Palin showing she's a good Limbaugh Republikan. Fighting hard to see that Ombama and Dems fail
to fix this Republican Deregulation Depression.
The American Dream Going Down...(thank you, Phil Gramm)
Phil Gramm was the sponsor of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act which legalized Credit Default Swaps - and made them UNREGULATED. CDSs by supposedly making high return Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) safe by insuring the investor against default loss produced an exploding demand for sub-prime loans driving Predatory lenders to beat the bushes for anybody they could sign up to a subprime loan(and falsifying loan applications to get the loan approved). The lenders then flipped the mortgages bundled into CDOs.
Senator Gramm couldn't get the bill out of committee so he slipped it in as rider (much like an ear-mark) to the Omnibus Spending Bill 2000 - a must pass (to keep the Government running) bill (11,000 pages long) which was passed in the final days/hours of the Clinton administration. Virtually nobody in Congress even knew they were voting on a bill which would enable the unregulated trade in a financial derivative that Warren buffet called "financial weapons of mass destruction" (in 2003!).
Derivatives are financial instruments that allow investors to speculate on the future price of, for example, commodities or shares - without buying the underlying investment.
Derivatives generate reported earnings that are often wildly overstated and based on estimates whose inaccuracy may not be exposed for many years.
Outstanding derivatives contracts - excluding those traded on exchanges such as the International Petroleum Exchange - are worth close to $85 trillion, according to the International Swaps and Derivatives Association.
Some derivatives contracts, Mr Buffett says, appear to have been devised by "madmen".
He warns that derivatives can push companies onto a "spiral that can lead to a corporate meltdown", like the demise of the notorious hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998.
Phil Gramm observed in the fall of 2008 that "America is suffering from a mental recession.".