6 JUL 2010, Tuesday

• WARNING:  Rant coming...Why government interference in markets never works.  
• For example, let's consider the housing market.  Congress attempted to engineer a "social outcome" and sponsored hundreds of "affordable home" programs which drove prices skyward.  And, ironically, now that housing prices are coming down and becoming more affordable, government is doing everything they can to stop the slide.  Does this make sense?
• Cash for Clunkers: program to take older cars off the road that burn gasoline.  Well, duh!  Hello...cars burn gasoline.  So, they took the cars out of the used car market and DESTROYED them.  Huh?  Perfectly usable assets and you crushed them and have driven prices up in the used car market via a government forced shortage?  What about the folks that need cheap transport?  You know, like the kids coming out of college with big loan debt into a crappy employment scenario.  Heck you could have raffled those cars off to graduating college kids and made back some of the $4,000 per car paid out.
• Bank Bailout:  I see...so we identify the banks that couldn't manage their portfolio and we then shove more money into them trusting that they'll now know how to manage their portfolio.  Heck!  Makes sense to me....NOT!
• For every policy the government makes there comes an unintended consequence.  Government, once again, jumps in with new corrective policies to meet the first unintended consequence which lead to other unintended consequences....
• Do you sense the trap of allowing market manipulation by the government?  How funny that the old communist and socialist countries are running out of the burning building and our current leadership wants to run in.
• We have learned nothing.  The script we're following is just like the FDR days...it prolonged the downturn then and it appears to be doing the same now.  
• "Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."

 

• "Drat that blogger!  I'll get you and your little dog, too!" cried the Wicked Witch of the West.