Harry Reid believes that out Southern Border is secure

Yep, exactly. A union can also make a great worker into a lazy worker as well. I've seen it happen.

Yes, let's look at it. The latest data says that working hours compared with the Bush average are down a MASSIVE 6 minutes per week.

Of course these days employers are finding ways to get that extra six minutes for free, by, for example, expecting employees to monitor and respond to emails on nights and weekends.

From Boilerman's link!
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Gee, I guess that means that from 1930 to about 2004 or so, we just had a peachy keen Fed, right? Um no, that's utter bullshit.

Repealing Glass Steagall and letting the banks turn Wall Street and the home mortgage market into a big lottery caused the Great Recession. Us liberals opposed the repeal.

Oh bullshit on you. The Fed not only turned a recession into the Great Depression, they almost did it again with the Great Recession.

Glass Steagall didn't even apply to the worst offenders. AIG? no. Freddy & Fanny? No. Bear Stearns? No. Lehman? No? Morgan Stanley? No. Goldman? No. GMAC? No. And you think there would have been no Great Recession if only Glass Steagall hadn't been repealed? Naïve at best.

However without Greenspan's loose money policy, low capital requirements and abdication of the Fed's responsibility to oversee banks this couldn't have happened. There would have been no housing bubble to begin with. That's the root cause. No bubble...no huge banking losses....for the Investment houses or the Banks.

But it was a perfect storm with other culprits too:

Foolish Home owners who used their home equity as an ATM (With Greenspan's Help)
Consumers who went into major credit card debt...because it was easy to do.(With Greenspan's help)
House and Senate Banking Committees who never uttered a peep until the collapse. Thanks Barney.
The bubble and bust in oil markets with absurdly low margin requirements
Irresponsible Lenders who were only in it long enough to package a loan for the next sucker institution.
Criminal Credit Rating Agencies that were more interested in business opportunities than fairly rating credit.
The Commodities Futures Act that allowed the derivatives markets to be completely unregulated. (Also pimped by Alan Greenspan).

Each of these played as big a role as the Glass Steagall repeal...but none bigger than Alan Greenspan's Federal Reserve. I imagine in another 70 years they'll admit it. Like they admitted they caused a recession to become the Great Depression 70 years after the fact.

Milton Freidman and Anna Schwartz in their econ classic "A Monetary History of the United States" proved the Fed was responsible for the Great Depression. In 2000 Ben Bernanke finally admitted Friedman was right:

"I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again". I think the Fed found a way to 'do it again'....but hey that's just my opinion.

And as to why the recovery is so slow and shallow, I place that on Greenspan's Fed too. His monetary policy encouraged huge levels of consumer debt. Then the Crash... As the economy recovers, consumers pay off debt rather than save or spend...because they have to. So my theory is that the Marginal Propensity to Consume has declined because of unprecedented levels of consumer debt---facilitated by Greenspan.

And who were major customers of Bear Stearn, AIG and so on? The commercial banks that would have been more highly regulated under GS.

But I should have also given credit to the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Regulation kept Wall Street solvent for about 75 years. Deregulation almost killed it.

I think you're wrong on that. The banks would have been the customers of these investment houses under Glass Steagall as well. They were getting AAA paper which satisfied all the requirements for tier 1 capital.

What bad practices that we witnessed would have been prevented if Glass–Steagall was still on the books? Bad underwriting? No. Questionable Mortgage Backed Securities? No. Consumers borrowing every cent they could on HELOCs? No. Consumers financing houses with liar loans and 0 down with teaser rates? No. As I already pointed out the biggest violators wouldn't have changed either. The worst players were NOT banks and not subject to G/S.

And let's not forget the supply side of this equation...credit driven malinvestment. Home builders were all the rage...buying up land and planting down castles....build that house....filp that house. Look what was happening in Vegas. City Center, Echelon, Cosmo, Fountainbleau + all the home developments. It was a microcosm of the economy. We managed to build up a huge oversupply and over capacity in many industries...but especially building. Based on what? Low interest rates. Easy Credit.

At some point it became clear that our credit driven boom was unsustainable. That's when housing prices crashed, builders went out of business, bank loan portfolios start to stink, aggregate demand collapesed and it all spiraled downward from there. Would Glass Steagall have prevented any of that? I don't see how. Sure a few major banks would have had better balance sheets and required a few billion less in TARP bailouts.....but that would have had almost 0 impact on the REAL economy....which was destined for this disaster because the Fed gave consumers short run incentive to over borrow and over spend and businesses incentives to overbuild. At some point the piper is always paid.

Now, the bubble couldn't have happened without too much money in the economy for far too long. The recession would have happened anyway with or without Glass Steagall. It's part of the 'Business Cycle'. It was made far worse by our Federal Reserve....similar to the 1930's...only they did it by inflating the money supply when they shouldn't have instead of restricting it when they shouldn't have. It's always all about the money.

You know Milton Friedman thought that constant tinkering with the money supply would lead to calamity. He eventually recanted this position because the 'Maestro' had created such an illusion of long term stability. Friedman just passed away a couple of years before he was proven right again. Well, it probably won't be generally accepted for a few more decades, but proven right IMHO.

And while I'm at it I'll add on a secondary impact of the aforementioned loose money policy. After the financial meltdown, Wall Street money poured into commodities markets creating a second asset bubble in the oil market. This speculative rise in prices over a sustained period of time did as much harm to the economy as the actual financial crisis in my opinion. The US economy runs on oil. Drive the price up and slow the economy down. Do it right when you're reeling from the housing bubble bust and banking crisis and it's a compounder. I'm sure forkush will also blame this on a lack of regulation...and there may be some merit in that position as well.....but I see the root cause as another case of too many dollars chasing too few goods.

So what is the real answer you might ask. Thank you for asking. It's pretty simple really. A constitutional amendment that requires a balanced federal budget along with growing the money supply at a reasonable constant rate.....based on population growth for example or maybe even just keep money supply growth at 0 and let the dollar strengthen over time.

Now this wont stop recessions or bad actors in the economy. It will make everything more predictable, help to prevent these credit driven asset bubbles from taking down major sectors of the economy and smooth out the tops and bottoms of the business cycle. Capitalism hates uncertainty....even more than over-regulation.

And don't get me wrong...there's nothing wrong with smart laws that really protect market integrity....It's just compared to a mismanaged money supply and an incompetent oversight regime; new regulations (or old ones for that matter) just pale in significance.

Sorry this is so lengthy, but I got on a roll.

Ok...and one more thing. Forkey claims the Great Recession was caused by repealing and rewriting sections of a 1930's law. That eventually allowed banks to participate in more exotic investments via bank holding companies and non bank subsidiaries of bank holding companies. An example of a bank holding company is Bank of America Corporation.

Along with that rewrite, a specific organization was tasked with the Supervision and Regulation of these holding companies and their non bank subsidiaries. None other than Alan Greenspan's Federal Reserve....Yes. Alan Greenspan's Federal Reserve.

Forkey wants you to believe that a lack of regulations caused the banking crisis. How about a lack of Supervision? And where was the Democrat controlled House and Senate Banking Committees in the year leading up to the crash? Where was FDIC? Where was Treasury? Where was OCC? Where was President Bush? Who was warning the American People of the pending banking disaster? Who was taking steps to prevent it from happening? NO ONE. What good are more regulations when the regulators are incompetent boobs? Who in Government got fired for their role in shirking their fiduciary duties to the American people? Zip. Who in private enterprise got arrested for the fraudulent behavior of the Credit Rating Agencies and Underwriters? Nobody.

That's all I swear.

Meanwhile, . . . back to border security:

Do You Feel Safe ?

I feel safe in my home town, however I was with a friend and his mom over the weekend. She's doesn't feel safe in Green Valley, AZ as there are illegals tromping through her area every week.

I've been in a Chicago Mexican neighborhood that I believe had a far higher crime rate due to the illegals and gang members. I did not fee comfortable there.

Ha ! ...
Ha! ....
BWAAAAAAAAAA.......HAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
James....BWA....
James O'BwaaaaHAHAHAHAHA
James O'Keefe ! Hahahahahahahaah

Oh, thats great. Really. Thanks for that.
10 bucks says he filmed that video in the airplane kiddie ride at the Supermarket. No..wait...whats that behind him? Is that the parking lot at the Silverton?

For once I wish the Mexico border had armed machine guns. Now that would be a video worth buying.

But if you really want to get freaked out...check out this.....