(sorry I have been away. had time for awhile but nothing good to write about.)
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke
The latest banking crisis is a good moment however, to point things out.
When Senator Chucky wrote his letter and caused the third largest bank failure in history, I think liberals everywhere took a moment to pause. And smile.
Once again, it was an opportunity to point out the failure of the free market and capitalism. They don’t like it very much, today. The average Democrat. It’s inconvenient. It doesnt respond to threats or intimidation. It only responds to what the people want. Back to that later.
Granted, that has its downside. We might get what we asked for and it doesn’t feel so good afterwards, but that IS what we wanted.
Banks are a case in point. Now, I work for a firm that services hundreds of small banks. Hundreds. Did you know that there are over 2,400 banks, ballpark, in the United States? I didn’t. I had no idea. B of A, WaMu, Wells Fargo, Chase… I could name a bunch. But 2,400. Most are small, community banks that service local areas. Now I can name over a hundred. Community Bank of Orange City, People Bank of LaFollette, and on and on…
I can tell you that NONE of the small banks are the LEAST bit fazed by the events unfolding. They are building their websites and ramping up their online banking features as fast as ever. They are capitalized differently, their risks minimized… they have less to lose but less makes you more cautious. I dont understand it all, but I know they are not panicked. And neither are THEIR customers.
These George Bailey institutions deserve a moments thought. We, as a society, choose to put MOST of our money into large banking institutions, and set ourselves up for this very problem to occur. And when we do, (excuse me, time to get out my sack of liberal Non Sequiturs) … out come the doomsayers who want the entire country to be run like the DMV.
“Either you nationalize the banks now or you nationalize the mortgages. When you have a systemic financial crisis, there is always a government bailout.” http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a07mKRPm4Lp8
Or,
“When it works, nothing is better at creating an endless variety of reality TV shows than free market capitalism. But when it doesn’t, it isn’t just that extra brand of clear dishwashing liquid that goes away. Businesses fold. Banks foreclose. People starve. And no one can stop it.” http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/15520
No matter where I began to look, the chattering mob was nipping at the heels of the engine of America. :We don’t want risk! We don’t want loss! We don’t want challenge! We want everything as it is and for it never to be anything else!
Oh really? People starve? In America? Prove it. Show me a family in poverty with two color televisions and a car outside that cant afford a Big Mac. People starve in America because they have other priorities and government will do nothing to help THAT. What they have goes in their arm or up their nose and then they starve.
Nowhere do I hear the voice of “Gee, it happened before and it keeps happening. Why don’t we stop bailing them out?” See, if the banks KNEW they weren’t going to be bailed out, they wouldn’t feel free to engage in risky behavior. And those who demanded loans be made to people who couldn’t pay them back would be told to shut up. And the future would be remarkably stabler without a mattress to fall on. Instead, the insanity of liberalism has been upped a notch from “Do the same thing over and over again! to: Do the same thing, only do MORE of it this time!”
I’m taking my money out of US Bank today, by the way, and putting it in my local credit union.
The irony, and the hypocrisy, of this whole mess is that many of the same people who cry “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” are the same people who have no problem with the government stepping in and bailing out these corporations.
If our free market system is as sacred, as sacrosanct, as those folks say it is, then lets’s let the Bear Stearns and the IndyMacs and the Fannie Maes succeed or fail on their own terms.
I have a bank and a credit union. I find the credit union a bit more inconvenient, but my bank has strange policies, like counting debits before credits. What’s up with that? Sure, they waived the fee this time, but what about next time? So the next time anyone pays their taxes, they should remember that they’re paying for the bailout a second time.
SMS
Whats the diff, the big bank and the small bank and the credit union are all members of the same club.
If you want to diversify for safety, then put some of your dollars in Yen and Euro’s and some into gold and silver. And I don’t mean intangibles. And of course food, long term food like MRE’s.
Bank wise, I like Farmers & Merchants bank.
The banking system has been our biggest monopoly ever since the creation of the Federal Reserve System. Banks like Indy don’t fail as they are taken over and merged, sold or liquidated just as the bad apples (the ones that don’t follow the rules) are removed from any organization. Only crooks lose money in banking as they eventually get overly greedy.
*Guess nobody has seen Al Pacino in “Scarface”! The best story on bad banks in South Florida and on to Panama….Remember Manuel Noriega….he was
“dry cleaning the CIA Drug Money”…but got greedy. George the First had to go into Panama and re-take all those Indy banks and give them back to Citibank and the big boyz!