Royal Shaft: The Breakdown

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My friend "CS" emailed me this evening:

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I am almost shaking as I write this for what is happening to the capital markets, this country, and the free world. The impact of the past two weeks' action in the financial markets, if not reversed by cooler heads, will have irreparably changed the world in a way that only terrorist attacks and acts of war have in the past.

Nationalizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, providing an emergency quasi-legal bridge loan to AIG, temporarily banning short-selling on all stocks in the US, and instituting an RTC-type entity to handle the toxic waste of the financial system is economic violence on a grand scale.

The long-term cost of these actions to dollar holders will likely be in excess of $1 trillion. The basic premise of a free economy is one governed by laws and not men, where property rights are respected, where individuals are free to make contracts with each other, and where honesty and transparency exist in the marketplace. It's questionable whether any of these currently exist in the economy of the United States.

Before I continue let me provide a partial list of entities responsible for the financial mess we find ourselves in:

* -Fractional-reserve banking, which is inherently unstable and entirely a confidence game

* -Congress for passing the Federal Reserve Act and creating the Federal Reserve, the third central bank in the history of the US

* -Woodrow Wilson for using the Fed to finance World War 1

* -Benjamin Strong, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 1914-1928, for inflating the money supply in the '20s to help out Great Britain which led to the Great Depression

* -Herbert Hoover for his economic intervention from 1929-1932. He was not laissez-faire by any means.

* -John Maynard Keynes for laying the foundation of a miseducated public

* -FDR for banning private ownership of gold, enacting the New Deal, creating Social Security and Fannie Mae, and exacerbating the Great Depression

* -The FDIC for lulling the American public into a false sense of security regarding their bank deposits and training the public to unquestionably trust the financial system

* -LBJ for the guns and butter of the '60s

* -Nixon for severing all ties between the US dollar and gold

* -Reagan's intellectual duplicity, using free market, small government rhetoric while turning the US into a chronic debtor nation

* -Alan Greenspan, one of the most duplicitous, arrogant, and incompetent individuals in the history of the United States. If I had to pin this crisis on any one man, it would be he.

* -George W. Bush for cutting taxes while raising spending and his full embrace of Cheney's doctrine of "deficits don't matter"

* -Ben Bernanke for following the Greenspan doctrine to its inevitable conclusion

* -The heads of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for using artificially low borrowing costs to create systemically-dangerous housing institutions

* -Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank for beating the socialist drum

* -Christopher Cox for thinking a ban on short-selling will solve anything

* -Hank Paulson for folding the hand he was dealt

* -The ratings agencies for rubber stamping garbage assets as AAA

* -The heads of the major banks and brokerages on Wall Street for turning a blind eye as their institutions were taking on massive leverage that threatens to take down the financial system

* -The hedge funds that levered up structured finance to dangerous levels

* -Generations of lawmakers for kicking the looming financial crisis can down the road

* -Home buyers who lied about their income and creditworthiness

* -Predatory lenders who put people into mortgages they could never afford

Frankly, I don't know where we go from here. Despite what government officials want, you cannot intervene your way to renewed credit and economic growth. The excesses of the past 25 years have come home to roost, and if we aren't careful this country's status as the hub of global capital markets and the holder of the world's reserve currency will disappear.

Freezing foreclosures, mandating artificially low mortgage rates, sweeping junk assets on bank balance sheets under a Level 3 rug, delaying the writedown of debt, pursuing a witch hunt against legitimate players in the capital markets, and having the government be the lender and borrower of last resort will do nothing other than recreate the mistakes of the 1930s. Short-selling isn't taking down financial firms, overlevered balance sheets of bad assets is.

This country has a lot of problems.