YouTube – President Obama: My Wish List.

Asian investors won’t buy debt and mortgage-backed securities from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac until they carry explicit U.S. guarantees, similar to those given on bonds issued by Bank of America Corp. or Citigroup Inc.

The risks are too great without a pledge that the U.S. will repay the debt no matter what, according to Hideo Shimomura, chief fund investor in Tokyo for Mitsubishi UFJ Asset Management Co., and other bondholders and analysts in Japan, China and South Korea interviewed by Bloomberg. Overseas resistance may hamper U.S. efforts to hold down home-loan rates and shore up the nation’s largest mortgage-finance companies.

Even after President Barack Obama vowed on Feb. 18 to sink as much as $400 billion of capital into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, double the original commitment, “there is still a concern that there is no guarantee” from the government, said Shimomura, who oversees $4 billion in non-yen bonds for the arm of Japan’s largest bank.

“Looking at the risk, they’re not so attractive,” he said. “We need a guarantee before we’ll buy.”

Foreign investors sold $170 billion of agency debt and securities in the second half of 2008, the largest amount since the Treasury began tracking sales in 1977, according to the most recent data. Asians, the biggest non-U.S. block of owners in the category, unloaded $70 billion worth from July through December, after scooping up $55 billion in the second quarter and being net buyers during much of the last decade.

via Bloomberg.com: Exclusive.

BlockShopper v. Jones Day: The right of Web sites to link. – By Wendy Davis – Slate Magazine.

You’re a politician. Better yet, you’re the president of the United States, at the height of centralized government power in this country. You take office at the beginning of what is seen as a new era. Books have been written about you, and titles bestowed upon you, such as “Child of Promise,” or “Hope” of America. You have the willingness of the masses behind you.

Where do you turn for your ideas on economic policy?

Answer: You turn to the economist who unabashedly validates the massive expansion of your own power, who thinks that elite intellectuals like you are the only ones who deserve the power to run the world’s greatest political and economic nation: John Maynard Keynes.

Read the rest: logos redux :: Keynesian crack for political coke-addicts :: February :: 2009.

After all the ghastly statism of the Bush years, you might think that the Left would back off from using power to achieve its aims. Instead, they have learned nothing. The Left has been lying in wait for its chance. As the Obama people entered the White House, it was as if they found a closet labeled “failed ideas of the past.” They opened it and the contents spilled everywhere. They started grabbing things and putting them in the regulatory books and in legislation.

What an amazing pile of junky, worn-out, bogus policy ideas Equal pay for equal work. Infrastructure spending. More money to the public schools. Socialized medicine. Rock-bottom interest rates. Welfare Every wish granted by government. Down with business. Down with business failures. Curbs on fat-cat pay. Down with Wall Street. Turn on the money spigots. Expropriate the expropriators. Subsidies for every lifestyle that flies in the face of bourgeois prejudice.

Thus are we again reminded of what a profound threat the Left represents to liberty. Its been more than a decade now since weve seen this at work, and probably longer really. Clinton was a pain, but he was smart enough not to take his reigning ideological framework too seriously. He actually showed some deference to reality from time to time.

The Obamaites are different. They are woefully ignorant of economics. They seem to actually believe all that socialist claptrap that has provided an excuse for innumerable foreign dictators: the idea that government is the source of wealth and can make anything happen with the push of a button.

via The Left in Power – Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. – Mises Institute .

Before the invention of recording devices, there were no professional musicians. Until they had a way to get recordings made and distributed via a label, there simply were no professional musicians. And the only way there can be professional musicians in the future is if the technological development, that led to recordings being made, stops from that point on.

Right?

YouTube – Stimulis: Because all economies have performance issues.

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Cash 4 Gold would like to melt down and recast their reputation.

Hat tip: Chris

It seems that most Christians assume that a Biblical worldview necessarily includes being a Luddite.

That assumption gives away the show.

via Worldview Escapism « Wedgewords.