The American Spectator

Reader Mail

None of the Above

4.2.08 @ 12:01AM

(Page 2 of 4)

What a bunch of crap. Instead of talking about the Pastor, why do you not write about a real issue like the Bosnia affair which was memorized by Hillary and repeated on three different occasions. It is important because it showed how easy it was for her in front of a live audience to lie to the public. She has become a pathetic figure to say the least. By the way, I am a white man from Canada who cares about what the Americans have gone through during the past eight years of Bush-Cheney lies. Do you want this for another four years, or vote for someone who will bring back respectability throughout the world?
-- Roger

The only person or thing responsible for getting Barack Hussein Obama into hot water? C'mon. It's the same fellow whose face he washes and shaves daily.

In some way, he must be beside himself because of the UCC's intentions, which just keep public what he desires to conceal.

After all, Hillary had just hoisted herself with her Bosnian petard and remains hanging. His devotees in the MSM and a good chunk of the punditocracy had done all they could, and fairly successfully, to bury or ignore this tar baby to which he remains stuck. He'd even gotten another MSM free pass when he downsized the heat and hatefulness of Wright's remarks by insinuating, as he did recently in Greensboro, N.C., that they were just "stupid remarks." And there was that performance on ABC, with gushing The View ladies, where, with typical long-windedness, he appeared to be retreating even further away from those very few, so-called denunciations of Wright.

Still, it's sad and alarming to see the UCC denomination dive headfirst into this mess. You'd think the denominational leaders, regardless of their apparent left-leaning political bent, would see that they're volunteering for self-inflicted wounds and denomination-wide problems here.

Will this backfire for them and the denomination, just as Obama's evasiveness, if not outright prevarication, as well as absence of judgment and moral ambivalence and blindness continue to do so for him? How can it not?
-- C. Kenna Amos
Princeton, West Virginia

ROBBING FROM PETER TO PAY PAULSON
Re: Philip Klein's Depressed about Paulson:

Rothbard, in his book on the economic history of the U.S., reports that the Federal Reserve actually did substantially inflate the currency during the Depression, but private hoarding was a more powerful effect than Fed currency inflation, with the result that available currency contracted. Friedman's report about the Fed contracting the currency during the Depression was apparently incorrect.
-- Will Schueman

While Mr. Klein is sensible to question the sagacity of any appointee of George W. Bush, Mr. Paulson's advocacy of broadened regulatory authority for the Fed is not without merit. Despite the last two bubbles and the ongoing credit crisis, there has been much greater stability in our regulated financial markets than there was up until the Depression. Similarly, our recessions have become shorter and less severe. Mr. Paulson correctly notes that many recently-invented investment vehicles have become too complex to be understood by buyers and sellers alike. Certainly, if investors and issuers had thoroughly understood the risks attendant to securitized subprime mortgages, the credit crisis would have been much milder than to threaten our financial infrastructure. There still remains a minefield of hedge funds and derivatives that could explode without warning. What institution is better equipped to untangle these thorny technical problems than the Fed, which is staffed by some of the best economic minds in the world? I shudder to think what would happen if Congress took over.

I agree with Mr. Klein to the extent that the Fed has goofed a few times. But their mistakes have sometimes occurred in a vacuum of historical data and economic theory. The unforgivable mistakes they've made are the same as any made due to ideological prejudices. Alan Greenspan's philosophical adherence to the works of Ayn Rand belongs in the same ash heap of history as neoconservatism. At the moment, we need more technocrats and less ideologues.
-- Paul Dorell
Evanston, Illinois

I wasn't predisposed to go along with these "financial regulatory" reorganizations, though I was willing to listen for a while. Then a commentator mentioned these "reforms" would reorganize all these governing and regulating bodies, "just like the Department of Homeland Security." That blew it for me, then and there.
-- Robert Nowall
Cape Coral, Florida

Perhaps Mr. Klein could do me (and other readers insufficiently educated in the nuances of economics) a favor: explain why reducing leverage ratios are a bad thing. According to the NY Post, "(M)any brokers have been using $32 of leverage for every dollar of capital on their books..." That sounds grossly irresponsible to me. Am I wrong?
-- Arnold Ahlert
Boca Raton, Florida

In his article, "Depressed About Paulson," Philip Klein wrote, "Under Greenspan's leadership, the Fed slashed interest rates 13 times from January 2001 to June 2003, bringing the federal funds rate from 6.5 percent to 1 percent, where it stayed until mid-2004. By keeping rates so low for so long, the Fed helped push mortgage rates to their lowest levels since the Eisenhower era. That spurred stratospheric growth in housing prices and created the easy money environment that allowed banks to issue increasingly risky loans."

The Fed does not control long term (mortgage) rates. This assumption that many people have (that the Fed Funds rate somehow controls -- or even worse -- that it is synonymous with -- long term mortgage rates, is wrong. Mortgage rates are a product of market supply and demand (mortgage backed securities) and are primarily driven by inflation. If you want to see how mortgage rates are driven, simply watch the leading indictors of inflation such as the CPI.

Here's a case in point. The last six times that the Fed cut the Fed Fund Rate, there was a temporary drop in long term mortgage rates, but in each of those six cases, the long term rates rose. This flies in Mr. Klein's assertion that the "Fed helped push mortgage rates to their lowest levels..." through the lowering of the FFR.
-- Don Layton

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Hillary Clinton, Economics, Islam, Environment, Global Warming, Books, NATO, Conservatism, Neoconservatism, Alaska