000 Gramm, who was the chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, received $1,000,914 in campaign contributions from the Securities & Investment industry.[1]"

"Gramm was one of five co-sponsors of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000[3]. One provision of the bill was referred to as the "Enron loophole" because Gramm drafted it in cooperation with lobbyists for Enron Corporation. Critics blame the provision for permitting the Enron scandal to occur.[4] At the time, Gramm's wife was on Enron's board of directors."

Gramm's "Deregulation" of the energy markets and the Commodities Futures Modernization Act directly opened the door to:

Enron, Tyco, Global Crossings, the rape of California in Enron’s constructed “energy crisis” and now… the “Subprime mortgage meltdown”, Bear Stearns failure, IndyMac’s failure…. and the speculation that caused the spike in oil prices and gas hikes!

Now your just making up crap! “Law of Cycles” indeed! They have never been able to explain or predict economic cycles, oh economist have tried but to no avail. Even their supercomputer models have no more that a 50%-50% probability of being accurate and that statistically is no more than chance… throwing a dart at a dart board has the same degree of probability.

----------------

The law of cycles does not explain the details of what occurs during a cycle, that is determined by the actions of people. The actions of people are predictable, however. There is not one cycle, but multiple time frame cycles, in phasing and out phasing with each other. sometimes a cycle is left justified, peaks early and sometimes it is right justified, peaks late.

The 1929 Dow , 1989 Nikkei and 1999 Nasdaq bubbles all peaked within 4 months of the end of their decade. The 10 year cycle peaks in year 9.

Ron.j @ 71:

What did regulation of energy markets open the door to? There is always another side to the coin. A government manipulated market is also corrected, just as a free market is.

Yes there is another side to the coin and regulation of the commodities market were part of the “firewall” that was put in after the great Depression it led to what economist call “The Golden Age of Capitalism.” The long stable period that had the fastest rate of GDP growth in our economic history… the years between 1945 and 1972.

------------

1945- that is long after the bottom of The Great Depression. Of coarse GDP growth was strong, after so much of the industrial capacity of the rest of the world was destroyed. That has nothing to do with regulation.

China is now undergoing its greatest GDP growth ever, as it is now manufacturer to the world.

Those regulations of the Banking, Brokerages, and Commodities Futures market set the stage for the longest running stable expansion of the GDP in history.

When Phil Gramm and the GOP pulled them out it gave us:

Enron, Tyco, Global Crossings, the rape of California in Enron’s constructed “energy crisis” and now… the “Subprime mortgage meltdown”, Bear Stearns failure, IndyMac’s failure…. and the speculation that caused the spike in oil prices and gas hikes!

And to borrow a phrase from Reagan... there you go again with your bullshit about China. What does China think about our current GOP born economic mess?

Booming, China Faults U.S. Policy on the Economy

Excerpt:

Chinese officials are expressing their disdain in forums around the world. Last month, Liu Mingkang, the chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, delivered a lecture at the British Museum in London in which he blamed the American government for the subprime mortgage crisis that came close to freezing Western debt markets and required extensive intervention by the Federal Reserve. The turmoil, he said, was “counteracting the course of global civilization.”

“Does moneymaking or doing business justify the regulators in ignoring their duty for prudential supervision and their job of preventing misbehavior?” he said.

One of Mr. Liu’s colleagues, Liao Min, told the newspaper The Financial Times in late May that the “Western consensus on the relation between the market and the government should be reviewed.”

“In practice, they tend to overestimate the power of the market and overlook the regulatory role of the government, and this warped conception is at the root of the subprime crisis,” said Mr. Liao, director general of the commission.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/world/asia/17china.html?_r=1&hp=&pagew...

So Again... your BS about cycles and deregulation are exactly that Bullshit... Your so called understanding of economics won't even fill a thimble half full!