Tag Archives: government

Government’s Gotta Regulate What A Man’s Gotta Do

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It is taking home buyers longer to get a mortgage, which some in the real-estate industry say is the result of new federal rules meant to make mortgage terms easier to understand.

It wasn’t broke, and mortgages were moving as much apace as this Obama Recovery permitted, but it also wasn’t regulated. Government abhors a control vacuum.

Mortgages took an average of 49 days to close in November…the longest closing time since February 2013….

That’s only a three day increase over October, but it’s an entirely unnecessary and a completely government caused delay.

The rules…require lenders to give borrowers final terms of a loan at least three business days before closing to ensure they have time to understand the agreement.

Never mind that consumers already can walk away from any purchase contract, including mortgage contracts, within three days after signing—the “cooling off” period.

Advocates for the changes say they are a common-sense response to the housing crisis, during which it became apparent that many borrowers didn’t understand the ramifications of terms such as teaser rates or growing principal balances.

Of course a Liberal will say it’s common sense to regulate. It couldn’t possibly be common sense to educate instead.

The outcome of this demand to regulate anything and everything is more than just a delay in closing. Sales of existing homes have fallen sharply, 10.5% in November, the first month these wonderful new regulations have been in place, compared to October.

Who Doesn’t Trust the PRC Government?

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Recall late last summer when the People’s Republic of China’s stock market melted down over the PRC government’s interference in currency exchange rates and its subsequent failures to handle the stock market result of that. In a Wall Street Journal article centered on a different matter was this little tidbit [emphasis added].

While China’s main stock index is up 20% since August, it is still down 33% from its June peak. About 15% of Chinese stocks remain suspended from trading, and trading volumes are at one-third of their June levels.

Hmm….

How Convenient

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The State Department has told Senate investigators it cannot find backup copies of emails sent by Bryan Pagliano, the top Hillary Clinton IT staffer who maintained her email server but has asserted his Fifth Amendment right and refused to answer questions on the matter.

And

State officials told the Senate Judiciary Committee in a recent closed-door meeting that they could not locate what’s known as a “.pst file” for Pagliano’s work during Clinton’s tenure, which would have included copies of the tech expert’s emails[.]

That’s interesting for another reason. A PST file is what Microsoft’s Outlook emailer uses to aggregate and store sent and received emails that are handled by Outlook; it’s not any sort of industry standard. Thunderbird, which I use, uses EML or MSF or…, depending on the vintage Thunderbird being used. Other emailers use other storage means. Why is State carefully looking only for PST files? Outlook is the State-mandated emailer, but State knows full well that other emailers also are used by State personnel and “consultants.”

The second supports my suspicion of the first: how hard is State looking, really?

“Should You Fear the ETF?”

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That’s the headline question of Ari Weinberg’s piece in the Sunday Wall Street Journal.

It may be time to re-examine the entire ETF ecosystem,

said SEC Commissioner Luis Aguilar. Fellow Commissioner Kara Stein echoed the scheme:

Now is the time to be asking the hard questions about ETFs[.]

The article is well worth reading in its entirety; there are a number of good points regarding what an investor should look for in considering an ETF investment.

However, these cautions are not unique to ETFs; all investment vehicles need such careful consideration and similar questions answered. Government need not get involved here, beyond enforcing transparency so that investors—us Americans—can make informed decisions. Or foolish ones: that’s our prerogative, and no government can legitimately interfere to protect us from ourselves. Government can do that much only by taking our freedoms from us, and it can do that much only by imposing its definitions of appropriate decisions on us. Which is to say, only the men in government can do that much and only by taking our freedoms from us and by imposing their own, personally beneficial definitions of appropriateness on us.

No.

We’ll make our own decisions, thank you. And, through the aggregation of us, Mr Free Market will deal with the risks and gains of ETFs.

There’s Containment, and There’s Containment

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Recall President Barack Obama’s claim, on the morning of the Daesh’s terrorist attacks in Paris, that Daesh was contained.

Now he’s saying he was right in that assessment:

[H]e insisted that the reason he said they’re contained, hours before terror teams launched deadly raids across Paris, is because “they control less territory than they did last year.”

That may be marginally true: the Kurds have successfully pushed toward Raqqa in Syria, and they’ve driven Daesh from Sinjar in Iraq.

How important is that bit of geography, though? Daesh has expanded from attacks within and at the periphery of the geography it holds to attacks in two different continents—the airliner bombing in Egypt and those Paris attacks.

Physically contained? Geographically contained, maybe. Maybe. But plainly not physically contained—Egypt and France. And plainly not contained as a practical matter.

It’s hard to believe that neither Obama’s echo chamber nor Obama don’t understand this.