Picasa is being weird so sorry about the long string of photos! I would have preferred a collage!
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Reunion Photos...these are in reverse of when they happened...
Picasa is being weird so sorry about the long string of photos! I would have preferred a collage!
Week of My Birthday photos...
As I posted earlier, my Picasa is being weird so this is how it's going to be for now! A collage would have been more effecient, owell!
So much for my weekly blogging! Here's the scoop!
So last I posted about us it was the week before my birthday, which was a month ago! My PICASA is doing weird stuff so I can't make a collage to show all we have done in a more efficient way. This summer we've planned Monday movie day, Tuesday library day, Wednesday water day (swimming & such)and Friday field trip day. We have stuck to this as a general rule but have switched days when it suited us--summer is great like that! I had a great birthday, Tim took me out the night before to Texas Roadhouse and it was yummy, my sister had the kids at her house because she took them to Strawberry Days Rodeo and then straight home to her house. My mom took me out to lunch and shopping and Tim made me strawberry shortcake for dessert that night! We had Tim's family reunion with all 7 living siblings and their kids from Boston, MA, Fredrick, MD, Pflugerville, TX, San Antonio, TX and Boise, ID along with the locals! It was a blast! We started out Father's Day Sunday going to church together--we took up 6 rows (or pews), Gwen handled her class pretty good in the end! After church I visited my dad and then we went over to Tim's parents' for dinner and an open house type gathering with extended family so they could see all the out-of-towners. That was great to catch up a bit with them. Monday morning we had a family talent show and if I may brag, we are a very talented bunch! Then the kids 10-17 yrs old went to the Space Center for a space mission and they had a blast. The younger kids we took to the Dinosaur Museum at Thanksgiving Point. Some adults tagged along too. That evening we had family pictures taken by my friend Merrily. That was a feat to get 51 to cooperate! Tuesday we prepared to go to some cabins in Heber that Tim's parents had gotten for us all to stay in. We also went on a hike to Battle Creek Falls in Pleasant Grove and that was fun and a great hike even Gwen did well on it! After a little more prep we left and got up to Heber in time for dinner. We had fun playing Ultimate Frisbee adults vs kids. The next day we went to Jordanelle Reservoir for water fun. At the lake we rented 2 jet skis with tubes to pull people on the back. Everyone had a great time. There was a nice playground nearby too. We had also brought some inflatable boats which helped keep us busy. That night after dinner we had a testimony meeting by the campfire and it was fantastic. We are so blessed to be a part of a family that gets along and everyone is trying to live the best they can. Thursday we packed up and some went to the zoo--Zane and Gwen from our family went to the zoo with Hans (Tim's brother) and my niece Erika and a few others. We took a couple of nephews with us to Park City. We rode the Alpine Coaster and Slide--most of us. Some did the Zip line too. It was so much fun. That night Taran had his Eagle board of Review and we just got his card--he is an eagle scout he just needs his Eagle Court of Honor! Friday morning the teenagers went to the Draper Temple to do baptisms then that evening the adult did sealings and went out to dinner. Later, after we all changed our clothes we met at a park to celebrate Sam's (a nephew) birthday. That was fun too. Saturday morning Emily and Taran were in our city parade (Emily for NOVA and Taran because he is on our city youth council), Izak had a lacrosse game. Later some of the families went bowling, Tim took Emily, Izak, Micah and Zane along with 4 nephews. That week we had 5 nephews staying with us when we weren't at the cabins, they were so much fun! We watched movies and talked and just had a great time! Saturday evening Tim's brother Hans left. That evening we had everyone over to our house to watch the fireworks from our front yard and eat brownie sundaes. It was a simple and fun gathering. Sunday our family went to my cousin Izak Louw's 'homecoming' talk and lunch after at my aunt and uncle's. That was fun since there were cousins and aunts and uncles from out of town there too. We had a great time then we came home and crashed for a couple of hours. After dinner we had everyone (Pew side)here one last time before they started leaving Monday morning. We visited and played games. Monday we said good bye to the 3 boys who were still here and I cried. We really enjoyed having them! Hopefully it won't be 5 more years before we see them! That next week was trying to get back to 'normal' we did get to spend time with Tim's brother Curtis who stayed that next week. We went to the Children's Discovery Garden one day. That night Tim and I celebrated our anniversary by going to a movie and dinner. Saturday we celebrated the 4th early with Tim's family at his parents and those who live around here and Curtis' family. Tim made peach ice cream--yummy! Sunday we went to my brother Keith's for the 4th and celebrated with them, my parents and Amber's parents. Tim made peach ice cream again! Teresa and my brother Charl were both out of town. We watched the DC fireworks on PBS. Monday we went to Bridal Veil Falls with most of Curtis' family. We had lunch there and then we went to Macey's for ice cream--KING KONG KONES for the oldest guys and Tim. The rest of us ate more reasonably! Although no one was really hungry for dinner. We brought Curtis' 3 youngest boys back to our house and they played and watched Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Lightening Thief too (Tim hadn't seen it). After dinner we went back to Tim's parents and hung out until we needed to go. We said good bye to Curtis' family then. The kids and I were bummed that all the cousins were gone from out of town. Our consolation is that we still have some close by!Since then we have been doing visits to the dentist and doctor--check ups and follow ups. Last Sunday we had dinner at my parents and got to see Teresa and Charl who were back from their trips. That was fun and Teresa told us all about her trip to Gettysburg and surrounding areas--a special class she was chosen to attend! Monday Tim's parents had us over for a delicious dinner and my parents. We all sat and watched the Homerun Derby after, it was a very pleasant evening! Emily went to camp this last week and I decided on Tuesday to re do her whole room! It was crazy but it all got done and she loved the surprise. Our 2 nephews who live close by spent the night the last night Emily was gone--the boys really wanted to do that. They had fun of course. Friday Tim and I went to the 100 years of Recording Celebration of the MoTab. It was fantastic! Tim's sister Amy and her husband Nate came with us. We went up early and had chinese and then had milkshakes on our way home. We had a lot of fun. Early yesterday I woke up in pain, I had terrible cramping. I had some bug and finally after a couple of hours and a blessing it decided to come out. I mostly laid around recovering. Bummer didn't get much done on a Saturday! Owell. luckily today I was alright to teach my class. So there you go...our month in a nutshell. The kids had parties and fun as well but I am sure you've read enough! I will post photos soon---I hope!
Friday, July 16, 2010
Freedom Friday
Okay, where was I? I had no idea about this bill that just passed and it may be worse than the Healthcare Bill! Please read these 2 articles. Very sobering!
Financial Reform Bill: Bureaucratic Absolutism
Written by Charles Scaliger
Friday, 16 July 2010 00:00
Wall Street Czarist Russia is looking better and better. Once a byword for bureaucratic absolutism, the apparatchiks of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and their endless rule-making seem positively enlightened beside some of the pieces of aptly named omnibus legislation emanating from Capitol Hill these days. The newly passed Dodd-Frank Financial Regulation Bill may be the worst yet. At 2,315 pages and 390,000 words, the bill is half the size of the entire King James Bible. It stretches credulity to believe that America’s political leaders now enact single pieces of legislation many times the size of the entire Mosaic code. But they do.
Nor is the bill’s size illusory. As the AP’s Jim Kuhnhenn put it:
From storefront payday lenders to the biggest banking and investment houses on Wall Street, few players in the financial world are immune to the bill's reach. Consumer and investor transactions, whether simple debit card swipes or the most complex securities trades, face new safeguards or restrictions.
Nobody, in other words, will be unaffected by this latest foray into federal micromanagement of the private lives of Americans. Among other things, the new bill will give vast new powers to the Federal Reserve, the secretive central bank that, more than any other single entity, has been responsible both for modern asset bubbles and the recessions and depressions that have followed them. Yet instead of being held to account for its role in creating the ongoing crisis, the Fed will now be responsible for overseeing large, interconnected financial concerns deemed large enough to pose a significant threat to the financial system should they fail. It will be the task of a separate 10-person council of regulators led by the Treasury Secretary to identify such concerns on behalf of the Fed.
Then there’s the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a new bureaucratic behemoth responsible for writing what will doubtless amount to many thousands of pages of additional regulations for mortgages, credit cards, and numerous other financial instruments. Edward Yingling, president and CEO of the American Bankers Association, expects at least “5000 pages of new regulations on traditional banks and years of uncertainty as to what the massive new rules will mean.” Assuming comparable regulatory burdens on other players in the financial sector, it is no stretch to assume that the new body of regulations spawned by this monstrosity will run into the tens of thousands of pages.
Tellingly, the bill has nothing to say about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two quasi-government agencies deeply complicit in the subprime fiasco. The market meltdown has been consistently portrayed by Washington insiders as a failure of the free markets, not of government. It is therefore freedom, not government, that is erroneously held to account by Dodd-Frank.
For a bill so massive and laden with legislative land mines, it is impossible to anticipate all of the ill effects. But a few are already evident to the discerning. The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s John Berlau warns: “New collateral requirements on derivatives could cost U.S. companies as much as $1 trillion in lost capital and liquidity, according to the International Swaps and Deriviatives Association.... These costs would not just hit big banks, but farmers who use derivatives to hedge the price of their crops and fuel for their tractors. The new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could also hit retailers that issue credit tangentially related to their business, such as small stores that offer layaway plans.” Berlau lays out a litany of additional grievances:
On the other side of the retail ledger, some of the biggest retailers also got an unjustified mandated benefit with the Durbin amendment that puts price controls on the interchange fees they pay to process credit cards. This corporate welfare for fat cat merchants will mean higher costs to consumers, community banks and credit unions.
In addition, the bill contains provisions that will empower special interests at the expense of ordinary shareholders and that may exceed the limits of the U.S. Constitution. The bill's “orderly liquidation” authority will allow the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department not just to bail out firms whose failure is deemed to be a threat to “financial stability,” but to actually seize firms that are not even asking for a bailout. The “proxy access” provisions would override longstanding state rules in corporate director elections and force companies and their shareholders to subsidize director elections by special interest-shareholder — such as unions, environmentalists and others. This would give these groups leverage to cut deals with management to push through agenda items, such as the “card check” abolition of secret ballots in labor in labor election and carbon cap-and-tax reductions that they can't get through the halls of Congress.
That such a truly revolutionary (in the worst sense of the term) piece of legislation has been met with only a muted response from the American public is a disappointing indicator of how few people truly cherish freedom — at least as the Founders and the first several generations of Americans understood it — in 21st century America. Too many have now accepted the monstrous notion that Americans are too free, and one of its corollaries, that the state — not free individuals — is the best determiner of how an economy should run. As a consequence, we now have several immense new regulatory bodies charged with monitoring and regulating our every financial act. Financial privacy, as of July 2010, is officially a thing of the past.
Somewhere, Czar Nicholas II is probably enjoying the irony.
Financial Overhaul Is Politics in Worst Sense: Richard Posner
By Richard A. Posner - Jun 29, 2010
Bloomberg Opinion
The most sensible legislative response to the financial collapse of September 2008 would have been to do nothing until the causes of the collapse were fully understood.
There is no urgency about legislating financial regulatory reform. The existing regulatory agencies have virtually total authority over the financial industry. And because they were asleep at the switch when disaster struck, they are now hyper- alert to prevent a repetition of it. Indeed, bank examiners have become so fearful of condoning risky practices that they are making it difficult for banks to lend to small businesses and consumers and thus are retarding the economic recovery.
The principal factors in the recent economic collapse were:
No. 1. Incompetent monetary policy, which under former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and his successor Ben Bernanke produced the housing bubble that burst, bringing down the financial industry, which was heavily invested in the mortgage market.
No. 2. The inattention of the Fed and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which didn’t understand the changing nature of the banking industry, particularly the rise of so-called nonbank banks dependent on short-term, noninsured capital.
No. 3. The over-indebtedness of the American people and government, which has hampered the restoration of credit.
No. 4. The failure of the Treasury Department under former Secretary Henry Paulson and the Fed under Bernanke to rescue Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. They didn’t realize that Lehman’s bankruptcy would trigger a run on the banking industry, causing a global credit freeze.
Not Paying Attention
Barack Obama’s main economic officials -- Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and National Economic Council Chairman Lawrence Summers -- were implicated in the regulatory oversights that precipitated the crisis, as were key legislative officials, such as Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank. None of them wants to shoulder blame for the crisis. Instead, they blame the banking industry.
Banks did take risks that were excessive from an overall social standpoint, but businesses will always take the risks that government permits them to take, especially if the brunt of any harm falls on others.
The costs of the collapse have been borne largely by people and firms that had nothing to do with finance. Some banks took a hit, but the big ones are doing well. The government saved them from bankruptcy and the Fed is allowing them to borrow at interest rates close to zero, thus enabling them to return to profitability without doing much lending and thus without meeting urgent credit needs.
Political Response
But just as politics requires that President Obama be seen to be doing something about the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, though there is nothing he can do, so politics requires that Congress be seen to be doing something to prevent another economic disaster, though there is nothing it needs to do.
The same political imperative led to the reorganization of the intelligence community in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a move now widely regarded as a failure. Reorganization is a favorite response to a governmental failure because it is visible, easily explainable, and can be done without ruffling too many feathers among interest groups and bureaucrats. It also buys time, since no one expects such reshuffling to be effective immediately.
The new financial overhaul bill is about 2,300 pages long, and though they are pages of large print and broad margins, I defy any single person to claim to have read and understood it all. So far as I can judge, though, much that the bill ordains is within the existing powers of the financial regulatory agencies and is therefore superfluous.
Adding Redundant Layers
The Financial Stability Oversight Council (consisting mainly of the Fed chairman, the Treasury secretary, and the chairmen of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the SEC) to advise on systemic risk? These officials don’t need legislation to hold regular meetings if that would be useful.
A consumer-protection bureau lodged in the Federal Reserve? The Fed already has such a unit. It is ineffectual because the Fed cares about the solvency of banks, not the solvency of their customers. Congress proposes to cure this skew by making the head of the Fed’s consumer protection staff -- renamed the Consumer Financial Protection Board, since renaming is the least arduous and hence an irresistible form of reorganization -- a presidential appointee, which will create friction with the Fed’s chairman, who might (because he has a fixed term) be a holdover from a previous administration.
Already Helping Consumers
The Federal Trade Commission already has extensive experience in consumer protection and could be given additional resources to police unfair and deceptive practices in mortgage and other consumer lending. If, as some students of finance infer from the extraordinary interest rates that people pay for credit-card debt and other forms of fringe banking, it’s true that Americans simply can’t handle debt responsibly, the only solution is to reinstate usury laws.
The new bill increases the amount of equity capital that banks must hold, relative to their total capital, in order to reduce bankruptcy risk. But the Fed in the case of commercial banks, and the SEC in the case of nonbank banks, already have the authority to decide how much equity capital the firms they regulate must hold.
The legislation requires that most credit-default swaps --a form of credit insurance, but also a device for speculating on bond defaults -- be traded through clearinghouses and on public exchanges, like publicly traded stocks.
Slighting Disclosure
Uncertainty about the liabilities and solvency of issuers of credit-default swaps did contribute to the financial panic of 2008, but can be dispelled simply by requiring better disclosure of firms’ off-balance-sheet contingent liabilities. These could include not only credit-default swaps but also the structured investment vehicles in which banks parked their mortgage-backed securities.
It may be argued in defense of the new law’s apparent redundancy that the regulatory agencies didn’t use their authority properly to avert the crisis -- which is true -- so they must be ordered to do better.
But it is a mistake for Congress to tell regulatory agencies in minute detail what to do. The idea behind administrative regulation is that agencies hire experts to deal with technical issues that Congress has neither the competence nor the time to resolve. Legislation once adopted is difficult to change, and can put a regulatory agency in a straitjacket. This is a particularly serious concern in the case of finance, which is undergoing continuous change.
Restricting Regulators
Besides trying to micro-manage the regulatory process in some respects, the new law in other provisions takes a different tack and directs the regulatory agencies merely to study particular problems. This is a waste of ink. All the senior financial regulators are appointees of the Obama administration. If there are areas of financial regulation that would benefit from further study -- and there are -- the administration can tell its appointees to do so. There is no need for a congressional prod.
There are little nuggets here and there, such as the abolition of the ineffectual Office of Thrift Supervision, but on the whole, so far as I can judge, the new law is a political measure in the worst sense.
(Richard A. Posner is a U.S. Court of Appeals judge for the Seventh Circuit and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. The opinions expressed are his own.)
Financial Reform Bill: Bureaucratic Absolutism
Written by Charles Scaliger
Friday, 16 July 2010 00:00
Wall Street Czarist Russia is looking better and better. Once a byword for bureaucratic absolutism, the apparatchiks of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and their endless rule-making seem positively enlightened beside some of the pieces of aptly named omnibus legislation emanating from Capitol Hill these days. The newly passed Dodd-Frank Financial Regulation Bill may be the worst yet. At 2,315 pages and 390,000 words, the bill is half the size of the entire King James Bible. It stretches credulity to believe that America’s political leaders now enact single pieces of legislation many times the size of the entire Mosaic code. But they do.
Nor is the bill’s size illusory. As the AP’s Jim Kuhnhenn put it:
From storefront payday lenders to the biggest banking and investment houses on Wall Street, few players in the financial world are immune to the bill's reach. Consumer and investor transactions, whether simple debit card swipes or the most complex securities trades, face new safeguards or restrictions.
Nobody, in other words, will be unaffected by this latest foray into federal micromanagement of the private lives of Americans. Among other things, the new bill will give vast new powers to the Federal Reserve, the secretive central bank that, more than any other single entity, has been responsible both for modern asset bubbles and the recessions and depressions that have followed them. Yet instead of being held to account for its role in creating the ongoing crisis, the Fed will now be responsible for overseeing large, interconnected financial concerns deemed large enough to pose a significant threat to the financial system should they fail. It will be the task of a separate 10-person council of regulators led by the Treasury Secretary to identify such concerns on behalf of the Fed.
Then there’s the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a new bureaucratic behemoth responsible for writing what will doubtless amount to many thousands of pages of additional regulations for mortgages, credit cards, and numerous other financial instruments. Edward Yingling, president and CEO of the American Bankers Association, expects at least “5000 pages of new regulations on traditional banks and years of uncertainty as to what the massive new rules will mean.” Assuming comparable regulatory burdens on other players in the financial sector, it is no stretch to assume that the new body of regulations spawned by this monstrosity will run into the tens of thousands of pages.
Tellingly, the bill has nothing to say about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two quasi-government agencies deeply complicit in the subprime fiasco. The market meltdown has been consistently portrayed by Washington insiders as a failure of the free markets, not of government. It is therefore freedom, not government, that is erroneously held to account by Dodd-Frank.
For a bill so massive and laden with legislative land mines, it is impossible to anticipate all of the ill effects. But a few are already evident to the discerning. The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s John Berlau warns: “New collateral requirements on derivatives could cost U.S. companies as much as $1 trillion in lost capital and liquidity, according to the International Swaps and Deriviatives Association.... These costs would not just hit big banks, but farmers who use derivatives to hedge the price of their crops and fuel for their tractors. The new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could also hit retailers that issue credit tangentially related to their business, such as small stores that offer layaway plans.” Berlau lays out a litany of additional grievances:
On the other side of the retail ledger, some of the biggest retailers also got an unjustified mandated benefit with the Durbin amendment that puts price controls on the interchange fees they pay to process credit cards. This corporate welfare for fat cat merchants will mean higher costs to consumers, community banks and credit unions.
In addition, the bill contains provisions that will empower special interests at the expense of ordinary shareholders and that may exceed the limits of the U.S. Constitution. The bill's “orderly liquidation” authority will allow the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department not just to bail out firms whose failure is deemed to be a threat to “financial stability,” but to actually seize firms that are not even asking for a bailout. The “proxy access” provisions would override longstanding state rules in corporate director elections and force companies and their shareholders to subsidize director elections by special interest-shareholder — such as unions, environmentalists and others. This would give these groups leverage to cut deals with management to push through agenda items, such as the “card check” abolition of secret ballots in labor in labor election and carbon cap-and-tax reductions that they can't get through the halls of Congress.
That such a truly revolutionary (in the worst sense of the term) piece of legislation has been met with only a muted response from the American public is a disappointing indicator of how few people truly cherish freedom — at least as the Founders and the first several generations of Americans understood it — in 21st century America. Too many have now accepted the monstrous notion that Americans are too free, and one of its corollaries, that the state — not free individuals — is the best determiner of how an economy should run. As a consequence, we now have several immense new regulatory bodies charged with monitoring and regulating our every financial act. Financial privacy, as of July 2010, is officially a thing of the past.
Somewhere, Czar Nicholas II is probably enjoying the irony.
Financial Overhaul Is Politics in Worst Sense: Richard Posner
By Richard A. Posner - Jun 29, 2010
Bloomberg Opinion
The most sensible legislative response to the financial collapse of September 2008 would have been to do nothing until the causes of the collapse were fully understood.
There is no urgency about legislating financial regulatory reform. The existing regulatory agencies have virtually total authority over the financial industry. And because they were asleep at the switch when disaster struck, they are now hyper- alert to prevent a repetition of it. Indeed, bank examiners have become so fearful of condoning risky practices that they are making it difficult for banks to lend to small businesses and consumers and thus are retarding the economic recovery.
The principal factors in the recent economic collapse were:
No. 1. Incompetent monetary policy, which under former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and his successor Ben Bernanke produced the housing bubble that burst, bringing down the financial industry, which was heavily invested in the mortgage market.
No. 2. The inattention of the Fed and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which didn’t understand the changing nature of the banking industry, particularly the rise of so-called nonbank banks dependent on short-term, noninsured capital.
No. 3. The over-indebtedness of the American people and government, which has hampered the restoration of credit.
No. 4. The failure of the Treasury Department under former Secretary Henry Paulson and the Fed under Bernanke to rescue Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. They didn’t realize that Lehman’s bankruptcy would trigger a run on the banking industry, causing a global credit freeze.
Not Paying Attention
Barack Obama’s main economic officials -- Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and National Economic Council Chairman Lawrence Summers -- were implicated in the regulatory oversights that precipitated the crisis, as were key legislative officials, such as Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank. None of them wants to shoulder blame for the crisis. Instead, they blame the banking industry.
Banks did take risks that were excessive from an overall social standpoint, but businesses will always take the risks that government permits them to take, especially if the brunt of any harm falls on others.
The costs of the collapse have been borne largely by people and firms that had nothing to do with finance. Some banks took a hit, but the big ones are doing well. The government saved them from bankruptcy and the Fed is allowing them to borrow at interest rates close to zero, thus enabling them to return to profitability without doing much lending and thus without meeting urgent credit needs.
Political Response
But just as politics requires that President Obama be seen to be doing something about the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, though there is nothing he can do, so politics requires that Congress be seen to be doing something to prevent another economic disaster, though there is nothing it needs to do.
The same political imperative led to the reorganization of the intelligence community in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a move now widely regarded as a failure. Reorganization is a favorite response to a governmental failure because it is visible, easily explainable, and can be done without ruffling too many feathers among interest groups and bureaucrats. It also buys time, since no one expects such reshuffling to be effective immediately.
The new financial overhaul bill is about 2,300 pages long, and though they are pages of large print and broad margins, I defy any single person to claim to have read and understood it all. So far as I can judge, though, much that the bill ordains is within the existing powers of the financial regulatory agencies and is therefore superfluous.
Adding Redundant Layers
The Financial Stability Oversight Council (consisting mainly of the Fed chairman, the Treasury secretary, and the chairmen of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the SEC) to advise on systemic risk? These officials don’t need legislation to hold regular meetings if that would be useful.
A consumer-protection bureau lodged in the Federal Reserve? The Fed already has such a unit. It is ineffectual because the Fed cares about the solvency of banks, not the solvency of their customers. Congress proposes to cure this skew by making the head of the Fed’s consumer protection staff -- renamed the Consumer Financial Protection Board, since renaming is the least arduous and hence an irresistible form of reorganization -- a presidential appointee, which will create friction with the Fed’s chairman, who might (because he has a fixed term) be a holdover from a previous administration.
Already Helping Consumers
The Federal Trade Commission already has extensive experience in consumer protection and could be given additional resources to police unfair and deceptive practices in mortgage and other consumer lending. If, as some students of finance infer from the extraordinary interest rates that people pay for credit-card debt and other forms of fringe banking, it’s true that Americans simply can’t handle debt responsibly, the only solution is to reinstate usury laws.
The new bill increases the amount of equity capital that banks must hold, relative to their total capital, in order to reduce bankruptcy risk. But the Fed in the case of commercial banks, and the SEC in the case of nonbank banks, already have the authority to decide how much equity capital the firms they regulate must hold.
The legislation requires that most credit-default swaps --a form of credit insurance, but also a device for speculating on bond defaults -- be traded through clearinghouses and on public exchanges, like publicly traded stocks.
Slighting Disclosure
Uncertainty about the liabilities and solvency of issuers of credit-default swaps did contribute to the financial panic of 2008, but can be dispelled simply by requiring better disclosure of firms’ off-balance-sheet contingent liabilities. These could include not only credit-default swaps but also the structured investment vehicles in which banks parked their mortgage-backed securities.
It may be argued in defense of the new law’s apparent redundancy that the regulatory agencies didn’t use their authority properly to avert the crisis -- which is true -- so they must be ordered to do better.
But it is a mistake for Congress to tell regulatory agencies in minute detail what to do. The idea behind administrative regulation is that agencies hire experts to deal with technical issues that Congress has neither the competence nor the time to resolve. Legislation once adopted is difficult to change, and can put a regulatory agency in a straitjacket. This is a particularly serious concern in the case of finance, which is undergoing continuous change.
Restricting Regulators
Besides trying to micro-manage the regulatory process in some respects, the new law in other provisions takes a different tack and directs the regulatory agencies merely to study particular problems. This is a waste of ink. All the senior financial regulators are appointees of the Obama administration. If there are areas of financial regulation that would benefit from further study -- and there are -- the administration can tell its appointees to do so. There is no need for a congressional prod.
There are little nuggets here and there, such as the abolition of the ineffectual Office of Thrift Supervision, but on the whole, so far as I can judge, the new law is a political measure in the worst sense.
(Richard A. Posner is a U.S. Court of Appeals judge for the Seventh Circuit and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. The opinions expressed are his own.)
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Freedom Friday a day early...
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2010/07/Inflated-Federal-Pay-How-Americans-Are-Overtaxed-to-Overpay-the-Civil-Service
I found this great article today. It's too long and has a lot of graphs so I only have the link here but this is where a lot of our taxes are going. How can we possibly think these people should be in control of so much...wake up people! We can do better than this!
I found this great article today. It's too long and has a lot of graphs so I only have the link here but this is where a lot of our taxes are going. How can we possibly think these people should be in control of so much...wake up people! We can do better than this!
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Happy 19th Anniversary To Us!
Today, 19 years ago we were married in Manti, Utah in the LDS Temple there. We went the night before and stayed in the Manti Hotel with our family and some friends! We played games until bed time. My brother Keith was the only sibling that couldn't come in the temple, he was only 17. We had such a great experience with our family and friends who were able to come--my college friend Terilynne surprised me with her presence in the Bridal Dressing room--all the way from Virginia! It was a great day. I am grateful for how well things went that day and that the weather cooperated. My mom's friends set up tables and decorated the backyard for the reception. Our colors were navy and white and I had daisies for my flowers--my favorites! Today I feel even more lucky than I did then for Tim because of the great husband and father he is. The girls from his high school missed out! I am ever grateful for he is a great friend to endure the lows of life we experience and enjoy the many adventures we face with a lot of laughing as well. I would be forever grateful if our sons turned out to be half as good as him and our daughters found men equal to his integrity to marry.
Because we have an extended family party tonight we celebrated by going out to eat last night at a pizza place and catching a movie afterward Eclipse--which turned out to be pretty good. Then we went to Cold Stone for dessert...yummy! Our kids were great while we were gone so we came home to peace instead of chaos! What a great way to celebrate 19 years! I am amazed and wonder how did time pass so quickly! There is some good and bad to that! But today I feel really grateful!
Friday, July 2, 2010
Freedom Friday
So I felt like finding some great quotes from our founders, unfortunately I could only narrow down to these. There are so many great quotes. As I read these 2 things have stuck out to me one that we can only keep our freedom if we are a virtuous people and two we must teach our children what this means so they can maintain it as well. This reminded me of a scripture: If you keep the commandments ye shall prosper in the land ... Have a great 4th of July and remember how blessed we are and what we need to do to keep us free! I hope you enjoy these quotes:“"The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men." -Samuel Adams”
"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim tribute to patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness -- these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. . . . reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles."
George Washington
"Human rights can only be assured among a virtuous people. The general government . . . can never be in danger of degenerating into a monarchy, an oligarchy, an aristocracy, or any despotic or oppresive form so long as there is any virtue in the body of the people."
George Washington
"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters."
Benjamin Franklin
"[In a republic, according to Montesquieu in Spirit of the Laws, IV,ch.5,] 'virtue may be defined as the love of the laws and of our country. As such love requires a constant preference of public to private interest, it is the source of all private virtue; for they are nothing more than this very preference itself... Now a government is like everything else: to preserve it we must love it . . . Everything, therefore, depends on establishing this love in a republic; and to inspire it ought to be the principal business of education; but the surest way of instilling it into children is for parents to set them an example.'"
Thomas Jefferson: copied into his Commonplace Book.
"The institution of delegated power implies that there is a portion of virtue and honor among mankind which may be a reasonable foundation of confidence."
Alexander Hamilton
"The aim of every political Constitution, is or ought to be first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust."
James Madison
". . . Virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor, my friend, and this alone that renders us invincible. These are the tactics we should study. If we lose these, we are conquered, fallen indeed . . . so long as our manners and principles remain sound, there is no danger."
Patrick Henry
"Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles."
Patrick Henry
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
John Adams
"[N]either the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He therefore is the truest friend of the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen onto any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man."
Samuel Adams
"No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders."
Samuel Adams
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