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What happened to Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac / AIG  was more a direct result of easy money low interest FED policy than anything else.  Factoring in inflation our interest rates have been either %0 or even negative.  See my article about the Rolling Liquidity Bubble.

We had 3 rapid succession booms.  Internet / Real Estate / Oil.  How does one explain this? unDemocrats have a neurotic hatred of oil so there’s probably a surfeit of regulation in that area.  Yet oil boomed and is still relatively high at 100 US dollar per barrel.

What explains events?  I think its effective 0% interest rates.  When interest rates are too low people can afford to go lightly into them without the due diligence of intense worry.  Money got slung around in excess.  Momentum patterns set up in internet, housing and then oil.  When the speculators see a momentum pattern if they have sufficient liquidity they buy in and reinforce that pattern.  When you have excessive money supply a momentum pattern is bound to set up somewhere as people search for a way to increase their wealth.   People have survival instincts.  They do this naturally!  You want people to be suicidal ??? 

Speculators speculate.  That is what they do. Oh yes and you too are a speculator if you have ever bought anything for any reason.  Thus it makes no sense  to point fingers and say "Dirty low down speculators".   It only makes you look like an IQ challenged liberal.  It makes no sense to point your fingers at Barnie Frank and the unDemocrats.  unDemocrats do what unDemocrats do and that is skim off the casino like the mobsters they are.     There is only one form of regulation that prevents these speculative momentum patterns:  Meaningful interest rates !    You want to stop the skimmers?  Shut down the casino with meaningful interest rates.   No politician is going to go for that option.  It has to be forced upon them.   The 70’s only gave way to the 80’s after interest rates shot up and put the game to an end.    You can be assured that the current era of easy money will only end after the same sort of sequence.

Thus we play with fire if the terms of any of these gargantuan bailouts are too easy.  Unfortunately Its not realistic for me to ask that the offending entities be left to go out of business as no one asks my opinion.   If it were up to me their assets would be auctioned off to people with money.  The people with money right now are the last men standing.  They avoided the mistakes.   Who better to entrust?  The government? Please.  That’s crazy talk.

In the mean time we are hamstringing our financial sensing apparatus by banning short selling.  Most stock holders do not study companies intently.  They buy the stock on the advice of someone they know.   The options traders do us great favors by studying intently these companies.  For if you are an options trader and do not do your homework you soon have a new profession.

I tried installing the wp-classifieds plugin.  When I did I received the following error message:

   Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in …..   /wp-includes/functions.php on line 1052

Where the …. continuation is the first part of my URL which will differ from yours.  When I de-installed this plug in my top page wordpress theme was messed up.  It was rendered very narrow and I still had the above error line listed twice before the page rendering.  

In order to get the theme back to normal I went into the DESIGN menu and re-selected my theme.  After that the rendering was back to normal.

I really want to try this plugin but will need the authors assistance before I can do this.  http://forgani.com/wpclassified-plugins/