Manns Medium

Well here we go again America, just when we started to see some excellent signs of recovery, a group of some of the dumbest smart people in the world takes the wheel and aims us right back toward that economic cliff that we was once dangling from only a few short years ago. According to an article from the Associated Press “new U.S. rules aimed at getting banks to take on more of the risk when they package and sell mortgage securities are being relaxed with an eye to spurring broader home lending.  Federal regulators have dropped a key requirement: a 20 percent down payment from the borrower if a bank didn't hold at least 5 percent of the mortgage securities tied to those loans on its books.  The long-delayed final rules unveiled Tuesday by six federal agencies include the less stringent condition that borrowers not carry excessive debt relative to their income.  The rules, proposed in stricter form in 2011, were mandated by the overhaul law enacted in the wake of th...

Before this economic collapse, many people on Main Street never really considered Wall Street as alive; it was only thought of a place where people go to work.   Lately, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Wall Street is most definitely alive and is eating our breakfast.   Typically, I never really like to categorize any issue as “us/we” and “they/them” but for the sake of clarity and to better help you understand my point, this time I must.   We will be the middle class, seniors, poor and less fortunate while they will simply be the wealthy.   Make no mistake about it, this is class warfare. One of the most ingenious things ever created by Main Street was Wall Street but just like any animal that goes mad, it turned on us.   Main Street wanted a better life for their children so we created the Student Loans.   We wanted to reach a higher standard so we created Home Loans.   We wanted to be our own boss so we created Commercial Loans.   We w...

While channel surfing last night, I stopped by The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.   Stewart was interviewing William Cohan about his new book and I heard Mr. Cohan say that Goldman Sachs was a collection of very smart people who were put on Earth to make money.     Sounded like a very strange statement which made me even more interested in how he came to believe such a thing. Mr. Cohan mentioned that many of our former and current leaders of the financial sector of this economy were prior employees or leaders of Goldman Sachs.   He mentioned people like   Robert Rubin   and   Henry Paulson   who served as   United States Secretary of the Treasury   as well as   Mark Carney , the governor of the   Bank of Canada   since 2008.   Research lead me to discover that Stephen Friedman , a former director of Goldman Sachs, was named Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in January 2008 and we are all aware of the con...