You Can't Blame The President For The Economy: George II

The New Yorker The Financial Page Going for Broke by James Surowiecki April 7, 2008 ... a law that Congress passed in 2005 which has made it more difficult for people to write off their debts. Filing for bankruptcy has become much more expensive. More important, while lower-income people can still declare Chapter 7, which takes away your assets but then discharges your debts, most middle- and higher-income people now have to declare Chapter 13. That means they have to pay their creditors monthly for five years before they’re free. Historically, the U.S. has treated debtors leniently. But the credit-card industry, which was the driving force behind the new law, insisted that tolerance had caused a bankruptcy “crisis”: the number of bankruptcies in the U.S. quintupled between 1980 and 2003. Irresponsible debtors, the argument went, were buying plasma TVs and fancy vacations and then declaring bankruptcy to escape their debts. And they were being supported by the rest of us, who had to pay higher interest rates and fees on our credit cards to cover credit-card companies’ billions in annual write-offs. Cracking down on those who “abused the bankruptcy laws,” President Bush said, would therefore “make credit more affordable.” And we’d all be better off. So are we? That depends on your perspective. The law did slash the number of bankruptcies—they fell by sixty-two per cent between 2004 and 2006. And the credit-card companies should be happy—their profits rose thirty per cent between 2005 and 2007. But the law hasn’t done much for anyone else. Interest rates and credit-card fees have not fallen as promised. And for debtors life has become significantly harder: many can’t afford bankruptcy—strangely enough, it’s possible to be too poor to pay the filing fees—and many others can’t qualify. These people will either spend the next five years having their paychecks garnished or simply muddle along, avoiding debt collectors and accumulating huge interest and late fees on their credit cards. This king, George II, has conspired and complotted to destroy the well-being of the citizens of this country. He has ignored those laws passed by Congress for our relief, and he has enforced those which result in our detriment. Who is calling for Revolution? Our lives are being undermined, sapped, and destroyed by the absolutism of George II: Globe Investor http://www.globeinvestor.com/servlet/story/GAM.20080328.RCAPITALISM28/GIStory/ Even on Wall Street, capitalism takes a hit Socialist-style Fed or financial saviour? BARRIE MCKENNA ...Guaranteeing Bear Stearns' portfolio of troubled investments sets a bad precedent by transferring potential losses from the market to taxpayers, complained Allan Meltzer, a professor of political economy at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University. "I do not believe the current system can remain if the bankers make the profits and the taxpayers share the losses." Others, however, said Mr. Bernanke may have saved the U.S. financial system from the cascading series of failures that marked the Great Depression of the 1930s. "Bernanke may very well turn out to be a hero here, when everything is said and done and the recovery comes," Jeremy Siegel, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton business school in Philadelphia, told the school's online magazine. Of course Bernanke is a hero. However, this does not change the fact that the Capitalist system in the USA has just been transformed into a new form of Socialism, implying thereby that the Capitalist system was just as faulty and malicious as the Socialists have been saying all along. And, a good deal of blame may be laid to the Republican Party and the Lobbyists for various parts of the financial sector. Greed makes fools of the wisest!