Part 1 of ???

So here is part 1 of my giant update, sorry it’s been a month+ and I’ve just been holding all this until now, and I can’t take it anymore.

Politics

Ignore/skip this entry if you don’t want to hear it, I won’t mind. I have some serious concerns with our current administration and their handling of the economy. Today Tim Geithner released his oversight plan for future financial institutions. I don’t think I like any part of this plan, here are my reasons. It creates more bureaucracy that will in no way improve the financial institutions, nor will it “protect” the American people. I think people somewhere along the line forgot that investments are risky, and there is potential to lose money. We are not entitled to make money in the stock market, we are not entitled to keep our retirement if we invest it in companies that we have no control over, we are not entitled to anything really. FDIC exists to guarantee our money (up to certain limits) against bank failure, it’s for banks that meet regulated reserve requirements. When we invest in the stock market there is no FDIC, and there never should be. The only way to guarantee a business will make money is if they are printing it, otherwise it is up to the business to meet the needs of their customers. If I invest in a company that is not meeting the needs of its customers I can expect the stock price, or the value of my ownership, will decrease. The biggest key here is people have invested their 401k with limited investment options in the stock market. Their are solutions, you can still invest in bonds (that market is much more stable), another option would be to opt out of investing in the 401k and move your money to some other FDIC secured institution. I realize that a lot of people depend on their 401k, but… as it turns out they are susceptible to loss. If a person can maintain a long term investment strategy then a 401k works great, generally the market goes up.
My other big issue with Geithner is a sound bite I heard on talk radio the other day where he said he wasn’t opposed to a world currency. This scares the crap out of me, I can’t imagine anything worse for the US. The fact is that whoever controls the currency (currently the Federal Reserve, not the US government) controls the economy. The other issue is that having separate currencies allows countries to make fiscal adjustments to offset things like unemployment and inflation.
I may just be wound up in conspiracy theories but I think this administration is leading faster toward a socialized system than any president has ever before. If people think George W went too far with government power (the patriot act, no child left behind, etc.) they haven’t seen anything yet. The Obama administration would like to have authority to seize business that they deemed “unsafe.” They want to punish employees of certain businesses with illegal taxes, see AIG. On that note, I think it was morally wrong for AIG to pay out those bonuses but that is really such a small drop in the bucket, it’s like people forgot that we just gave this company ~$170 Billion. It’s like if someone gave me $100 to pay my gas bill and I spent $.10 on a piece of candy, would they care? We shouldn’t have ever given them the Billions in the first place, that way this wouldn’t have ever been an issue.
I’m a little sick of our government “protecting” us from capitalism. The beauty of capitalism is that people suffer their own consequences, be it good or bad. The problem is they want the good parts of capitalism (innovation, growing GDP, highly skilled services, etc.) without the perils (chance of failure). You can’t do that, if there are no risks then there are no returns.