Consumers: September 2008 Archives

The Hound has been living in a recession for most of the past decade. If Republicans in the House want to take you all into one, as their president has warned, let them do it. Hope they and their party are ready to face the consequences in the failure Monday to protect the financial basics of the U.S. economy.

Unless you can't add, the financial markets have been taking a beating the last few months or more because of bad mortages, bad debt and bad management. It's a disaster movie befitting a Hollywood blockbuster. Trust me, feather merchants, this could get ugly. Better yet, don't trust me, trust your president, the Fed chairman and every banker from here to What Cheer, Iowa.

The consequences for Republicans, especially those who voted against the $700 billion bailout package is they get voted out and become the minority party for the next 30 years as they were until the GOP revolution of the 1980s. They can run, but they can't hide.

And, don't give The Hound the baloney about nobody bails out the taxpayers. When the taxpayers hold the power to issue business lines of credit, mortgages, car loans, just to name a few financial uses for lent money, then your opinion counts.

Besides, the government does bail out taxpayers. There's unemployment insurance, food stamps, disaster relief. This wouldn't be the first financial bailout. Remember the Resolution Trust Corp. of the '80s and the savings and loan debacle. The Hound was told several Lake County savings and loans got caught up in that financial nosedive.

Looks like the Republicans are holding pat in their crusade to save Main Street from the ills of Wall Street. Good luck because it's a little late for that. Hold on to your wallets folks, it'll be show time today on the Big Board.

Here's a shocker: A new study shows that the leading source of personal bankruptcies in recent years is caused by...overspending. If that's the case, we're living in a bankrupt country.

A professor in the graduate school of management at the University of California-Davis said that while illness and unemployment were the previous primary reasons for filing bankruptcy, Americans just like to spend and spend and spend. No, duh.

Now the government is bailing out mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which own or back about half the nation's mortgage debt, with a plan to inject up to $100 billion
in each of the government-chartered mortgage financiers. That helped the stock market on Monday, which saw stocks rise nearly 300 points. Nothing like gov'mint money to warm a banker's steel heart.

Back to the bankruptcy study, though. The study, which calls for bankruptcy law reform to prevent Americans from just running up debt, says such debt caused half of all recent bankruptcies, while being out of work caused 13 percent of filings and medical calamities, 5 percent.

The study also notes bankrupt households have bigger mortgages, bigger car loans and bigger credit card balances --- and earn half as much money --- than those who are solvent. Sounds like beside an obesity problem in the nation, we have a spending problem. But, then, so does the government.