Market Week

In honor of that hardcore businesswoman from California....Nancy Pelosi. (What, you thought I meant Carly Fiorina or Meg Whitman?  C'mon, they're both headed to the public sector, and just might be passing Granny Rictus McBotox in the opposite direction - God spare her "headed for the George McGovern School Of First-Hand Economics For Liberal Dummies" soul)

***American economic competitiveness is sliding - three guesses as to why, and two of them will be a waste of oxygen:

The United States now ranks fourth among all nations in competitiveness, down from first just two years ago. Not surprisingly, it’s government — not business — that’s to blame. …

Why did we lose our spot at the top? Broadly speaking, the Geneva-based forum report cites “a weakening of the United States’ public and private institutions, as well as lingering concerns about the state of its financial markets.”

The group stressed that the U.S. remains innovative with a flexible labor market and outstanding higher education. But its soaring deficits, burgeoning debts and declining public confidence in the nation’s leaders and businesses are dragging it down. Finding a way to end the massive federal stimulus of the last two years will help boost U.S. competitiveness, the WEF also said.

The report doesn’t come right out and say it, but it might as well: Not only is Obamanomics not working, it’s doing material damage to America’s economic well-being.

In a possibly related story, the United States now has the fortieth best record on property rights of any country on the planet (as in thirty-nine countries protect private property rights better than we do).  We now rank on this economic liberty scale behind such bastions of capitalism as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Gambia, and COMMUNIST CHINA.

Which, I guess, means that Tom Friedman's dreams are coming true.

***Democrat Financial Logic Bombs today, Democrat Financial Logic Bombs for-EVAH!:

At around the same time this program went into effect, the New York Times did a piece on a small program Fannie Mae is implementing through state housing finance agencies, which have been crippled by the recession. It’s called Affordable Advantage, and it allows first-time home buyers in four states (Massachusetts, Minnesota, Idaho and Wisconsin) to get essentially no-money-down loans that are then sold to Fannie Mae. It requires $1000.00 down, but the couple profiled in the piece received a grant, and ended up paying just sixty-seven cents for a $115,000 home.

The Fannie Mae program requires a minimum credit score of 680 (720 in Massachusetts) and the buyer must live in the home. All loans are thirty-year fixed. The arguments for the program are persuasive: It wasn’t the no-money-down loans themselves that fueled the housing crash, it was the poor underwriting. These loans are very strictly underwritten. Adjustable rate loans were the primary drivers of default, while these loans are fixed.

This rationalizing is akin to assuring ocean liner passengers in 1912 that another Titanic-like disaster can never happen again because White Star Lines will now be offering free swimming lessons.  Fannie can rearrange the deck chairs all it wants, but all the basic elements of another 2008 crash are present: No money down, government grants, bilking homebuyers into more house than they can afford, selling the bad paper to Fannie, which will securitize it and spread another malignant wave of financial cancer throughout the economy.  "Money for nothing and chicks for free."

After the disaster Obamanomics has made of this economy, it's going to take an even bigger crisis for the Left to exploit themselves back to the power they currently enjoy.  "Small programs" like this show they're already hard at work laying that destructive foundation.

***Does a story like this even NEED a preface anymore?:

Despite coming under daily assault from Republicans over spending, the Obama administration is pushing a $20 billion-plus pre-election shopping list on its Democratic allies in Congress as they prepare must-pass legislation to prevent a government shutdown next month.

Republicans are protesting the spending requests, which include $1.9 billion for grants to better-performing schools, financial help for the Postal Service and more than $4 billion requested by the administration to finance settlements of long-standing lawsuits against the government.

A tally by Republicans puts the price tag of the Obama requests at more than $20 billion, including $5.7 billion to prevent shortfalls in the popular Pell Grant program next year and permit the cash-strapped Postal Service to delay a scheduled $5.5 billion payment into a health care fund for retirees and use the money to stay afloat.

The wish list appears to be an overreach given political anxiety among Democrats over spending with midterm elections to determine whether they maintain control of Congress just seven weeks away. Representative Tom Latham, R-IA4, predicted that the White House would get relatively little of what it’s seeking.

Anybody still think The One is going to follow in Bill Clinton's triangulating footsteps the next two years?  No, my friends, he's gonna keep pushing ruinious spending and calamitous regulating and disastrous nationalizing because that's his religion and that's what he blindly believes in.  And each passing day he does so, especially after the hellacious blowout coming on November 2nd, he'll render himself less and less relevant because the scattered Donk survivors of the midterm cataclysm will carry that political anxiety over spending with them for a long, long time to come.  All he'll have is his veto power, which he will use constantly, making himself an easy Republican caricature as the "obstructionist" still stubbornly "defying the will of the American people," which will make it all the more difficult to motivate minority Dems to rally around him when he forces the inevitable government shutdown showdown a year from now.  Only this time Barry O will be in the role of Newt Gingrich, and the crisis he tries to force and then blame on the GOP will instead be exploited against him.

It might even net him a primary challenger or two, because at some point the Democrat Party will have to separate itself from the Hopenchangenstein it loosed upon itself and America if it wants to remain a viable national political entity beyond the end of his fall.  The extreme Left will have no such luxury.

***You know what the risk for bloggers is in linking to any Reuters economics story?  It's become impossible to believe that they have a single reader left for their economics misreporting:

Consumer sentiment unexpectedly [?!?!?!?!] worsened in early September to its weakest level in more than a year, as distress over jobs and finances intensified among upper-income families, a survey released on Friday showed.

The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan’s preliminary September reading on the overall index on consumer sentiment came in at 66.6, down from 68.9 in August.

“Confidence edged downward in early September, as consumers judged prospects for the national economy less favorably,” the survey’s director Richard Curtin said in a statement.

The latest sentiment figure was the lowest since August 2009 and fell short of the median forecast of 70.0 among economists polled by Reuters.

I'll just glom a quote from Ensign Ed, because I can't muster the energy to gin up the appropriate level of slack-jawed incredulity:

Did they bother to read their previous report?  Reuters’ survey showed a prediction of 1.8% GDP growth in the third quarter and 2.7% GDP overall in 2010, with a prediction of even less growth in 2011 at 2.4%.  That range of growth means no real job creation, which means lasting unemployment and downward pressure on demand and sales, as well as continued trouble in the housing markets.  And they really expected consumer confidence to rise after making those predictions?

You know what's coming now, don't you?  "YES...THEY...DID!"  OF COURSE, they did.  Because they're as blindly barnacled to Marxism-Alinskyism as their "some kind of a god," and their creed CAN'T be wrong (no matter how many times it fails), and so the solution to all these "Bush/capitalist-caused problems" is more of the same.  In perpetuity.  FOR-EVAH.

Or, in the context of this post, just another manifestation of Red Barry's aforementioned pre-election shopping list foisted upon congressional Dems that can SEE its political radioactivity.

Ponder that as we close: a heretofore major "news" service is systematically destroying itself over the obstinate use of a single adverb, because they will not describe reality's divergence from Obamunism any other way.

At least after Reuters goes tits-up, they won't be around anymore to report their demise as "unexpected".