Cramer Responds to New White House Meme

cramerWe’ve been talking about Cramer, Suze, and Santelli recently and listening.  They’ve stepped into the arena in defense of the US Everyman and the investments we make in our homes, our pensions, and our children.  These folks have made money but are not the high rollers that gambled away our savings, drug the weakest among us into bad mortgages, and bankrolled the campaigns of Obama, Biden, Dodd, Grahm, Leach and a bunch of other pols who did not and do not have our interests at heart.   When Cramer started talking about Obama-proofing your investment portfolio and finally begged POTUS to stop ignoring the messages screaming out of Wall Street Markets, he became just another target for the Blogkrieg Botz.  Two days ago, I outlined what I saw was a concerted on-line effort to assassinate his character and professional standing.  The MSM has also been repeating what was sure the latest Axelrove meme.  Cramer doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  Cramer makes money off you at your expense.  He’s one of those bad guys.  Meanwhile, the infusions of taxpayer dollars to the real culprits behind the meltdown as well as the complete lack of any regulatory reform sallies forth unabated.  Barney (subprime mortgages r us) Frank is now calling for a super regulator and is planning on holding ‘hearings’.  Just what we need. More hearings while the pensions and home values of every one of us continue their decline.

Today, Cramer hit back and I say more power to him.

The lines are drawn pretty clearly: If you can help people make money to be able to retire, enjoy life, pay for college, pay down debt, etc., you are a “good guy,” so to speak. If you take the other side of the trade, you are, well, let’s say, a less favored fellow. And if you gun for the gigantic investor class that is out there that includes 90 million people in one form or another, whether it be 401(k)s or individual stocks or pension plans, then you are on my enemies list.

I am a member of that ‘gigantic investor class’.  But it also includes people like Penny Pritzker who was head of Obama’s Finance Committee during his election and is now one of his advisers.  If you’d like to read about her and her part in the Financial Crisis, just Google away.  It’s every where.  Just read about this FAILED BANK that was really one of the first that greed brought down.  At the time it was one of the most expensive bank closings on record costing in the realm of about $500 million. Of course, that sounds like chicken feed now. But she’s just typical of the mega rich that gamed the system.  She’s also the  typical mega investor that funded Obama and owns him lock stock and barrel. That’s probably why the Blogzkrieg Bots are on the warpath of the likes of the Cramers of the world.  They’re messing with the Obamessiah’s imagine and that could cost the megainvestors in Obama their tax payer bailouts.

First, they eviscerate your character and your professional ability.

I am a fight-not-flight guy, so I was on my hackles when I heard White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ answer to a question about my pointed criticism of the president on multiple venues, including the Today Show.

“I’m not entirely sure what he’s pointing to to make some of the statements,” Gibbs said about my point that President Obama’s budget may be one of the great wealth destroyers of all time. “And you can go back and look at any number of statements he’s made in the past about the economy and wonder where some of the backup for those are, too.”

They do it in the Media, they do it from their podiums, they hire folks on Craig lists to visit blogs to convince every one there is a swell of outrage for the Obamessiah.

Then they send out the message that Cramer isn’t acting in your interest.  Obama is the one fighting the nasty ‘bankers’.  His program is going to help every one of you little guys.

Gibbs went on to say, “If you turn on a certain program, it’s geared to a very small audience. No offense to my good friends or friend at CNBC, but the president has to look out for the broader economy and the broader population.”

How much I wish it were true right now that stocks played less of a role in peoples’ lives. But stocks, along with housing, are our principal forms of wealth in this country. Only the people who have lifetime tenure, insured solid pensions and rent homes but own no stocks personally are unaffected. Sure that’s a lot of people, but believe me, they aspire to have homes and portfolios. If we only want to help those who have no wealth to destroy, we are not helping the majority of Americans; we are not helping the broader population.

Then third,  it’s the nastiness that he inherited from Bush that’s causing all these problems and Cramer’s just a closet Republican, a Racist, a R@tf*cker!

You can argue, of course, that Obama inherited one of the worst hands in the world. I had been a relentless critic of the Bush administration’s “stewardship” of the economy, calling repeatedly for changes to avert the disaster that I saw coming, although perhaps Gibbs hasn’t seen my CNBC meltdown. Seemed pretty prescient to me.

I, like everyone else, have made less authoritative and wrong statements in the past, but that rant still stands as something that I am sure everyone in the Bush administrations’ Treasury and Fed listened to. My calls to sell 20% of your stocks in September at Dow 11,000 and then all of your stock if you need the money for the next five years at Dow 10,000 in October, might have eluded Gibbs, too.

I said it here just a few days ago and I will say it again.  There is a very active proproganda wing of this POTUS.

rise_Hillary, on March 5th, 2009 at 3:00 am

You are right about the paid bots only these are a whole new crew. Criag’s List today had a job posting for Bloggers Needed. They are offering $5.00 per finished conversation…whatever that means. It’s listed under the computer jobs. I do believe this is recruitment to become an Obot. Thanks to the stimulus porkulus, jobs are being created in this sector. {{snark}}
So as they hire more kids on taxpayer dime, you will see more manufactured Obots. They only get paid per conversation so remember to ignore them and they will quit their new bot jobs when they don’t get paid for a ‘completed’ conversation. Spread the word.

I can’t tell you how many folks have come to my site today to say they’ve noticed the uptick in that propaganda effort.  Here’s the type of criticism they don’t want to hear from Cramer who supported Hillary Clinton in the primary.

But Obama has undeniably made things worse by creating an atmosphere of fear and panic rather than an atmosphere of calm and hope. He’s done it by pushing a huge amount of change at a very perilous moment, by seeking to demonize the entire banking system and by raising taxes for those making more than $250,000 at the exact time when we need them to spend and build new businesses, and by revoking deductions for funds to charity that help eliminate the excess supply of homes.

We had a banking crisis coming into this regime, but now every area is in crisis. Each day is worse than the previous one for this miserable economy and while Obama’s champions cite the stimulus plan, it’s really just a hodgepodge of old Democratic pork and will not create nearly as many manufacturing or service jobs as we hoped. China’s stimulus plan is the model; ours is the parody.

And here’s the money line from the mad money man:

If that makes me an enemy of the White House, then call me a general of an army that Obama may not even know exists — tens of millions of people who live in fear of having no money saved when they need it and who get poorer by the day.

Hey Cramer, Obama knows the army is out there.  Be prepared to be called a deadender for Hillary.  Have you got the call-outs for being racist yet?  How about a ‘bitter knitter’?  You’re not a woman, but if they can find something akin to calling you a dried up old va-jay jay get ready for that too.  Because there are a lot of folks out there, and the purpose of propaganda and the Blogzkrieg Bots is to silence you.   They will try to intimidate you into silence.  Don’t let them.


The Blogzkrieg Bots

splashAxelrove must’ve sensed a disturbance in the force because I believe the Blogzkrieg Bots are back at work in sites where the Obamessiah’s economic message has been questioned.  Most of the frontpagers and bloggers that I know were chased off various blogs when they harshed the Obama mellow or dared suggest that Hillary’s campaign was better, not racist, and worthy of support. Recently, a set of anonymous email exchanges were released at Liberal Rapture.  One writer of the exchange has self identifed themself (James Kunstler) and verified the authenticity of the exchange.  Those of us who have dealt with the spam filter and comments in moderation can give our take on the Blogzkrieg under taken by the Obama campaign which apparently still is in full force to stop any potential anti-obama Buzzkill.  Here’s the relevant exchange from a former Obama supporter that I’d like to reference.

I can also say how shocked I became at the really dishonest tactics he used, from race-baiting to caucus fraud to paying cyber stalkers to terrorize pro-Clinton writers and website owners.

The cyberstalking continues.  Yesterday, I blogged about CNBC’s Kramer.  I have to say that I’m a value investor, unlike Kramer, and do not follow any of his individual stock picks.  I do think the man has an excellent grasp of and background in market psychology.  I started listening to him more when he came out on Ellen as a  Hillary supporter.  He made it clear he thought she’d be best for the economy. So yesterday, I wrote on his rant on cnbc.  This wasn’t his first rant but one the most eye-popping to date.  All last week he was talking about Obama-proofing your investment portfolio.

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Martin Wolf on Fareed Zakaria: Worth a View

FT's Martin Wolf

FT's Martin Wolf

I’m not one to recommend CNN programming these days. Actually, I’m not one to recommend programming on any of the TV stations these days.  However, I  find FT’s Martin Wolf one of the few voices of economic reason in the world. He was interviewed on Fareed Zakaria’s program today.  It’s one of the few CNN programs left with an international twist. They’ve watered down most of the new shows to the point I consider People Magazine a better source of global news.  This program will be repeated this evening at 5 est so you may want to try to watch.  Also, Canadian PM Harper is on the program.  Both the Canadians and the Brit’s have economists for PMs.  It’s amazing to listen to his interview because it’s full of wonky specifics rather than hopey changeyness–that as Martin Wolf says–lacks boldness of vision and action in its actualization.  Listen to Harper.  It’s an amazing contrast to some one who needs a teleprompter with words penned by a 27 year old frat boy to form a complete sentence.

Fareed Zakaria never insults the intelligence of his audience. That is also a reason I enjoy his program.  He wants to stimulate discussions and thought.  He has a juicy wonderful list of books that he recommends.  This week’s selection is a biography of Keynes.  You might know him as the father of economics and government stimulus, but he was also a very interesting character.  He frequently attended white house dinners with

JM Keynes

JM Keynes

his husband of the moment and was known for writing some fairly outrageous social and political commentary.  The book is: John Maynard Keynes, Economist, Philosopher, Statesman” by Robert Skidelski. I’m putting it on my summer reading list.

One of the primary reasons that I listen to Martin Wolf is that he is English so he has no political dogs in the hunt for a return to global prosperity.  His focus is purely on getting out of this mess.  That is why I’m listening to him even more than Paul Krugman.  Krugman may have tenure at Princeton and a Noble prize, but much of his column has to do with maintaining popularity here at home.  After all, he won’t get invited to all those sexy parties if he criticizes the home team too shrilly.   Brit Wolf gives the Obama economic team an English B for a grade. That would translate roughly to a D here in the United States.  He says that it’s not that the talent isn’t there because it is very much there.  Wolf says that there is a time that calls for bold action.  This was a time when bold action could be taken.  He also says what we have gotten is basically carefully parsed politics as usual which is anything but bold.

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It’s Mardi Gras: You know, the Party before Penitence?

dscn0382I’m sitting here watching the kids get their costumes together for the big day of celebration called Fat Tuesday.  That’s the day when you pull out all the stops because you know lean days (no meat, no alcohol, no fun) starts tomorrow.  I guess I must be in hyper-metaphorical mode because it’s really striking me this year as a good fable.  Tonight at midnight, the Krewe of Klean will take to the streets of the French Quarter to shovel all the leftovers into the dump trucks. The police will ride their horses down Bourbon street and announce that the Party’s over.  They arrest anyone who want the party to continue at that point.  You can either spend Ash Wednesday doing penitence in your bed or the Parish Prison.

When I first got out of graduate school I went to work at a small bank.  I was soon lured to the biggest Savings and Loan in the middle of the country.   I’d been working on loan pricing models and arranging bank income statements into an exercise called spread management and asset-liability matching.   Big time company working for a big time CEO!

I have to admit, the only person that I really knew that was a CEO was my dad and he was great.  His employees loved him.  He gave them wonderful benefits and when they had sick children or they were gravely ill,  he gave them time off with pay.  His office manager was openly gay.  His mechanics and body technicians were a diverse group for small town Iowa.  Most of them worked for my dad the entire 30 years and loved him as much as I did. From the time he bought it when I was one, until he retired when I was in my 30s, the entire employee base was my extended family.  So, I entered the business world thinking this was the model for management and boy, was I wrong.

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WTF? Pre-Determined Stress Tests?

I finally have a bit of time to catch up on reading.  I’m hosting 10 of my youngest daughter’s college friends for Mardi Gras in a very small house and it’s as wild as it sounds.  I read this on Naked Capitalism and just didn’t even know what to say.   So I’m going to throw it to you. Now mind you, this is an economics site and not a political one.

We have been skeptical that the pending Treasury stress tests on banks, designed to ascertain their state of health, were inadequately staffed and therefore could not do the job properly. Our big concerns were that they had too few bodies to e test financial data versus underlying documentation adequately (usually done on a sampling basis) and they lacked the expertise (and perhaps the mandate) to vet risk models (which we all know have performed impeccably over the last two years.

Is it a test if the results are pre-determined? Apparently Team Obama thinks so.

I’ve been wondering what exactly this stress test was going to be myself and how they were going to pull it off.    I’ve worked in commercial banks, savings and loans, and at the Fed as well as the educational background and I’ve been scratching my head since it was first announced. No wonder the Obama administration is sounding so firm on the no nationalization issue. They’ve planned what they’re going to get ahead of time.

bank_crisis_03 This report and picture from CNBC.

Said one high-level official, “I think the market is missing that the whole intent of this process is to show that the banks have enough capital for even worse outcomes than we currently envision and to show there’s a program in place to give banks access to that capital if they need it.”

Yes, read it again. The process is to show us that the banks are okay.  No wonder there’s no discussion of the Swedish or German approach to Banking crises.  We’re going to be ‘shown’ everything is okay even under the ‘worse’ outcomes.  Details on the worst scenarios are supposed to be out on Wednesday, but really, we’ve heard this before. Remember I mentioned in my last thread that much of the definitions had to do with what type of stock (common, preferred, some hybrid) winds up flowing from the Treasury to the target banks?  Here’s another on the money paraphrase from the CNBC story.

The key misunderstanding in markets, officials believe, is how the public-private partnership will work and the way that new government capital, in the form of mandatory convertible preferred shares will become common equity.

One official said the public-private partnership will be voluntary so there will not be no mandate that banks offload assets at a loss. The official added that additional government capital will go into the banks as mandatory convertible preferred. Those shares remain preferred until realized losses and capital needs trigger conversion to common. As a result, the official said, the government may end up with a large stake in a given bank over a period of time, but it wont’ happen overnight.

May I suggest some new Savings Vehicles for the Obama Years?

pinky-money-bank-vintagemattresscookiejar8tallx7widelg