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Once and awhile something happens that helps us focus. Bill Clinton complaining about banks subprime loans is one of those instances. Investor’s Business Daily editors spotted this one.
… For good measure, Clinton late in his second term installed several of his cronies — including White House budget chief Franklin Delano Raines — in key Fannie and Freddie board positions, ensuring they continued his affordable-lending crusade well into the next administration.
By the time he left office, Clinton had changed the rules for risk in the lending business. He had fundamentally changed the home finance market for the worse.
This untold Clinton scandal stayed hidden until the bubble burst. Now the former president is conveniently a critic of the very loans he promoted.
He was all for them before he was against them.
Interestingly, “Bank Robbery” notes that the Clinton Foundation that sponsors his global initiative has scrubbed from its website Clinton’s boasts of shaking down banks for riskier minority loans.
History should deal harshly with this former president. He didn’t just damage the dignity of the presidency with his personal failings. He may have permanently damaged American living standards.
Debra Saunders deals with Dem Solyndra excuses.
Excuse No. 1: New technology start-ups by definition are risky ventures.
Problem: Solyndra engaged in profligate behavior. A Washington Post story describes the spending spree that followed the Department of Energy loan guarantee – new factory, state-of-the-art conference room, lobbying bills that grew from $160,000 in 2008 to $550,000 last year. Within a week of winning the first loan guarantee, Solyndra went back to the Department of Energy for another $400 million (which was never approved).
Excuse No. 2: Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., claimed that both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations “supported Solyndra’s loan guarantee application.”
Problem: In its final month, the Bush Department of Energy credit committee voted against a loan guarantee for Solyndra.
It was the Obama White House that pushed for early conditional approval of a Solyndra deal, …
Steve Hayward explains why Solyndra is worse than it looks.
The spectacular collapse of Solyndra has all of the trappings of an epic Washington scandal, with serial revelations of embarrassing and potentially improper White House machinations to secure a $535 million federal loan guarantee for a startup company with dubious prospects of success. The sudden bankruptcy of the Fremont, California, manufacturer of solar panels?—?after it was feted as a model creator of “green jobs” by President Obama and Vice President Biden?—?has already featured FBI raids, contentious congressional hearings, and demands for a special prosecutor to investigate. The plot thickened further last week when Solyndra’s two top executives, who made 20 trips to the White House while their loan application was under consideration, invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions from the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Even if the administration eventually escapes any finding of legal wrongdoing, Solyndra threatens to haunt the green energy campaign in much the same way that the collapse of Lincoln Savings became the emblem of the savings and loan industry’s recklessness in the 1980s. The Solyndra story includes Obama campaign donors and everybody’s favorite Wall Street whipping boy, Goldman Sachs, in the middle of the whole sorry mess. Yet it would be a mistake to mark the story down as merely another excrescence of crony capitalism. It is much worse.
The green energy lobby is probably hoping that Solyndra’s failure can be portrayed as an isolated case of illegal influence, lest it cast a shadow over the entire edifice of massive subsidies that green energy requires to survive. But Solyndra is merely the most spectacular of several recent green energy failures. And beyond the domain of green energy, the Solyndra fiasco is emblematic of the Obama administration’s economic philosophy, which harks back to the mid-20th-century hubris of state-planned enterprise. It is also fair to note that the origins of this fiasco predate the Obama administration, and illustrate the continuing incoherence and wishful thinking of U.S. energy policy.
Here’s what we know so far: Solyndra was founded in 2005 on the concept that lightweight, high-efficiency thin-film solar panels in a unique tubular design could compete effectively with traditional silicon-based flat panels. Thin-film solar is the energy equivalent of thin-thigh diets?—?dazzling results are always promised but seldom delivered. …
In a WSJ OpEd, Matt Ridley says human advances were not the result of a dramatic evolutionary step, but are the result of trade.
… There was no sudden change in brain size 200,000 years ago. We Africans—all human beings are descended chiefly from people who lived exclusively in Africa until about 65,000 years ago—had slightly smaller brains than Neanderthals, yet once outside Africa we rapidly displaced them (bar acquiring 2.5% of our genes from them along the way).
And the reason we won the war against the Neanderthals, if war it was, is staring us in the face, though it remains almost completely unrecognized among anthropologists: We exchanged. At one site in the Caucasus there are Neanderthal and modern remains within a few miles of each other, both from around 30,000 years ago. The Neanderthal tools are all made from local materials. The moderns’ tools are made from chert and jasper, some of which originated many miles away. That means trade.
Evidence from recent Australian artifacts shows that long-distance movement of objects is a telltale sign of trade, not migration. We Africans have been doing this since at least 120,000 years ago. That’s the date of beads made from marine shells found a hundred miles inland in Algeria. Trade is 10 times as old as agriculture.
At first it was a peculiarity of us Africans. It gave us the edge over Neanderthals in their own continent and their own climate, because good ideas can spread through trade. New weapons, new foods, new crafts, new ornaments, new tools. Suddenly you are no longer relying on the inventiveness of your own tribe or the capacity of your own territory. You are drawing upon ideas that occurred to anybody anywhere anytime within your trading network.
In the same way, today, American consumers do not have to rely only on their own citizens to discover new consumer goods or new medicines or new music: The Chinese, the Indians, the Brazilians are also able to supply them. …