Better Days Ahead

Today's Retail Sales activity for Nov broached expectations, thus cooperating nicely with our anchor. Consumers are far less cautious than before. Thank you very much. But this blog’s about National Politics is it not?

OK, let’s veer away from recent data just a tad and look at another key development: The House Committee on Financial Services (before, the House Banking Comm) is about to acquire a new chairman, thanks to Nov/2. We celebrate this event.

Under Barney Frank the committee went awol. As a result the crisis of Q4 ‘08 was birthed.

Frank never understood the workings of Fannie & Freddie. Bush efforts to reform the twins were blocked by Frank (and his Dem counterparts in the Senate, including BO). He and Clinton and Dodd and Obama may not have known that in encouraging the twins to take just a little more risk, then just a little bit more, in the successful effort to garner black votes that they would trigger the crisis but that was the result. That is, Barney politicized the mortgage origination business and for that he should be strung up by his thumbs (or by something, you pick).

KEY: Walt Street lampreys would have been without a host if not for Frank. (McCain would have won the election if he could have articulated this to the masses. He tried once in debate, then gave up the effort.)

We spent a day in front of the House Banking Committee when under Henry Gonzalez (D - Tex). We didn’t share Henry’s politics but admired the man. He was after Greenspan and Greenspan’s Fed for their multiple indiscretions; so were we. Gonzalez understood banking. He was fair. He was also a boxer in his younger years, something a heckler should have remembered. In a restaurant in Texas one day this poor fool called Henry a communist. Henry was in his late 70's at the time. He jumped up and knocked the guy out, TR style.

Somehow Frank and his sleazy far left politics do not fit this mold, even if he has put that male prostitute business behind him. Frank is sharp but so what? He was nothing more than a pseudo community organizer acting as the helmsman of US finance - a misfit. As a pilot on Twain’s Mississippi, he was sure to run aground.

We can expect the new chair, Spencer Bachus (R - Ala) and vice chair Jeb Hensarling (R- Tex) to unsnarl most of Frank’s mistakes, beginning with the Dodd-Frank act, “to correct, replace or repeal job-killing provisions that unnecessarily punish small businesses and community banks that did nothing to cause the financial crisis,” as Bachus told the Wash Times.

Then onto the twins.

Robert Craven