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I bank with them, sound management with sane mortgage lending standards. We'll be lucky if it ends with subprime, but I think option ARMs in the ALT-A segment over the next 9-12 months is the next wave in this mess. Can't remember who brought it up, but the gist was to have the...

All hail the Übertrader.

Right prices have to come down relative to wages, makes perfect sense. Tough to control prices when you buy so much that's imported. Tougher still when real income is down close to 50% due to the dollar. Then again, none of it matters if you're one of the people who've been down-sized...

Decent idea, if everyone's mortgage was still held by the local bank. Then again, if they did, we wouldn't be in this situation. Anwyay, how do you pull that off when mortgages are packaged up and sold as fixed-income debt instruments to the UK, Germany, Japan, China, and so on?

Hey dipstick, I came from a similar background, BFD. I didn't say you need to learn about success and failure, I said you need to re-examine your idea of it.

What you've just described is exactly how the public sector is compensated, an objective computation based on job specification, pay grade and length of service along with an annual performance bonus. Do you really want the entire workforce to become government employees, if not in name, in...

This isn't about those who've squandered the opportunity to get ahead, they deserve what they don't get out of life. No, this is about treating wage earners "equally" when they never got an equal opportunity at success Take the inner city kid who gets stellar grades in a public high school...

Anyone who thinks a percentage flat tax is fair hasn't taken into account that there are three dimensions to compensation. The first is the socioeconomic ladder. It's disproportionately harder to move up when you're farther down at the start. The second is income growth opportunity. Blue...

It's flat because there are no deductions or categorization of income. It's progressive because the rate is indexed to the distribution of income. Tax deductions create problems. There's incentives for special interests to game the system. It also increases overhead due to the need to...

How do you go about valuing 10 acres of: - Undeveloped, Louisiana swampland. - corn field, fallow - corn field, active - rural single-family homes - suburban single-family homes - high-density, low-income city housing - low-density, high-income city housing - occupied by an auto...

Prove it. Provide one example of where it's ever worked.

It does nothing to address the unequal distribution of income and it would drive manufacturing offshore. Which is exactly what's happened every time a consumption tax is implemented. You don't have to look no further than the destruction that was caused by Bush I's luxury tax back in the...

Er, the larger point seems to be lost on you. It's in the Corn Belt, who's left to grow the corn? The electoral college exists because of the inequities that grow due to unevenly distributed population. We have a representative democracy because of the fear of the tyranny of the...

Less effective than having congressional term limits and campaign spending reform. Same with a line item veto. Better to have a one bill, one item amendment. No single person should be able to override bits and pieces. All legislation should stand on it's own to live or die in Congress...

Yeah, that'd work. The "townships" of Manhattan, Chicago, L.A., etc. would prosper while places like Podunk in the Corn Belt would wither.

Great question, a lot of people what to know exactly what the Fed has taken in collateral for some of the loans they've made recently. And, according to Bernanke's testimony on Monday, all of the collateral they've taken on is supposed to be low-risk, high-quality debt instruments. IMHO...

That's a fairly generic treatment, much of which isn't applicable to the way it's done in the U.S. If you want to rely on Wikipedia then you should refer to this instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve A pretty good treatment of the components of the U.S. money supply is...

Credit doesn't have to be paid off with currency, you could pay it off via re-financing.

Whoa! You're the one saying the U.S. government is already monetizing it's debt directly into foreign currency. Still waiting for you to provide evidence for that...

Not all money is equal. The reason we have narrow and broad components to the money supply is due to the fact that while all currency is money, not all money is currency. The money the Fed requires a bank to keep in it's reserves must be in some form of currency. But, the money created...