President Obama - “Your Ego Is Writing Checks Your Body Can’t Cash”
Blog Author: Frank Denver
This is a classic line, from the movie Top Gun, which holds true even today. Whether it’s a quest for financial gain or political glory, the results are the same. The Wall Street big wigs and President Obama are writing checks they just can’t cash.
Wall Street’s non-existent view of a healthy economy and a lust for quick profits led the United States into one of the worst economic downturns in history. Wall Street dreamed up all sorts of investment schemes in order to make large profits. To Wall Street, it didn’t matter the losers would be the American people and their retirement funds.
We Americans have not seen the end of Wall Street’s destruction. Credit Default Swaps (CDS) are a contract in which an individual pays for protection in case of a default of an event. Unlike insurance, CDS are derivatives and therefore priced based on financial models. The CDS market around the world has grown exponentially over the last decade. To put it into perspective, the housing market is roughly $7 trillion in size and the CDS market is estimated to be near $50 trillion. Should the CDS market collapse, our economy will reach lows never seen in its 234 year history.
President Obama came onto the World stage with an agenda and the President has not veered from it once. To admit that his wishes are to help others, there is no doubt. To his timing, it couldn’t be worse. We’re coming off one of the worst economic down turns in our country’s history. We’re experiencing unemployment rates near ten percent. Mr. President, this is not the time to be focused on an agenda that was put together a decade ago.
Now is the time to put all those charity plans aside and create a new plan. A plan no-one would have imagined necessary even five years ago. Today, we need to focus on getting capital to our small businesses. Small business is the engine that drives employment in the United States. Our Congress has invested way too much time on National Health Care Reform instead of focusing on the economy.
Banking, in the United States, is broken. Bankers have discovered there are more lucrative options to put our money into such as hedge funds and CDS. We need to find a way to make lending to small business more appealing to bankers. We need to distinguish between acts of gambling and good business practices. Placing our bank deposits into hedge funds and CDS is gambling with other people’s money. It’s time to get the American engine turned on and begin to grow employment.
Mr. President, now that the Health Care bill has passed, why can’t we push back the implementation until a constructive mile marker is reached? Maybe we can set unemployment below seven percent as the mile marker to begin spending on Health Care? Maybe we should try and reach a certain amount of lending to small business as the mile marker? Now is not the time to be asking businesses to take a charge for health care. Heath Care Reform will require AT&T to take a $1 billion charge; Caterpillar - $100 million; 3M - $350 million, etc. This will have the opposite effect of a true economic stimulus plan. We’ve reached a point where we’re finally getting some footing, why are you pulling the rug out from under us now?
