How Greenspan Went Wrong--and How to Make It Right - Forbes.com

Alan Greenspan allowed the overheating of the housing market. He wanted to help the economy, so he lowered interest rates again and again. This induces inflation and pushed the US dollar lower. Bernake followed the weak dollar push and allowed the price of oil to climb to the stratosphere.

Steve Forbes sums it up: Greenspan wasn't satisfied with his powerful job; he played God.

How It Went Wrong--and How to Make It Right - Forbes.com:

The chief rap against Greenspan is that he loosened money too much after the high-tech bubble burst in 2000--01 and kept it loose even when the economy began to recover vigorously in 2003. The former chairman has also been criticized for the Fed's failure to crack down on growing abuses in the mortgage lending market.

... This is a misbegotten view of what central banking's main mission should be. The Federal Reserve should have two key tasks--and only two: preserving the integrity of the dollar and dealing vigorously with financial panics to limit unnecessary damage.

Greenspan's woes came about precisely because he lost sight of the Fed's prime job: ensuring a stable dollar. In the late 1990s Greenspan inadvertently tightened up. The most sensitive barometer of market mistakes is gold. During that time the yellow metal plunged to a low of $250 an ounce. Other commodities crashed, with oil dropping to nearly $10 a barrel. For a time the dollar became too dear, which contributed to the 2000--01 recession. When it became clear--just before George W. Bush was sworn in as President on Jan. 20, 2001--that the economy was skidding, Greenspan realized his mistake and started to reverse gears.

But he stayed too easy, even when the economy was back on track. In 2004 gold began to surge well above its 12-year average, and oil began its long, rapid ascent, as did all other commodities. The dollar weakened not only against gold but also against other currencies, such as the yen, the Swiss franc and the pound. With money easy, the already buoyant U.S. housing market began to go berserk as lending standards started to decline precipitously.

See also: Greenspan's Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve, by William A. Fleckenstein with Frederick Sheehan. Other sources: Robert Campbell; Inside Mortgage Finance.

Burma/Myanmar government refuses aid workers

The government of Burma only cares about its control of its country. It is refusing workers who bring aid and has confiscated aid brought to the country.

UN halts aid to Myanmar after junta seizes supplies:
YANGON, Myanmar (AP)—The United Nations blasted Myanmar's military government Friday, saying its refusal to let in foreign aid workers to help victims of a devastating cyclone was "unprecedented" in the history of humanitarian work.

While the junta dithered and appeared overwhelmed by last Saturday's disaster, more than 1 million homeless people waited for food, shelter and medicine. Many crammed into Buddhist monasteries or just camped out in the open.

Entire villages were submerged in the worst-hit Irrawaddy delta, with bodies floating in salty water and children ripped from their parents' arms. At least 62,000 people are dead or missing, state media reported, and aid groups warned that thousands of children may have been orphaned and the area is on the verge of a medical disaster.

... "Believe me the government will not allow outsiders to go into the devastated area. The government only cares about its own stability. They don't care about the plight of the people," said Yangon food shop owner Joseph Kyaw, one of many residents angry at the regime for doing little to help them recover from the storm's destruction.

Great Radio - Rush channeling Clinton - Put yourself in my shoes

Rush channeled what poor Bill Clinton is thinking in a monologue today. It is the King at his best. It is so good that competitor talk-show host Hugh Hewitt played it today. You can read it at the link, but to listen to the audio requires a paid subscription to Rush's web site.

What Bill Clinton Was Thinking :
RUSH: I received an e-mail, ladies and gentlemen, during the break. "Rush, your monologue to women in the last hour was funny as hell. It was very brilliant. But I think you're misunderstanding Bill Clinton standing behind his wife frowning and looking bored. Could you try to look at it from his perspective?" And that's all the e-mail said. So I got to thinking about that: What would Bill Clinton say if he'd heard my monologue to women? Because that e-mail got me to thinking. It might go something like this: (doing extended Clinton impression)

"Hey? Hey, Limbaugh! I heard that monologue that you did to women, talking about me sitting back there looking all depressed and down in the dumps, like I had sunburn and so forth. Come on, Rush! You're a guy. You gotta look at it from my perspective. Where did I come from? I came from the swamps. I came from nothing. I mean, I came from poor people. Nothing, nothing. Arkansas, Limbaugh, I came from -- and I rose up. I rose up to become president of the U-nited States of America. I did. I overcame obstacles like you can't believe.

"'She stood by her man,' everybody is saying, because she stood by me. What about me? You think I didn't stand by her? How many guys -- you included, Limbaugh -- how many of you ditched your first wives? How many of you guys ditched your second wives? You know my wife sounds just like your first wife and second wife probably put together, but I -- I -- stuck in there. And look what's happened to me? I presided over one of the greatest periods of prosperity and peace the world has known! I got my daughter out there. My daughter! My daughter is saying my wife will be a better president than I could be, and I can't say anything about that, Limbaugh. I can't say anything about it. My daughter is out there disrespecting me, and I gotta sit there and smile? You want me to smile standing behind those two? You want me to stand there behind a loser who couldn't run a smart campaign if her life depended on it?

"She had no plan after February 5th, Limbaugh! Do you understand that? She thought she was going to have to it wrapped up by February 5th. She had no plan! That's why she's in this sit'ation. I'm supposed to stand back there and I'm supposed to smile.? Look at me! I've lost all my black friends. I was 'the first black president.' I have to sit here and I have to listen as this rookie out of Chicago gets to be the first black president. Everybody knows I was. This guy is the biggest lightweight I have run into. I'm called a racist! I was the first black president. I had Maya Angelou do that poem, 'A River, A Rock, A Tree,' at my inauguration; and now Oprah is running around throwing birthday parties with Maya Angelou and not inviting me. My God, Limbaugh, you have no clue what this is like! I'm supposed to sit there and listen to my daughter insult me by saying my presidency would be nothing compared to my wife's? I'm supposed to stand behind her, and I'm supposed to look happy?

"Here's another thing, Limbaugh. I bet you haven't thought of this. There have been 43 presidents of the United States. Forty-three. And I, I'm the first damn one of them whose wife wanted the damn job, too; and I gotta sit there and act like, 'Whoa, that's great, honey! What can I do to help you?' This woman has been trying to take over every day of my life! Everything I've done she tried to take over. She's held everything that every other husband does over my head and demanded payback for it. I'm supposed... I get shipped out into the dregs of North Carolina! You saw me. They had me in the back porches in the sticks talking to 20 people at a time. I'm supposed to help her win North Carolina? All this time I'm being called a racist. You know how humiliating it was, Limbaugh? You commented on this. I know you know. I was dispatched to someplace called Whiteville, North Carolina, in the midst of this campaign -- and my wife doesn't even have the courage.

"She may thank me up there, but she doesn't talk about how great I am. She praises her mother; she praises Chelsea. You saw that picture Drudge had up on his site of Chelsea. She can't draw a crowd. What did she have, 20 people there? I can outdraw my daughter any time, but I am the one...that's getting all the grief here? And you expect me...? I mean, I've done more for women -- I've done more women -- than Hillary could ever think of doing; and I'm supposed to sit there and act happy? I swear! People have lost their ability to understand how tough it has been for me. All that scandal stuff that wrecked my presidency, what was it? You think that was my fault? That scandal stuff, you think that was my fault? Hillary's billing records show up on my watch in the White House in the Map Room, and that somehow is my fault? Hillary wants to fire everybody in the travel office. Hell, I don't know what's going on in there!

"I'm president. I haven't got time for that kind of mundane stuff. She's firing everybody in the travel office. Real estate deals? She was always so obsessed with money, Limbaugh, you can't believe it. That Whitewater deal? She messed around with the McDougals. All that was about getting rich quick -- and I let her have health care. I let her do whatever she wanted with health care, and she botched it; and she's the reason that we lost the House in 1994! It wasn't me. And I'm supposed stand behind her and act like I'm happy I'm standing behind a loser? You can sit here and you can talk to these women all you want. Let me give you my perspective on this, Limbaugh. You're me. You're president of the United States, surrounded by all kinds of women -- women of great passion. So on one hand I got women of great passion; on the other hand my wife. What would you do? Now, you know, guys out there understand what I'm going through. They understand what I'm talking about.

"But I really resented that monologue you did talking about how all these liberal guys are cheating on Hillary. It's up to her to do something on her own for once, isn't it? Limbaugh, do you know how embarrassing it is for me to understand that you did more for her in this campaign than I could do? That bothers me more than you will ever know. If they'd have let me have my way I could have taken Obama out of this in the first week; I could have done it even before Jeremiah Wright showed up. Certainly after Jeremiah Wright showed up I could have handled this. But noooo, no! They didn't want me anywhere near it. Ickes, Wolfson, all these people -- people I kicked out of my administration -- are a bunch of hacks. This is the thanks I get. If it hadn't been for me being elected president, my wife... If it weren't for my last name that she has, she wouldn't be known by anybody in this country, and I gotta sit here and you tell me I'm supposed to be happy standing behind a lo-ser?

"Now, where in the hell were we last night? We've been traveling so much, I don't even know. (sigh) These women out there, they used to have me in their dreams. You remember all those stories about the power is "crackling in my jeans"? You remember all that? And now I've become a joke! I'm a laughingstock. And now you even out there. You tell people I hit on your date. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Hit on your date in the Kobe Club in New York. Ha-ha, you wish Limbaugh you wish you dated somebody I cared enough about to be able to do that. These women, they're mad, and they're bitter. They used to love me! They used to love me. They used to crave me. They used to crave about me. They used to promise me that they would give Lewinskys in exchange for keeping abortion legal, and now they want to abort me. You put yourself in my shoes."

Jerry Yang's Foolish "Victory" at Yahoo

Yahoo's rejection of the bid by Microsoft to buy it for $45 billion is the dumbest business deal of this year. Jerry Yang was said to have won by rejecting Microsoft. He lost. He cannot make his company have the value that Microsoft was offering - 62% premium on its market value. He was ahead 62%; he had won already. But he chose defeat instead.

Holman Jenkins describes the mess: Business World - WSJ.com:

Congratulations to Steve Ballmer. Not many CEOs would have the nerve – humility, cold-bloodedness, whatever – to float a gotta-have takeover offer, then back away over the difference between $33 and $37 a share.

Not many CEOs would have been willing nakedly to advertise strategic vulnerability and faulty execution vis-a-vis a rival like Google, then fail to consummate the deal marketed to investors as the remedy for that vulnerability and faulty execution.

Even more so because of Mr. Ballmer's Murdochian approach: He came at Yahoo with a rich 62% premium designed to foreclose a rival suitor and confront the Yahoo board with a choice of accepting Microsoft's terms or serving up a big ugly stock price drop to Yahoo's suffering shareholders. By laying such a dramatic premium on the table, he also sent a message to his own Microsoft shareholders that said: "This is the only way I see forward."

But Mr. Ballmer didn't count on Jerry Yang, whose idea of what his company was worth became inflated by the perception that Microsoft needed it so much. When Mr. Yang said Microsoft's offer "undervalued" Yahoo, he meant it underestimated Yahoo's value to Microsoft, not to anybody else.

Read on at the original.

And Fake Steve Jobs does it with drama.

Says here that Jerry Yang is facing a shareholder rebellion and possible lawsuits for failing to make a deal with the Borg. Money quote: "Disillusioned shareholders are bound to question whether the rejection of Microsoft's sweetened offer was driven more by emotion and ego than sound business sense."

Um, yes they are. And for good reason. FWIW, Jerry called me last night. Crying. He'd been on the phone getting screamed at by Wall Street people. And by Yahoo employees who apparently are being really abusive. In men's rooms all over the Yahoo campus a nasty new drawing is popping up, depicting Jerry Yang with his tongue hanging out, his legs pulled up and both thumbs firmly positioned in his ass.

Jerry's like, Steve, dude, I know I can turn this company around. I just need a little more time. I've got it all mapped out. First we'll do another 100-day review period to review our operations and re-review the review we did a few months ago; then we'll have a 100-day listening period; then a 100-day period to digest what we've heard when we're listening and incorporate that data into the data we gathered during our review; then a 100-day period to develop a new strategy; then a 100-day period to explain the new strategy to employees; then a 100-day period to reorg the company and start rolling out the foundations of the new strategy to maximize shareholder value and pursue ways to better leverage our opportunities in the still very young online advertising market where we continue to believe we are well-positioned with a unique strategy; then a 100-day period to finish the reorg and roll out the second half of the new strategy. I mean it's pretty simple stuff."

I'm like, Jerry, dude, I'm not very good at math and to be honest I kind of lost track of what you were saying because I put down the phone at one point so I could check myself out in the mirror, but I think that plan is going to take something like fifteen years, isn't it?

Hypocrisy Alert - If gas guzzlers are so evil, why does Obama keep - Update riding in them?

If gas guzzlers are so evil, why does Obama keep riding in them?

Michelle Malkin

There he goes again. Barack Obama is lambasting Detroit’s Big 3 automakers again for manufacturing SUVs. He attacked the car companies over the weekend for making the “mistake” of investing in SUVs and large trucks instead of producing more fuel-efficient vehicles. Obama also bragged about his Big 3- bashing speech a year ago that delivered “the kind of truth-telling we need from the next president.”

A truth-telling reminder of the gas-guzzling car Obama himself was driving before eco-hypocrisy caught up with him:

His own car: Chrysler 300C
Output: 340 hp, 390 lb-ft
EPA fuel economy, city/highway: 17/25 (17/24 AWD)

His fancy wheels got less than the standard 27 mpg that he now whines is too low.

After his do-as-i-say-ism was exposed, he traded in his beast for a Ford Escape Hybrid.

But on the campaign trail, to this day, it’s still the bigger the better. [photo of Him getting into a shiny black monster SUV]

Obama’s eco-hypocrisy emission standard: High.

Update

The London Daily Mail documents many more eco-hypocrites:

- John Travolts owns 5 jets.
- Sting travels with a retinue of 750 people.
- Chris Martin of Coldplay brags about low-impact tours. But he flies home and back multiple times during one "tour."
- Leonardo DiCaprio the Learjet liberal, flies "as much as possible on commercial," which is infrequently.
- Brad and Angelina criss-cross the country in their private jets.
- Barbra Streisand tells us to cut down on laundry. She flies on private jets.
- Madonna is really trying. Her carbon footprint is 100 times the average Brit.
- Prince Charles brought 14 people with him when he traveled to the US to accept an environmental award. And his sons travel the UK in military Chinook helicopters.

Taxes to slow the economy - Worked for Pres. Jimmy

It failed before; it retired President Jimmy. So let's try it again.

If you want to cause less of something you tax it to death. Do we want to kill oil - exploration, production, transportation, retailing? Then tax it. Amity Shales tells us the problems with the "windfall profits tax" on big, bad oil companies.

Bloomberg

Not Much Revenue

The first is that such taxes tend to yield disappointing revenue. Back in 1980, lawmakers were riled over the news of Arab Light hitting $36 a barrel, up from just $14 in 1978.

Congress, the world's worst economic forecaster, began to envision an endless increase in the price of oil and an endless gusher of revenue. Lawmakers imposed a levy of as much as 70 percent based on a per-barrel increase over a designated base price.
Carter wasn't necessarily comfortable with the recent ending of price controls. And he knew that Mobil Oil Corp. and other oil companies were excited about future discoveries.

Now he consoled himself with the thought that this windfall tax would take the profit of such discoveries from such irritating petrocrats.
Of course, oil prices didn't surge -- in fact, they dropped. There was something at work that lawmakers hadn't thought of. The oil-price increases had been partly a monetary event, reflecting the inflation that the new Federal Reserve Chairman, Paul Volcker, was then vanquishing.

Quiet Death

Some would argue that inflation plays the same role in goosing commodity futures prices today. By 1986 oil prices had collapsed. Disappointing windfall tax revenue reflected that.

At the Cato Institute, authors Jerry Taylor and Peter van Doren reckon that the windfall profits tax generated $40 billion or so, instead of the $175 billion once projected. By 1988, embarrassed lawmakers allowed the tax to die a quiet death.

But in the course of its life, the tax did plenty of damage. As a Congressional Budget Office paper from 1983 pointed out, the levy early on proved itself an administrative nightmare since it effectively required the collection of ``detailed information on each individual oil-producing property in the United States.''

What's more, the tax so depressed business activity that it had an effect on the general economy.

Experts Baffled

But in 1980 the economy's refusal to recover was baffling some economists. One of their conclusions, published in the New York Times, was that the windfall-profits tax was being passed along to consumers, reducing disposable income and so demand. In other words, it was doing the opposite of what the tax-rebate checks are supposed to be doing this month and next.

Specifically, the Windfall Tax made investment and production at domestic oil companies more expensive. Mobil was right. You needed incentives to want to drill. That deterrent slowed the sort of research that might have made energy less expensive earlier.

Satellite Indicates 23-Year Global Cooling

Warming? No. Cooling. It's the science, Albert Gore, Jr. Look at the data.

CFP: New Jason Satellite Indicates 23-Year Global Cooling:

Now it’s not just the sunspots that predict a 23-year global cooling. The new Jason oceanographic satellite shows that 2007 was a “cool” La Nina year—but Jason also says something more important is at work: The much larger and more persistent Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has turned into its cool phase, telling us to expect moderately lower global temperatures until 2030 or so.

For the past century at least, global temperatures have tended to mirror the 20-to 30-year warmings and coolings of the north-central Pacific Ocean. We don’t know just why, but the pattern of the last century is clear: the earth warmed from about 1915 to1940, while the PDO was also warming (1925 to 46). The earth cooled from 1940 to 1975, while the PDO was cooling (1946 to 1977). The strong global warming from 1976 to 1998 was accompanied by a strong and almost-constant warming of the north-central Pacific. Ancient tree rings in Baja California and Mexico show there have been 11 such PDO shifts since 1650, averaging 23 years on length.

Cut the cruelest tax

The cruelest tax of all is the property tax. It's the equivalent to taxing the air we breathe. You can't live in your home without paying hundreds per month.

Floyd Brown is doing something about it and needs help.

Tax Fight:
Save your home. Cut property taxes now!

The League of Washington Taxpayers has sponsored
Initiative 1030 which will cut your property taxes by
30 percent beginning in 2009.

No starvation for fuel, Al

Demon ethanol, an icon of the left called it, has raised the prices of corn, rice and other staple grains. It bothers us Americans. But in third-world countries it is breaking people. There have been huge price increases that caused riots in Haiti, protests in the Philippines, and other countries.

But the intent is to help the environment. Albert Gore, Jr., has pure motives. How is it going? Not well.

American Thinker Blog:

Big science is starting to agree that ethanol production is hurting, not helping the environment. According to an article in today’s Washington Post by Steven Mufson entitled “Global Food Crisis; Siphoning Off Corn to Fuel Our Cars ”

“Although ethanol was once promoted as a way to slow climate change, a study published in Science magazine Feb. 29 concluded that greenhouse-gas emissions from corn and even cellulosic ethanol "exceed or match those from fossil fuels and therefore produce no greenhouse benefits." By encouraging an expansion of acreage, the study added, the use of U.S. cropland for ethanol could make climate conditions dramatically worse. And the runoff from increased use of fertilizers on expanded acreage would compound damage to waterways all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.” [Emphasis added]

SCIENCE MAGAZINE is the official publication of the American Association of the Advancement of Science, www.aaas.org, a peer-reviewed academic journal with very high scientific prestige equivalent to NATURE, so Al Gore cannot claim it is under the control of the evil oil industry.