In a well-researched article, the idea of a financial meltdown is dispelled:
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4209026-another-financial-crisis-coming-investors-need-know?lift_email_rec=false
This author concludes that the conditions that precipitated the last meltdown (i.e. in 2008) do not exist. The last meltdown was caused basically by two thing: 1. subprime mortgages and 2. securitizing those subprime mortgages. As those mortgages became delinquent, the derivatives based on those mortgages lost their value. In fact, the banks who securitized the mortgages issued derivatives that were levereged 30 times the value of the mortgages. So, for every million loss in NINJA loans, 30 million loss occured in the value of the securities. Worse, the suspect loans were bundled in with good loans, so it was very difficult to isolate the problem.
Supposedly, the NINJA loans have been cut back and are no longer securitized.
There is one other reason why a meltdown is not likely. Total debt in the US rose 4.9% in the 10 years since the meltdown. But, population has increased 8.1% while the economy has grown by 39%. Thus, the debt is spread over a larger population that has more resources to pay.
Still, there are warning signs. The meltdown of currencies of peripheral states and their indebtedness will eventually spread because they act like the securitized mortgages did. The plight of these countries is exacerbated by the manipulation of the US Dollar to increase in value. As the peripheral nations have to pay off their loans in US Dollars, the problem is obvious. This problem could be solved if commodities increased in value, but the FED and the BIS keep commodity prices depressed by keeping the value of gold artificially low.
Financial advisor Ricards maintains that the Administration will eventually solve this problem by resetting the value of gold to maybe 10,000 dollars/oz but now it will not happen till after the election. Would such a revaluation cause inflation? Maybe, maybe not. We will revisit this topic at another time.
By Rich Noyes | September 26, 2018 10:27 AM EDT
During the twelve days since Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein publicly announced the existence of an unspecified allegation against Brett Kavanaugh, the ABC, CBS and NBC morning and evening news shows have spent nearly six hours (344 minutes) regurgitating various unproved allegations against the Supreme Court nominee.
But only a tiny percentage of that coverage — a measly eight percent — has been devoted to Kavanaugh’s denials and the lack of corroboration for his accusers’ accounts.
MRC analysts pored over all of the coverage from September 13 through September 24. Most of the airtime (305 minutes) was spent on the allegations made by Christine Blasey Ford, which were the only known charges for most of this period. The charges leveled by Deborah Ramirez drew 37 minutes during the September 24 morning and evening news shows; an additional two minutes of airtime was spent on an unknown third accuser teased by Democratic lawyer Michael Avenatti.
Amid that sea of coverage, our analysts found the networks devoted a minuscule fraction on the key points that support the Supreme Court nominee’s case:
■ Kavanaugh’s denials. Back on September 14, Kavanaugh issued a statement “categorically and unequivocally” denying Ford’s charges. For most of the coverage that followed, his flat denial was relegated to a few seconds in lengthy stories about the charges — sometimes no more than a parenthetical clause that reporters mechanically inserted in stories that bombarded viewers with the salacious details of each accusation.
On September 24, however, the three evening newscasts ran a combined three minutes showing clips of Kavanaugh’s interview on Fox News, in which he stated his denials on camera for the first time. That night’s coverage boosted the total airtime spent telling viewers about Kavanaugh’s denial to 14 minutes, barely four percent of the overall coverage.
■ Ford’s lack of confirming witnesses. Almost as soon as Ford told her story to the Washington Post, Kavanaugh and fellow Georgetown Prep student Mark Judge (named by Ford as in the room at the time of the alleged assault) flatly denied that they’d ever been to a party matching her description. Over the next several days, two other individuals named as present at the event — Patrick Smyth and Leland Ingham Keyser — also said they could not corroborate Ford’s account, even though Keyser announced that she believed her friend Ford’s story anyhow.
Important as these statements were, the networks didn’t seem to care. Judge’s denials of Ford’s account drew a mere 162 seconds of attention from the networks (49 seconds on ABC, 43 seconds on CBS and 61 seconds on NBC). Smyth was only mentioned by name once, on CBS This Morning, for a grand total of eight seconds. Keyser’s statement was mentioned on ABC and NBC for a total of 26 seconds. Collective references to these statements, or general statements that Ford lacked any supporting eyewitnesses, garnered an additional 94 seconds of airtime.
Add it all up, and the three broadcast morning and evening news shows spent less than five minutes on this crucial evidentiary point, or less than two percent of all coverage of Ford’s charges. This statistic should embarrass any network which claims to be devoted to fair news coverage.
■ Character witnesses. The broadcast networks also buried the fact that dozens of women who actually knew Kavanaugh were publicly vouching for his good character, including women who knew him in high school and others who worked with him in a professional capacity. CBS spent just 65 seconds of airtime acknowledging these supporters, but that was more than ABC (22 seconds) and NBC (35 seconds) combined.
Ex-girlfriend Maura Fitzgerald stated at a September 21 press conference: “In both public and private, Brett treated me and everyone I know with respect. He has always been kind and good natured.” But that press conference, which featured 75 women, merited just 21 seconds on the CBS Evening News, and 14 seconds on the NBC Nightly News. ABC’s World News Tonightcompletely skipped it.
■ Ford’s politics. On September 17, National Public Radio — hardly a right-wing outlet — passed along how Ford’s lawyer, Lisa Banks, said the accuser “was not motivated by politics,” but NPR added crucial context to that statement: “Ford is a registered Democrat who has made small political contributions to Democratic organizations. In April 2017, she attended a March For Science in San Francisco, which was held to protest Trump administration cuts to research, and she signed a letter in June 2018 condemning the Trump administration’s policy, since abandoned, of separating immigrant children from their parents at the border.”
None of these facts made it onto the broadcast networks. Only NBC bothered to mention this topic, when on September 17 Today co-host Savannah Guthrie invited Ford’s attorney, Debra Katz, to knock down the idea that partisanship was a factor: “According to the Washington Post, she’s a Democrat. A lot of people look at this and say here’s somebody who has a political motive to tell this story. What would you say to that?”
That amounted to just 12 seconds of airtime, which was still better than ABC and CBS, which never spent a second telling viewers about Ford’s liberal activism. You can be sure that if a liberal Supreme Court nominee was being accused by a woman with an equally conservative background, the networks would make sure viewers were aware of that background.
■ The Ramirez allegation. Compared to the Ford allegations, the networks were more skeptical of those that broke Sunday night in The New Yorker — but only slightly. Roughly 16 percent of the coverage focused on crucial questions about Deborah Ramirez’s story that Kavanaugh mistreated her at a college party in the early 1980s. Out of 37 minutes of coverage, the networks devoted 131 seconds to Ramirez’s admitted memory “gaps;” 126 seconds to the statements of Kavanaugh’s college friends disputing her account; 58 seconds to the admission that there are no eyewitnesses who can verify her account; and 49 seconds on how other news organizations, such as the New York Times, had attempted and failed to corroborate the story themselves.
Both Kavanaugh and Ford will get equal time to tell their side of the story at Thursday’s hearing. That’s a much fairer forum for Kavanaugh than he’s received from the broadcast networks during the past two weeks.
