Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner Is The New Mr. Wizard!

The G-20 group members will be swarming into Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on September 24-25, 2009, to discuss the state of economic failure that originated right here in the great U.S.A. The global crisis was concocted by fraudulent make-believe mortgage-backed securities/derivatives, and credit default swap swindles that permeated the entire globe. Out of Reaganomics, Laissez-faire capitalism purported by Alan Greenspan-- the has-been Federal Reserve chairman, and Supply-Side economics soothsayers rallying the grandiose plan to trickle down wealth to the working class suckers through the great idea of modest-to-stagnant wages and inexpensive credit deals with escalating compounding interest etched into fine print contracts, as well as the masquerading of homes as ATM machines, the rich became richer beyond their wildest dreams.

Little Boy Bush took an infection upon the body of the economy and drove it deep to the bone allowing it to become systemic, while poisoning the very marrow that made this country great. Once Greenspan was sent out to pasture upon the cushion of his Lazy Boy recliner, Ben Bernanke took the helm of the pirate ship called the Federal Reserve Bank, a member bank of the world’s central banks centered within the International Bank of Settlement.

The Federal Reserve Bank was established in 1913 by Congress under a veil of darkness giving it the power to be the sole issuer of our U.S. dollar. The Treasury collects taxes, and revenues and issues Treasury bonds and bills, which are then bought by the Federal Reserve. Now, since the Fed has bought up Treasuries, they are entitled to receive interest due upon their expiration. In other words, the taxpayers pay interest to a bank that is allowed to print and issue the American dollar.

Without going into detail, the Fed takes, for example, a $100 bond, and banks $10 of the $100 and then loans out $90 at zero percent interest to their broker-dealers and investment banks, which then takes that $90, deposits $10 and then, loans out $80. From $100, $170 is created. $70 created out of thin air via the fractional reserve method. So, what have the investment banks been doing with their Federal Reserve bootie? They (Goldman Sachs, BoA, and the rest) have been gambling on Wall Street pushing the DOW into positive territory. This manipulation is being done by the “Insiders of Wall Street” for their own gain. These investment-banking institutions engage in “front running”, which means that because of their computerized trading capabilities, they can jump ahead of a trading stock that is being pushed up getting ahead of others who are also making the buy and get that stock for a “front-of-the-pack” price.

What we are now witnessing is how the Treasury and the Federal Reserve are part of what could be called a syndicate to serve the financial needs of the corporate financial oligarchs instead of working to repair the damage done to the economy by those members of this syndicate. The American people are left out.

The investment banks that have been provided trillions of dollars through the Federal Reserve through various programs have not been committed to investing in the real economy, but only in themselves. Credit remains locked up. Actually, there is plenty of liquidity but many cannot or will not borrow. Many banks are hoarding their available liquidity.

If we go back to February 2009, and revisit Timmy Geithner’s objectives just after he was appointed Secretary of the Treasury, we see that his total intention was to recapitalize the very banks—the syndicate---with over a trillion dollars of the government’s capital. Even back on day one, Geithner was planning to feed the zombie beasts taking them from undernourished zombies full of unexposed and hidden toxic mortgage debt poisoning their balance sheets and viability, to obese zombies with the same unaccounted for toxic debt. His intention was to allow them to borrow Fed funds at zero percent and gamble with it so as to accumulated big profits in order to cushion or pad their balance sheets against the day when they will have to write down their virtually worth-less toxic mortgage debt holdings. It was not about taking care of the economic health of the nation, but to feed the evil beasts.

Yet, Ben Bernanke proclaims that the recession is basically over! Hurray for this Psychotic Reaction!

Geithner said, “We have to both jump start job creation and private investment, and we must get credit flowing again to businesses and families.” This objective has been a failure. Unemployment continues. When counting people that are no longer being counted, August really had 800,000 unemployed Americans. Tent cities in Tennessee, California, Florida, and elsewhere continue to grow. The underemployed numbers are growing, as well. Consumer spending is in decline as Americans save their fragile incomes and work to pay down debt.

Yet the zombie followers of the 9-12 Washington, DC protest last week hate the idea of a public option or a government health plan. Please tell them to give up their Medicare, or Medicaid. How many of the kook-turds are one step away from a lay-off and NO health insurance, or a job change with a jacked up co-pay and a shrunken benefit plan? Oh well. They loved the free ride provided by one of the 41 sponsors funded by the health care insurance industry. They got all-they-could-drink Kook-Aid.

Geithner had his pipedream of creating a public-private partnership to buy illiquid assets from the zombie banks as the way to get them recapitalized and rid of their worth-less mortgage debt burden. FAILURE! This Obama confidante actually believed that from his pipedream plan he could magically create as much as $1T. He then dreamt up a concocted plan that the private part of this partnership would “determine the prices for current troubled and previously illiquid assets.” But it never worked. The holders of this worth-less debt did not want to sell at the assessed price of 23 cents on the dollar. They wanted the FDIC and Treasury and the private sector to suck up 78 or 80 cents on the dollar. There solution was to just hold on to it.

The FDIC (government/taxpayer) was to kick it the lion’s share of the determined price as a way to entice the private sector to take the bait. IT FAILED. Geithner said this: “This program will provide markets working again for the legacy [toxic] loans and assets [the candy coated way of saying debts] that are now burdening the entire financial system.”

In addition, Mr. Wizard Geithner had another scheme and that was called TALF-- (Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility), whereby he would take a lump of $100B from the Treasury’s bake house and roll and stretch it out into a nice slab totaling up to $1T of new, freshly made capital in order to jump start new lending in hopes to sucker in consumers and business to borrow once more during a time of total insecurity and mistrust. OH YEAH!

Every morning Timmie Geithner, Treasurer Extraordinaire, must drink a gallon of the magic Kool-aid to believe what he is mixing up is the true elixir for the nation’s economic health.

Now, our Treasurer Extraordinaire was in London and spoke before the G-20, on September 4-5, 2009, defining his position. The UK Telegraph reported that Mr. Wizard Geithner said “You are seeing the first signs of positive growth now in this country and countries around the world.” TimmieBOY, a jobless recovery, with massive deflation, a declining US dollar, and tightened spending are not positive signs.

What he was coding was that Wall Street was showing positive growth. That is all that matters to Mr. Wizard Geithner. While TimmieG said it was too early to withdraw economic stimulus, meaning that he and Ben Bernanke must continue to funnel huge amounts of newly printed cash into the biggest financial institutions so they can continue to gamble on Wall Street and help the Fed chairman mop up Treasuries being unloaded by foreign central banks, Nicholas Sarkozy, the French president, will continue to push for tighter regulation of the financial services industry, as he did at the last G-20, and has promised to do it again when they all reconvene in Pittsburgh.

This means that he has had enough of Geithner allowing the US financial-banking giants to continue to go unregulated, and without transparency as they hide their debts off their balance sheets and manipulate markets as they have been doing.

What is a big laugh for all of us following the G-20 sham is that the world’s richest nations have pledged more than $1 trillion to help pull the global economy through the recession. That is like pocket change for the entire group of nations. Geithner and Bernanke printed up $1.5 trillion since February to hand over just to the top few investment banks right here at home.

The New York Times wrote on 9-11-09 that little has changed on Wall Street, but Mr. Wizard Geithner in tow with his gallon jug of Kool-aid continues to believe that stimulation of the biggest financial-banking institutions continue to be the order of the day so they can persist with their gambling on Wall Street by manipulating the process of trades. This is Mr. Wizard’s way to pave the road to recovery. Yet, he is not talking real reform of the financial sector. He is not talking about using the Anti-Trust laws to break up the too-big-to-fail financial institutions, or to keep them from growing even bigger so as to never again allow any company to hold the U.S. economy hostage.

Here is what Alex Berenson wrote in the NYT:

“Backstopped by huge federal guarantees, the biggest banks have restructured only around the edges. Employment in the industry has fallen just 8 percent since last September. Only a handful of big hedge funds have closed. Pay is already returning to precrash levels, topped by the 30,000 employees of Goldman Sachs, who are on track to earn an average of $700,000 this year. Nor are major pay cuts likely, according to a report last week from J.P. Morgan Securities. Executives at most big banks have kept their jobs. Financial stocks have soared since their winter lows.”

“For now, banks still sell and trade unregulated derivatives, despite their role in last fall’s chaos.” “In fact, though, regulators and lawmakers have spent most of the last year trying to save the financial industry, rather than transform it.”

“Simon Johnson, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, said that the seeds of another collapse had already sprouted. If major banks are allowed to keep making bets that are ultimately backed by taxpayer guarantees, they will return to the practices that led them to underwrite trillions of dollars in bad loans, Professor Johnson said.”

“They will run up big risks, they will fail again, they will hit us for a big check,” he predicted.” “But even some senior Wall Street executives acknowledge the lack of change surprises them, given how poorly the industry performed last fall and the degree of government support necessary to keep it from collapsing.”

“There was a general feeling that an enormous amount of additional regulation should be put in place to prevent what happened that weekend from happening again,” said Byron Wien, vice chairman of Blackstone Advisory Services and the former chief investment strategist for Morgan Stanley and Pequot Capital. “So far, we haven’t seen a lot of action.”

Robert J. Shiller, the Yale University economics professor who predicted the dot-com crash and the housing bust, said the window for change may be closing. “People will accept change at a time of crisis, but we haven’t managed to do much, and maybe complacency is coming back,” Professor Shiller said. “We seem to be losing momentum.”

Kenneth C. Griffin, founder and chief executive of the Citadel Investment Group, a Chicago-based hedge fund that manages $13 billion, said that regulators and lawmakers needed to impose rules so failing banks could be shut, rather than allowed to operate indefinitely with taxpayer support.”

“Mr. [Nassim Nicholas] Taleb[, a statistician, trader, and author,] warns that the system has grown riskier since last fall. The extensive government support that began after Lehman collapsed will lead investors to assume that governments will always prevent major banks from collapsing, he said.”

“So investors will lend money to the financial industry on easy terms. In turn, financial institutions will use that cheap money to make risky loans and trades. The banks will keep the profits when their bets pay off, while taxpayers will swallow the losses when the bets go bad and threaten the system.” “But legislation that would allow regulators to close giant institutions in an orderly fashion has been stalled for months.”

“Another proposed change would require banks to list and trade derivatives through a central clearinghouse, just as stocks and options are traded through exchanges, but it has yet to go anywhere.”

“Moreover, some banks oppose opening derivatives trading, because it would cut their profits by making pricing more visible and as a consequence competitive. For now, legislation to force derivatives trading onto exchanges has stalled, and banks are still writing contracts with limited regulatory oversight.”

“The off-exchange derivatives market is still the Wild West,” Ms. [Sheila C. Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation] Bair said.

Everyone in the G-20 knows that the emperor’s wizard wears no clothes, when he believes that he wears the finest of robes. It is clear to many that little has changed, but Geithner is basically saying, “Don’t worry. Be happy. Mr. Wizard is here to fix it.”

So, what will Mr. Wizard Geithner try and sell to the G-20 members? Oh, the U.S. is in recovery!!! Let us all have a shot and a beer, along with French fries packed into our sandwiches! (A Pittsburgh tradition!)

Here is an excerpt from “Will U.S. Consumer Debt Reduction Cripple the Recovery?” gotten from Mike Whitney’s piece, “The Long Adjustment. How Bad Will It Get?”:

“Over the past decade US household spending has served as the main engine of US economic growth. From 2000 to 2007 US annual personal consumption grew by 44%, from $6.9 trillion to $9.9 trillion—faster than either GDP or household income. Consumption accounted for 77% of real US GDP growth during this period…The US has accounted for one-third of the total growth in global private consumption since 1990…” “The amount of US household debt amassed by 2007 was unprecedented whether measured in nominal terms, as a share of GDP (98%) or as a ratio of liabilities to personal disposable income (138%).”

So people, without consumer spending there is no recovery; therefore, to believe the recession is over is delusional.

Will Bada Bing Bernanke, or TimmieG proclaim to the G-20 that the scam they have perpetrated upon Americans and the world is over? Here is Dr. Dean Baker, in “Reverse Bank Robbery” stating that “Even that giant corpse Citigroup is showing signs of life. Its stock is now selling for more than five times the lows it hit earlier this year. Its market capitalization is up nearly $57bn, a bit more than the $45 billion that the government lent them through the Troubled Assets Relief Programme, or TARP.”

So, their profits are a result of the taxpayer’s generosity, and self-sacrifice. Right! It is all about just one of the financial banking crime syndicate programs, and this is called TARP.

Dr. Baker went on to write: “On the other side, banks can buy up US government bonds that are currently paying around 3.5%.” “This means that we lend the banks the money that they lend to us, albeit at a considerably higher interest rate. To take round numbers, lets say that the banks have borrowed $1 trillion from the Fed’s various lending facilities. (The Fed’s total loans are now over $2T.) Suppose they pay an average interest rate of 0.2% on this money. If the banks then buy up government bonds that pay a 3.5% interest rate, they can pocket the difference of 3.3 percentage points. On a trillion dollars of lending, this will give the banks $33bn a year in net interest or profit. This is the extra money that the government is paying the banks to borrow back the money that it lent them through the Fed.” “We…have shrewd traders like [the] Goldman Sachs crew…[that] take the money that they borrowed, either directly from the government or with the government’s guarantee, and use it to speculate in items like oil and other commodities.”

This has been the “shared sacrifice” President Obama has asked us all to endure. We have been asked to allow the financial oligarchs the right to take our money and use it to make themselves filthy rich at the expense of the real economy. We have been asked because these oligarchs own the government and need to see bigger salaries and bonuses. The “shared sacrifice” has been seen in a 33% drop in housing prices since 2007. The deleveraging of the rest of America’s debt continues. They are in the process of reducing their debt as a group by $2.5 trillion and lower their debt-to-equity ratios to a much lower expectation. The $14 trillion in accrued household debt over the last 7 years had doubled and can no longer be sustained. Americans are foreclosing on their homes, asking for revaluations of their mortgages, and abandoning payments accumulated on their credit cards.

I don’t think the recession is over, but just getting started! Will Mr. Wizard Geithner begin talking about Change We Can Believe In? Doubtful.

Mike Whitney excerpted from McKinsey Global Institute’s “Will US Consumer Debt Reduction Cripple the Recovery?”, in his Counterpunch piece titled Chairman Milquetoast’s Solutions-Band-Aids for the Recession, 8-28-09:

“Homeowners withdrew “$2.3 trillion in home equity loans and cash-out refinancings between 2003-2008”. Most of the money was spent on personal consumption. Where will the money come from now that home equity has gone negative?”

How much clearer can it be spelled out even to the one-dimensional toy soldiers brought to D.C., wound up and told to march against a public option health care plan? It is much more about the largest financial multi-national banking institutions, the top 500 largest multi-national corporations, and the top 10% of the wealth holders. A public option may just protect the toy soldiers from bankruptcy. It should be more about protesting the take-over of our economy by the corporate thieves on Wall Street than about a public option to protect working Americans from further economic losses.

Mike Whitney excerpted Don Monkerud, “Wealth Inequality Destroys US Ideals” in the above piece, “In 1955, IRS records indicated the 400 richest people in the country were worth an average $12.6 million adjusted for inflation. In 2006, the 400 richest increased their average to $263 million, representing an epochal shift of wealth upward in the U.S.”

Mr. Whitney, in his piece, wrote: “Over 40% of GNP comes from Fortune 500 companies. According to the World Institute for Development Economics Research, the 500 largest conglomerates in the U.S. “control over two-thirds of the business resources, employ two-thirds of the industrial workers, account for 60 percent of sales, and collect over 70 percent of the profits.” He also wrote “The top 1 percent incomes captured half of the overall economic growth over the period 1993-2007. The top 14,988 households received 6.04% of income, the highest figure for any year since the data became available. The top 1% of households received 23.5% of income, while the top 10% received 49.7% of income (highest on record).”

So TimmieG, will you and the others discuss with the G-20 members, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the too-big-to-fail corporate oligarchy in this world and how they need to be broken up into not-too-big-to-fail companies for the purpose of a more realistic free market? Doubtful.

To further drive home the fact that what we have is an economic crime syndicate, Dr. Dean Baker wrote in “Bailouts Without Accountability-Bernanke’s Bad Money” that Ben Bernanke was pushing Congress to believe that his main concern was “economic and financial stability” and unless the Fed was to receive $700bn in TARP funds, we would see the opposite in our financial markets and a collapse within the overall economy. “Last September, when he [Bernanke] was telling Congress that the economy would collapse if it did not approve the $700 billion TARP bailout, he warned that the commercial paper market would shut down.” But the truth-be-known that “What Mr. Bernanke apparently forgot to tell Congress back then, [was] that the Fed [had] the authority to directly buy commercial paper from financial and non-financial companies. In other words, the Fed [had] the power to prevent the sort of economic collapse that Bernanke warned would happen if Congress did not quickly approve the TARP. In fact, Bernanke announced that the Fed would create a special lending facility to buy commercial paper the weekend after Congress voted to approve the TARP.”

This was, and continues to be, the Royal Scam, brought to all of us by President Obama, Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers, and Tim Geithner. They all work for the financial crime syndicate, which had Bernanke cry wolf before Congress, in September of 2008, to scare Congress into giving Treasury funds in order to bail out the banks when the Fed had the power to create these special lending facilities independent of Congress and without the TARP funds. But instead, he stole an additional $700 billion to pass out to his bank CEO crime bosses. All the instability has been created by Bernanke and is continuing today.

So, will there be any real significant change that we could believe in when the G-20 comes to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania? The history has shown nothing will change. The recession will continue and a recovery will only occur in dreams.

thanks for reading, jerry

How Real Change Could Occur After Labor Day!!

Here is an easy way to tell Congress, the health care industry, the insane Reichstag Republicans, the Cowardly Democrats, and the rest of the elite running corporate America that we are sick and tired of their corrupt takeover of America’s wallets.

All you have to do is sell your stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. You don’t even have to leave your home, your office or your easy chair!

Call your Congressperson and Senator’s office and tell the office person to give your legislator a message. The message conveyed would be that you will be selling all your stocks that involve drug companies, insurance companies, and health care facilities. Tell them you are divesting from the thieves and moving the cash from the sale into money market funds, CDs, or your savings account. What this action will say is that you have moved your money from their access to your access.

You then could proceed to tell that legislative aide that you will likely do the same with other stocks that involve the corporate thievery that has been going on in the country over the last 30 years. I would suggest you sell ALL stock holdings, and bond holdings, and move YOUR money into cash; even if done temporarily. This action will cause the market to tumble in a big way, ultimately resulting in a big shake up on Wall Street, in Congress, and with President Obama. By doing so, you will be sending a powerful message to corporate American and Congress. The Game Is Over!!! The Jig Is Up!!! It is time to give America back to the average American worker.

The time to dump the banking stocks is now! The same goes for insurance stocks, and REITs.

If Americans were willing to use their pocketbooks to take the country back, real change would occur.

This is the way to do it. Let Wall Street know that you are just not going to take their crap any longer. Let Congress know that enough is enough, and what you demand is real change for working Americans. It is time to fix the problems. It is time to end the wars, to rebuild the nation’s manufacturing sectors, to end corporate welfare for the richest thieves that have controlled the financial economic crime syndicate, to end the question about health care and say that all health care MUST be sold by not-for-profit companies, and in addition, financial regulation must be enforced. We must say that health care is not a privilege but a right, and that everyone, in spite of a pre-existing condition, deserves to have easily affordable health care. A single-payer or government regulated private plans must be created. We must tell the drug companies that their industry will no longer hold any patents to pharmaceuticals, but the nation, and its people will hold those patents. All our drug research should be funded by the people through the government and, by doing so, it would benefit the entire populace and not just a select few.

The people are already funding much of the drug research through the National Institutes of Health government programs. The drug companies need only to manufacture them. This would drop the price dramatically, according to Dr. Dean Baker, the author of “The Nanny State”.

The way to take this country back is by divesting from Wall Street’s gaming of the system. We are sick and tired of the revival of Reaganomics and his laissez-faire, trickle down, supply side smoke and mirrors propaganda. The economy was gamed to make sure that working people would remain indebted to the rich so they could reap huge piles of cash through that debtor-creditor trap.

In order to tell those Corporate Royalists the game would be to sell off one’s stocks and bonds quickly, and overnight.

And, the only way to force President Obama to control the financial crime syndicate is for all of us to sell off our stock, bond, and mutual fund holdings and transfer our personal savings wealth into money market accounts.

It appears that Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chair, has President Obama’s continued confidence, while much of the people know that Bada Bing Bernanke is nothing more than the senior field general for the financial crime syndicate and was set into that position so as to make sure that the financial investment crime bank bosses would continue to feed their insatiable need for cash through the pockets of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve.

Bernanke keeps Fed interest rates at zero percent. The banks borrow at zero, and gamble it on Wall Street stocks or buy Treasury bonds with it making easy money on the interest gained. Borrow at zero percent and buy bonds earning 3 percent interest. Forget about the real economy and those working people getting burned, as well as those business owners hoping to make payroll for another month, and keep business going throughout the next quarter.

This could be the Labor Day where Americans take back the country, or not. Here is a quote from Thomas Jefferson, "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." In other words, if we do nothing, then nothing changes, and the Corporate Royalists remain in charge.

It is all up to you now!

Thanks for reading, jerry

P.S. Consumer credit is dead!

Debtor Revolt

More on the consumer credit collapse

Our Vacationing President

This week Wall Street has been pushing the DOW to remain above 9500 on helium instead of it being supported by a true and strong wind current. The casino-style investment buying that allows large institutions to manipulate the market in order to pad their diminishing profits exists outside of the real economy.

Harvard law professor, Dr. Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the TARP Oversight Panel Committee appointed by Congress, and the only person directly affiliated with government accountability who is saying it like it really is, has warned us that the next big tsunami to sweep over the Wall Street Kool-Aid sippers is the commercial real estate collapse and coming foreclosures.

We all know where that would lead. Commercial real estate defaults would not get bailed out. There is no more money for bailouts. FDIC has already bailed out 81 banks just this year, and there are hundreds resting on the precipice of failure. FDIC is nearly broke. It has already used up its bank-rescue funds. Bernanke has already promised, pledged or issued $23T to the banking crime syndicate. How much more of the U.S. debt can he monetize? And, the Chinese have backed away from long term Treasury purchases.

As commercial real estate defaults, stores end up empty, malls become garbage dumps filled with weeds, and locust trees. Workers end up unemployed, and scared their mortgages may wind up in default, too! Consumers will tighten their spending belts even more. Treasury revenues will continue to decline.

Coming soon are more prime mortgage defaults as ARM-adjustable rate mortgages-come due. Many cannot afford the rise in the rates, and will end up walking away from the mortgages.

The financial crime syndicate’s chief financial officer (CFO), Bada Bing Bernanke, has been given a warm hug by the vacation president, Barack Obama. An endorsement that will extend Bernanke’s relationship with the financial crime syndicate’s crime bosses for another term. Bada Bing has done his best to threaten Congress from unraveling his disastrous web of worthless debt collected from his crime boss bankstas in exchange for hard cash at zero percent interest.

Back in November of 2008, Bloomberg News sued the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States, a private banking entity, yet, nevertheless, authorized by Congress to influence monetary and credit conditions, as well as the expansion and contraction of the money supply Bernanke refused to disclose any and all names of the financial companies he lent to. In addition, he would not disclose the amount of the loans, or the assets taken by the Fed as collateral under a wide range of programs. Secrecy is the bottom line. The Fed knows that if such information got out that the collateral they took in exchange for the cash give-away to the corrupt, and underwater financial institutions would likely cause the DOW to fall back to the 7000 mark or lower. This is Wall Street and the Fed’s way of window dressing the economy and making it look healthier than it really is.

Wall Street knows that these too-big-to-fail crime syndicate banks will never pay back their debts to the government. They just don’t care. If they lose stock market bets, it doesn’t matter to them, but to the average investor piggy-backing on their bets, it should matter. The Fed loaned them the betting capital at zero percent interest, while the average investor is using their precious earnings to ride the wave.

There will be no truth-telling here.

What we now have is Bernanke continuing to offer cash to these institutions allowing them to “Pump and Dump” stock prices. What the financial crime syndicate does is, no doubt, pump huge sums into specific stocks pushing up the stock prices, and then, once a price is reached that appeals to the manipulators, they sell, or dump. This pads their balance sheets. Their balance sheets have not been written down to disclose the trillions of dollars of residential toxic mortgages that they have been sitting on. They have been allowed to use imaginary market values to establish a make-believe market price for the worthless trash they claim has real value. Mark-to-market values no longer apply to them. They likely believe their toxic debt is worth 3 times what it is really worth. Their Cash-For-Toxic-Mortgage-Clunkers are not worth the actual 23 cents per dollar value, but instead they want a trade-in price of 80-90 cents per dollar value.

As they drive their investment banks down the road to fantasy recovery, what they refuse to see coming at them is a massive semi-tractor trailer filled with explosives labeled “Commercial real estate defaults”! By next year, Bank of America, PNC, Wells Fargo and Chase will see 50% of all residential mortgages underwater. Unemployment-underemployment figures will reach Depression Era levels of 20%. Mr. Barack Obama, Ben Bernanke, Congress and Wall Street will have to rope off the accident scene and perform triage. Will Mr. President decide that his vacation time has ended?

Such a scenario will create a second downturn in the economy, which will likely cause very damaging affects. I wouldn’t expect Wall Street to begin pouring the Kool-Aid anytime after that because the Kool-Aid would have turned sour. All the non-performing loans will implode like a blazing grass fire igniting the dry forest’s tree canopy.

What will happen in China when the second U.S. economic tsunami sweeps over? China has a significant overcapacity of goods, while it is busy inflating huge asset bubbles which could blow up in its face. Chinese bank regulators are telling bank lenders to increase their reserves of non-performing loans. In addition, the central bank has raised money-market rates in order to drain their liquidity swamp. Keep firing up the banking expansion. It doesn’t matter that many of their building projects have no tenants. China is determined to remain the world’s sweatshop, and anchor down deflation.

With only two years until a presidential election, and senate seat reelections, Congress may decide that the voters had had enough of the Ponzi Scheme, and the transference of wealth from working Americans into the hands of bankstas. We may just see Congress demand the Fed open its books before the primary election races. We may end up seeing Bernanke winning The World’s Most Hated Man award. He may have to shave his beard, dye his remaining hair red, and enter into the witness protection program where he will be relocated to Idaho, Montana, or Wyoming.

I keep wondering what would Truman do if he were President Obama? Knowing what I know about Harry Truman, he would not be gallivanting in Martha’s Vineyard, when the Rose Garden would have had to do.

Thanks for reading, jerry

The De-evolution of the United States

The Reagan Supply-side Revolution Hydra, with field general Alan Greenspan at its side, is finally seeing the tempest-like tentacles of the economic serpent spin out of control. This hydra of design was an intentional and willful decision on behalf of the riches Americans who felt that they were not rich enough, and the Republicans were not all powerful enough, therefore they executed a plan to take working America down to the wage bottom. It would take decades, but had to be done. The Reagan Economic Revolution of laissez-faire, neo-liberalism has frenzied the Rightwing into a full-fledged panic morphing their followers into becoming the new KKK, or the Kooktard Kook d’e-tat revolution.

This new, or neo-KKK, appears to be comprised of average Americans freaked out over a newly proposed, and now abandoned, government program designed to protect many of those very same people, or those close to them, from further erosion of their disappearing wages, savings, or livelihoods, which would take the form of a public option health care plan. This is the health care industry’s favorite choice now called Health Care Co-ops, which would diminish Americans from bargaining for the best prices for drugs or premiums.

What is unfortunate is that they have taken their marching orders from the Rightwing elites made up of the wealthiest corporatists, and Republican Party jihadis wanting to maintain their death grip stranglehold upon the political system they so intentionally damaged.

It appears their current plan is to try and disrupt the political dialogue among citizens by force, through the orchestration of aggressive tactics at local town hall meetings by their zombie neo-KKK foot soldiers who recite the fabricated and propagandistic talking points fed them by their neo-fascist masters in the Rightwing media, and inside government. The neo-KKK members are injected with IV formulas of lies and distortions of fact they extract from within the text of the proposed, and now likely defunct, health care bill, such as “death panel”, or ‘the intrusion of medical battalions entering one’s home to tell them how to raise their at-risk kids.’

We have people like former Lt. Governor Betsy McCaughey who put up a Youtube video trailered with clips and photos of Nazis and members of the Third Reich. Her video pretended that the public option bill had Hitler’s fascism as it’s underpinning, when in reality she had portrayed herself as a neo-Nazi-type of propagandist. This projection of others being fascists for considering the public option health care bill, which is a far cry from a government takeover of health care, although it should be, in my opinion, appear to harbor fascist beliefs that they carry inside themselves, which manifests through their irrational behaviors and actions brought forth into the “marketplace of ideas” that had been fathered through the birth of democracy a few hundred years earlier!

Sarah Palin, Senator Grassley, Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, Tom Delay, Dick Armey, Senator Kent Conrad, House Republi-CON leader John-the boner-Boehner, and others are currently the facilitators of the neo-KKK movement: Kooktard Kook d’e-tat. “Master operators” funding the Kook d’e-tat, no doubt, have hired Palin on. These same Rightwing corporate elites appear to be the drivers behind her resignation as Alaskan governor. She hides the real reason why she resigned. A huge increase in cash payments. She is the perfect pawn, carnival barker huckster to go around the country selling their neo-fascist, Rightwing propagandistic snake-oil in her good ‘ole folksy Alaska-speak style. “You Betcha!” The purpose appears to be to put her, and others, out front to start “Liar’s Fires” forcing the Left, Democrats, and moderates to run out with their fire extinguisher-in-arm representatives to attempt to put them out.

These puppet master neo-fascist corporate elites have a leash around their Congressional lapdogs, who they feed buckets of campaign contribution slop to make sure they bark out the message of ‘the rich MUST remain rich at all costs!’ Therefore, the neo-fascist puppet masters feed even more of this “slop” to their media master’s of ceremonies, such as Glen Beck, Shawn Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O’Reilly. It now appears that many such puppet masters find Beck too blatantly offensive. Their slop comes in the form of big salaries, perks, bonuses, and more.

Bush and Cheney set the stage with the Iraq War, torture, the terrorist boogiemen, the need to subvert the U.S. Constitution, and erode our respect in the world in order to bring about the new Rightwing neo-fascism to satisfy the multi-national corporate Hydra, which includes the insurance, Pharma, real estate and financial corporate elites. Their pledge amongst one another appears to be committed to making sure workers earn as little as possible, so they squawk minimally about cheap foreign-made goods made by low paid foreigners. Turn Americans into drone worker bees. But, in order to keep their diminishing cash flow from drying up, they entice them to borrow as much as they can to keep afloat, while enriching the elites with the interest they pay on their mounting debt burden. Ah. The rich stay fat and happy.

But their plan has exploded apart. The elites are now afraid, more than ever, of losing more of their wealth, control, and power that they have spent over the decades nurturing, massaging, and funding while they watch the economy slip further into decline. A decline rivaling only the Great Depression.

So, they ramp up the neo-KKK tactics, and encourage bold and aggressive behavior, such as carrying in guns and semi-automatic assault weapons to town hall rallies, as well as scream, yell, tantrum, and insight chaotic behavior in and around such venues. They have been intimidating congresspersons into rejecting the health care bill plan. Be afraid of possibly obtaining health care for your family at very affordable rates. We cannot anger the insurance company elites. Now, can we? The purpose of this neo-fascist movement is to create a tipping point in order to gain control. That tipping point is the fear of violence or actual violence itself.

To usher in Rightwing fascism and to regain the power lost by the Rightwing is to insight violence. There may be no turning back from that abyss if such bold actions begin to take hold.

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has been listening and following his marching orders from the FIRE/Pharma puppet masters (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) fearful of a mudslide that will likely collapse their profit making hydra-like machine. These “Corporate Royalists”, America’s puppet masters, whose political affiliations are more embedded within the Republican neo-KKK Party, are putting the squeeze on Bada Bing Bernanke to do whatever it takes to fire up a virtually broken drivetrain credit engine, which is losing its oil, ie. consumer spending resulting from excessive consumer borrowing, by the tanker load.

Bada Bing has poured $800B into the lending master’s crankcase with little results. The engine is backfiring a hazy bluish white smoke because the it is nearly fried after 30 plus years of running hard with little concern for long term reliability and care. Bernanke has stuffed over a trillion dollars into the pockets of the investment banking money lenders who have hoarded the load knowing that they have major liabilities that could leave them stranded and towed into bankruptcy court.

Toxic mortgage debt frothing at the mouth sitting off their balance sheets are ready to bite them in the face. Then there is the bloated, and about to drown, commercial real estate bubble ready to topple the major Humpty Dumpty investment banks that will see their investments explode into a securitized nuclear winter scenario. Or, how about their non-performing loans (a loan that is in default or close to it)? I guess it is called non-performing for a reason!

Bernanke has jumped to attention when these corporate financial crime syndicate thieves demanded that he call in the engravers to monetize the bogus debt he had collected as collateral, in addition to what he had already manufactured by selling Treasuries to the tune of nearly $13 trillion!

Has anyone told Bernanke or his “crime syndicate bosses” inside the world’s largest financial Pyramid Scheme, as well as the Republican orchestrated field marshals waving the neo-KKK baton, that the American worker has lost their retirement nest-egg and needs to save his/her money again, as they watch their wages turn stagnant or fall, and their standard-of-living erode, while their home equity evaporates, and their mortgage goes underwater?

And, for many, foreclosures have reached 1.9M, $14T in household wealth has vanished, home equity has dropped to 41%, under-unemployment has reached close to 20%, (reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics) that there is no job growth in any sector of the economy, and the U.S. private sector economy has failed to add any significant number of jobs within the last 10 years, except when the government has stepped in to hire on jobs off the private sector. So, where is the public outrage by the neo-KKK zombies booing and heckling at town hall meetings discussing the public option? Absent! “By 2006, the richest paid only 17.2 percent of their income in taxes. Today, the top taxpayers pay the same percentage of their incomes in taxes as those making $50,000 to $75,000, although they doubled their share of total U.S. income,” as reported by Don Monkerud in the Capital Times of Madison Wisconsin, 7-16-09. Shouldn’t the neo-KKK zombies want this to change first leveling the income tax playing field? I guess they don’t care. It is no socialized health care for them.

So who should the neo-KKK zombies be angry at? How about Bernanke for allowing the Republican corporate elite financiers, who are paying off nearly all the Republican, and many Democratic (Max Baucus, for one) greedy money junkies in Congress, as well as those within the executive branch over the last 30 years, but, especially, within the last 10 years! But NO; they choose the new guy on the block—President Barack Obama because he was pressing for a public option health care bill, while many of them might need it in the coming years. But no, it’s a Birther Revolution!

Were the neo-KKK Birthers, Tea Baggers, and Palineers calling for an uprising when BushBoy and McCain rushed to the halls of Congress hootin’ and hollering for a bailout of the investment bankstas resulting from Bernanke and (former Bush Treasury Secretary Hank) Paulson’s threatening bugle call sounding the warning that if it were not given to them ASAP the nation would experience an economic Armageddon? NO! Or, how about over the two wars, and a rising Pentagon and military budget? Or, the growing wealth disparity? Or, greedy corporate elites? NO!

Therefore, one can only conclude that this current Republican generated neo-fascist uprising is being orchestrated by those fearful of losing their financial and political wealth and control over government and the nation. This is how fascism is borne out of a damaged democracy. Be aware of what can happen next! Violence! A domestic military presence in the streets! And more.

The enforcement of the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terror Act of 2007 -HR 1955 passed under BushBoy and a Republican controlled Congress might actually become part of that tipping point I mentioned above. Read it! It is scary!

But, what is being heard is the announcement by the Chinese and their threat to dump U.S. Treasuries if Bernanke and Geithner continue to listen to the financial crime syndicate puppet masters wanting so desperately to dress up in their Brown Shirts and reignite the credit markets through more monetization of our increasing debt levels.

What we are witnessing today really is frightening. Democracy rests on a dangerous precipice, which has been pushed closer and closer to the edge of survival by the neo-fascist corporate greedy power brokers pounding hard against the Republican Party and their media commandos, the Blue Dog Cowardly Democrats, and others to not give into the “other side”, otherwise they may lose what they dearly cherish: greed and power. They are willing to sacrifice our democracy so that it may live on for another lifetime.

These corporate financial thieves that have drained the nation’s economic reservoir over the last 30 plus years, and especially, under BushBoy, used working Americans to create their wealth by keeping wages stagnant, and forcing them to borrow for the purpose of keeping consuming and spending alive and flowing, yet knowing that someday the gig will be up. Now the ride is about over. The U.S. consumer will no longer be the world’s junk and toy collectors. Their basement shelves are full and now they are heading for the local flea markets to see what they can get rid of, since they need that cash to eat, pay rent, utilities, as well as their exorbitant insurance premiums, if they have any at all. And, don’t forget gas for the family jalopies. Now that the working class consumer is no longer in the bargain hunting game, the U.S. marketplace will become less attractive to China and Asia. The end result of this Domino Effect could be the U.S. dollar will no longer be used as the world’s reserve currency. Therefore, the U.S. falls from its Ivory Tower joining the others on the struggling world stage.

The neo-KKK Republican zombies don’t want a government health care plan, but might accept what the health insurance industry gleefully would wish for and that is health care co-ops, which would not help people at all. They roiled themselves into a lather just because a section of the public option bill would permit health care professionals to assist families with their child development struggles they have at home. Now, we can’t have that! Can we? We cannot allow government to help us with the problems that young developing children have in school and/or at home.

Let us put aside that private insurance plans currently allows for this service in their own policies, such intervention is critical during a time when more and more young people are failing basic educational standards before they even set foot in their neighborhood public school. One of the most significant differences, found in one study, between poor families and affluent families is that affluent families speak around 20,000,000 more words to their developing children before the age of three. Without such knowledge, developing children are likely to fail. They will show deficiencies in language development, word acquisition, simple math puzzles, as well as emotional self-controls and patience.

“Professional parents directed an average of 487 "utterances" per hour toward their children, as compared to 301 for working class parents and only 176 for welfare parents. The quality of those utterances was also very different: Among professional parents, the ratio of encouraging to discouraging utterances was six to one; for working-class parents, the ratio slipped to two to one; and welfare parents made two discouraging utterances for every encouraging one. The consequences were predictable: By the time the children in the study were around three years old, the ones from professional families had average vocabularies of 1,116 words; the working-class ones averaged 749; the welfare kids, 525.” (Sited from this document ).

This is what was meant by family intervention by a team of medical professionals in the now defunct public option bill. But the neo-KKK zombie aggressors who are afraid of considering that just maybe they might benefit from some professional consultations with health care professionals and child development specialists, as well as others when it comes to helping their kids become more successful in school and at home. We can’t have that in Amerika. Now, can we? These foot soldiers for the corporate elite prefer to see this nation filled with more unintelligent people, who are compromised when it comes to raising intelligent and competent children.

In a program called The Harlem Children’s Zone, founded by Geoffrey Canada, 3^rd graders in his program scored equal to or out achieved New York Public School peers when tested following instruction given through Mr. Canada’s program.

Our society is devolving as a result of the neo-KKK assault upon democracy. Ignorance is their background. Aggression is their tactic. It goes deep inside the heart of the country, and founded its roots with the Reagan Supply-side Economic Revolution brainwashing working Americans to buy into their program of using working Americans to make the corporate elite very, very rich without having to give very much in return.

Thanks for reading, jerry

Harlem Children's Zone, Baby College, and more:

Click on “full episode” and listen to act one’s 30 minute piece.

Links to check out:

http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/studies/earlychild/index.cfm

http://jenni.uchicago.edu/papers/earlychildhood.html

http://www.smartstartga.org/educator-links.aspx

President Obama's Jobless and Stagnant Wage Recovery Plan

President Obama gave a speech today in Elkhart, Indiana a community hit hard by the economic collapse. He gave his typical feel-good pep talk about how the economy will come back if we do our part. His part is to give the truck company, Navistar International Corporation, the site of his speech $39 million to build a hybrid heavy duty cross-country hauler.

I am sorry Mr. President, what is needed is not $39 million, but $39 billion to stimulate competition among the truck manufacturers to develop a variety of hybrid models. Not just one!

You allowed AIG to receive $13 billion in bailout funding. $26 million went to pay off counterparty debt to Goldman Sachs and other banks, yet all you are willing to do for an industry invested in the real economy, in Green jobs, in supporting a community, is to offer them a measly $39 million. You should be embarrassed to show your face in that town.

You, Mr. President, have sold out to the financial investment banking industry, or what might be called the ‘paper capitalists’ embedded in the Wall Street financial bank robbery and crime syndicate operations.

Outside of Elkhart, approximately 10 miles, is Wakarusa. In that town is Electric Motors Corporation. They are planning to use an empty plant building in a partnership project with the Nappanee, Indiana-based Gulf Stream Coach, to develop an electric vehicle. They are hoping to receive some stimulus funding from the government to move forward. They don’t have it yet.

Again, Goldman Sachs has already received $26 billion in bailout money, but the Electric Motors Company wanting to build a real object to sell in the world market has to hope for funding. What has Goldman Sachs done with their bailout money? They have given huge bonuses and engaged in Wall Street market timing stock investing with taxpayer dollars. This is what Mr. Obama has been doing for America.

Here is the transcript of President Obama’s Elkhart speech.

Nowhere in his speech given to a group of hardworking Americans as listened intently to his message did he call for justice by pursuing an investigation of the financial-banking industry responsible for the collapse of the Elkhart way of life and economy, which includes the very jobs lost in the heartland of America. Nowhere in his speech did he demand justice in the form of major investment banking reform legislation. Nowhere in his speech did he say that transparency and accountability must be the new business-as-usual for Wall Street. Nowhere in his speech did he demand that the Federal Reserve be audited and made to bring forth documents outlining where the money has gone, to whom it went, how much was given out, and what the currency exchanges, warrants, and liquidity swaps are all worth today. Nowhere in his speech did he say that the workers of America should not have to pay the heaviest price resulting from this collapse. Nowhere did he say that those who facilitated this collapse with their corrupt and irresponsible business practices, as well as their intent to commit criminal acts would pay the heaviest price.

It is clear that what President Obama did in Elkhart was to play it safe, take the middle road, the road most traveled by politicians.

The investment banking industry has been promised, pledged and given $12 trillion, which is equal to what the GDP of this nation is in one year’s time. Yet, he had said that in his stimulus package: $500 billion per year for two years is what the real economy will get in order to remake this nation. Who is he fooling? Navistar will get $39 million to design, fabricate and manufacture a heavy duty hybrid truck. Yet, the nation’s working class will likely see 50% of all homeowners by 2012 underwater with their mortgages.

A hybrid truck is what the real economy got this week.

But, what we did see has been Wall Street banks showing large profits and improved balance sheets because, more than likely, Ben Bernanke injected these banks with taxpayer dollars, to the tune of over $2.3 trillion so they could manipulate the market by using very high speed computer-timed and engineered casino-like trades for the sole purpose of jacking up stock prices in order to make lots of money for themselves.

What Tyler Durden, of zerohedge.com, has discovered is that less than $400 billion in money market funds were taken out, since March 2009, to invest in the stock market. He asked then, where did the $2.3T come from, since it did not come from money market accounts? It did not come from working class expendable wages? Nor did it come from savings accounts, since people depositing in savings accounts are looking for no-risk protection right now. Since the cash was really not coming from $2.3 trillion in withdrawals from money market accounts, it more than likely came from Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke manipulating the stock market in order to boost the balance sheets of the biggest financial investment banks, those responsible for the collapse in the first place, so they, once again, can return to becoming cash cows; although, businesses on Main Street and Side Street continue to find it very hard to borrow in order to keep their businesses afloat. Credit continues to be locked up because the investment banks feel that it is too much of a risk to lend.

But Elkhart, Indiana gets cash for a hybrid heavy duty truck. That is only fair, right Barack? Throw a Green bone to the masses while the rich get fat and happy.

So, is only Matt Taibbi, Elliot Spitzer and a few others the only one’s calling this Federal Reserve, Treasury and the investment banks a triangle composed of the nation’s biggest economic crime syndicate in the history of the country?

Mr. President, shouldn’t YOU be calling this out as a crime syndicate, as well? But, YOU Mr. President have embraced the Wall Street financial crime syndicate foot soldiers by allowing them to assist you in the development of economic policy.

What is being hypothesized as the reason Bernanke has embedded himself in this swindle would be to fill up the investment banks with taxpayer cash so they can mop up the U.S. Treasuries that foreign central banks are likely to dump on the world market. Bada Bing Bernanke will be playing disaster clean-up man hoping he can catch these Treasuries before they get sold off at rock bottom prices ultimately driving down the value of the dollar.

The other reason for the engineered stock market rally is to give the illusion that the economy is in recovery and that working class Americans can now, once again, resume their consumer spending practices, and charge up their credit cards. Remember, credit is how the wealth of this country is measured.

But no one is talking about how close AIG is to falling off the precipice and into the bankruptcy pit in spite of their good news profits made the same way that Goldman Sachs does it, which is not the good old fashion way of doing business—earning it. It is all about high speed computer timed trades jacking up stock price values. They appear to be engaged in a shell game because they don’t have enough cash to cover their debt losses. Again, mum is the word regarding all the explosive credit default swaps sitting heavily on the balance sheets of the investment banks. In addition, Bank of America and the other credit card companies are writing down huge losses in credit card defaults.

To further point out the toxic tentacles of the investment financial banking crime syndicate, one has to read Pam Marten’s latest article titled “Millions of Americans Pushed Into No-Law System by Colluding Banks”, found on Counterpunch.org (8-3-09). She wrote about how Wall Street has fabricated their own private justice system through setting up a rigged kangaroo like court to handle the way employee disputes are dealt with. Employees with complaints have been allowed only one recourse option, and that is through “arbitration”. The process of arbitration is “where the financial elite make their own laws and run their own private justice system to carry out those laws.”

What has been unearthed through the courts is that one of the arbitration services that was supposed to be impartial and fair in dealing with issues brought up by employees working for Wall Street corporations was owned by a financial banking institution.

Here is another example solidifying that there is a financial crime syndicate at work. “Documents [show] that the private justice system used by the biggest banks in the country [had] been rigged in hundreds of thousands of cases. Next, evidence surfaces that conclusively shows that the general counsels of these very same banks have huddled together in one room to draft a uniform mandatory arbitration clause banning class action lawsuits in their credit card contracts and shared strategies on its implementation effectively locking the courthouse doors to every credit card holder in America.”

The article went on to say that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, on 4-25-08, charged collusion between Bank of America, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, HSBC Finance Corporation, MBNA, Providian Financial Corporation, and American Express. Many of these corporations, which had been bailed out by the taxpayers, were, at the same time, tightening the screws on them.

This entire arbitration charade was rigged because the financial banking and lending institutions hired on judges and lawyers who had worked in the public court system and appeared to many to have favored them. They lured them away from the public sector and into their various arbitration associations and service entities paying them lucrative salaries to represent their interests. One such association, The American Arbitration Association (AAA) engaged in an “incestuous relationship with corporate America.”

Ms. Marten’s article is a real eye-opener! It clearly shows that the investment-financial-lending banking institutions were rigging the judicial system in their favor without much of a problem. Even Janet Reno, when attorney general under President Bill Clinton, appeared to have ignored the request for an investigation into AAA, which failed to disclose “a financial conflict of interest” with a corporation it had been financially aligned with even though they were providing arbitration services for them.

Eight months later, Janet Reno went off and “was elected to the board of directors of the American Arbitration Association.” Do you feel you need to take a bath yet?

When will President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, Congress and the American people become outraged over the fraud these financial investment banking institutions have been engaged in? The incestuous relationship between Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner and the very institutions that took down the U.S. economy is nothing more than a bunch of dirty, filthy financial crime syndicate operators. The RICO statute needs to be implemented. The Sherman Anti-Trust Law needs be dusted off. It is not enough to just have the newly appointed Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission look into this crime syndicate.

If President Obama is to regain the trust of his supporters, which he is quickly losing, and the nation as a whole, he must move forward with the intent to punish, as well as to shut down this massive and invasive financial parasite that is sucking the life out of the economy of which it is using to sustain only itself and its interests.

President Obama has been filling the toxic soil of the largest investment banks with lots of fertilizers giving them much green but without meaningful results, while without the soil replenishers they would have died because the soil is filled with poison. Instead, what is needed is to fertilize the already enriched soils of the real economy where a field of green and blooms would deliver an immediate solution throughout the country. A few million for a truck company is just not enough, Mr. President. You have been doing it wrong.

thanks for reading, jerry

P.S. Top cities losing home values: Case-Shiller Indices.