ObamaCare, RyanCare, McConnellCare

First we have Obamacare, which is the law of the land, and will remain so unless Republicans get their act together.  Obamacare has doubled and tripled people's health insurance premiums, saddled them with $6000 co pays or deductibles,  cut workers hours from 40 down to 30 a week, and determined that small businesses stay small to avoid the killer costs that come when the 50th employee is employed.  Obamacare offers government handouts to some people sometimes.  How much and who is eligible is up to federal bureaucrats, who have 10,000 pages of Obamacare law in which to find words to justify what they want to do.  Which means the bureaucrats can do what ever they want to do.  And Obamacare tries to tax the healthcare industry to pay for healthcare; which doesn't work.  And the health insurance companies, after loosing barrels of money on Obamacare policies, are refusing to write new ones.
   Then we have a House bill to change some things.  It passed the House, just barely. Just what it does is unknown to me, although it is hard to imagine it being worse than Obamacare. 
   And the Senate is working on its own version of reform.  We don't know much about it, and Senate Leader McConnell has not been able to get the Republicans on board with it.  At a guess the Senate bill will be similar to the House bill, but since we don't know much about the House bill, that doesn't tell us voters much.  
   We voters elected Trump and the Republicans to fix Obamacare.  We don't understand just how that might happen, but we know we want the ridiculous co-pays to go away, and the premiums come back down to where they were before Obamacare.  And we want to have at least two health insurance companies competing for our business.  And we want to be able to buy "hospitalization only" insurance because it used to only cost $3000 a year whereas Obamacare's cover- everything policies cost four times as much.  A lot of people who are in good health, and have a little money in the checking account, like the idea of insurance only for the big expensive stuff, and pay the ordinary stuff out of pocket. 
   If the Republicans cannot get their act together, we voters will throw the bums out in 2018 and elect Democrats.  If the Republicans (the stupid party) does not understand that, good riddance. 

Swaps Rules to Get Revamp

Headline of a piece in today's Wall St Journal.  The global swaps market is $486 TRILLION.  Yikes.  I consider "swaps" to be a form of Wall St gambling.  Wall St is supposed to raise money to grow the economy, build factories, finance new construction, buy inventory, stuff that employs people and creates salable product.  Even the Journal was unable to describe how a "swap" works. 
   Much of the piece was about the Consumer Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)  whining about the sales data  being furnished to them by privately owned swaps data repositories.  As you might have guessed, each repository furnishes data in a different format.  CFTC hasn't bothered to write data swabber programs to put all the data into a common format for CFTC's programs.  Tough cookies CTFC.  Get your act together and fix the problem, don't waste everyone's time whining about it. 
   Apparently after Great Depression 2.0 Congress set up the reporting requirements "to help unwind failing market participants that posed a risk to the entire system"  By which they mean the taxpayer will bail out the swaps sellers next time the market goes south.  Why in God's name do we want to give a US government guarantee to Wall St gambling debts?  Let 'em go broke. 
   Our government at work.

The Economist writing about "The German Problem"

Sub title: "Why Germany's current account surplus is bad for the world economy".   The Economist goes on to write "At bottom, a trade surplus is an excess of national saving over domestic investment".   That's a crock.  Trade surpluses happen when you manage to sell abroad more stuff than you buy from abroad.  Having an array of good products at the right prices, helps with the sales end.  Having a good domestic supply of quality product helps keep imports down.  Germany has a lot of world class products, look at Mercedes, Porsche, VW, Lowenbrau, Airbus, and many others.  Who wants to buy an import when the domestic product is as good as you can get any where? 
   If the world wants to cut down on Germany's trade surplus, the world will have to offer products as good as or better than German products, at a competitive price. 
   Writing like this makes me wonder where the Economist's writers went to school.  If their economic writers are so deluded (in a magazine named the Economist!)  do their other writers know anything at all? 

You talk to everybody when you are running for President

Everybody.  They might vote for you, they might contribute money (in return for favors after the election), they might have intelligence (dirt) you can use, they might put in a good word for you, they might be planning a stab in the back.  You never know, so you talk to everybody you have time for.  You want to increase your candidate's name recognition, talking about him with everybody will increase it. 
   Given all that, I fail to see any interest in today's msm flap about Trump campaign workers, (Donald Trump Jr and Jared Kushner) talking with a low name recognition Russian lawyer.  So what? Everybody in the world wants something from the US, everybody in the world starts by talking to the presidential campaign people.  So what else is new? 

NBC's Beat the Press, my weekly dose of MSM

Chuck Todd was pushing the "Russian" story.  He thinks the Russians somehow influenced our election.  He advanced NO evidence.  Spent a lot of time on this narrative.  Then he trashed Trump over Trump's disparagement of US intel services.  US intel has made some major goofs, failing to predict the fall of the USSR, predicting that Saddam had nukes, leaking the fact that we were tapping Bin Ladin's satellite phone to the NYT, allowing Bradley Manning and Edward Snowdon free run of their classified, and others.  I have little faith in CIA or NSA anymore, and I don't see anything wrong with the President expressing doubts about US intel stories.  Chuck Todd has a problem with it, probably because a whole bunch of US intel people are Democrats who attempt to destabilize Republican administrations. 
   Then he read off a poll praising the MSM.  If you pay for the poll, the poll will say anything you like. 
   Then someone made this amazing statement "The base won't permit any bipartisanship".  I doubt that.  The base (either base) has some things they want, and other things they don't want.  Congresscritters who vote for (or fail to vote at all)  things the base wants, and against things the base doesn't want, will be voted out of office.  Just ask a bunch of Democrats who voted for Obamacare and are now out of office. 
  And finally there was a lot of talk condemning Trump for failing to take Putin to task over Russian election meddling.  Just how do they know this, when the meeting was just Trump, Putin, Secretary of State, Russian Foreign Minister and two interpreters is beyond me.  Did NBC bug the conference room?  Both Trump and Putin issued statements after the meeting.  I know Trump's statement would never fail to make Trump look good, and Putin's statement is likely a lie from end to end.  
  Anyhow back to real news on Fox News for me. 
  

647 Hp Mustang. Only $450,000

Looks sleek and hot.  Top speed of 216 mph.  That's smoking hot.  But the engine is a 3.5 liter V6???.  My Buick has a 3.5 liter V6.  Turbocharged and all,  what ever happened to the 427 V8 that won Le Mans 50 years ago.  Ford plans to build 250 a year.   For people that plan to race them, it's probably a deal.  For us ordinary folk, $450,000 is a helova lot of money for a car.

Fed Governor Urges Housing Finance Fix

Headline of a Wall St Journal piece.  Fed Reserve governor Jerome Powell wants more private investors to buy into Fanny and Freddy, so that next time Fanny and Freddy go bust, private investors will lose money rather than taxpayers.  Everyone always thought that Uncle Sam stood behind Fanny and Freddy even though the fine print in the enabling laws did not so state. This wide spread belief allowed Fanny and Freddy to borrow money on the credit of the United States, which meant they could raise money for 3-4%, really cheap.   But when Fanny and Freddy went bust in 2008, Uncle decided us taxpayers were on the hook for $140 billion to avoid besmirching the reputation of the US treasury.
    Fanny and Freddy didn't cause much trouble until the 1980's when they started buying mortgages off banks.  The real estate industry loved this, it made more mortgage money available. Sell a mortgage to Fanny or Freddy, and presto, the bank has the cash to make yet another mortgage.  Fanny and Freddy recovered the money by selling bonds on Wall St.  They said "Look, these bonds are 'backed' by real estate."  Suckers fell for this, and for a while the bonds sold like hotcakes.
   The banks, now that they could unload their mortgages started writing really bad mortgages, "sub prime" and "alt-A" to borrowers who would never be able to pay off the mortgage.  No matter, long as we dump this worthless mortgage on Fanny and Freddy we are OK.  This continued until the sucker investors wised up to the fact that "backed by real estate" meant nothing.  They didn't have the right to foreclose and repossess the real estate.  So the bonds stopped selling, and Fanny and Freddy went Chapter 11.  For $140 billion.  This touched off Great Depression 2.0.
   In actual fact, we ought to shut Fanny and Freddy down, for good.  We don't need them to "make more mortgage money available".   Mortgages are profitable and safe. We used to say "Safe as houses". If the borrower fails to pay, the lender gets the house.  Home mortgage borrowers are strongly motivated to keep up the payments, who wants to explain to a spouse that they are getting evicted?  Far more secure than the stock market.
  Shut down Fanny and Freddy.  The real estate industry (brokers, builders, appliance makers, lumber industry) will cry a lot, but  life will go on.