Do you ever watch Squawk Box, I do, it is like a Wall Street talk/reality show. You do know that most talk shows and all reality shows are scripted to meet the expectations of their audience, how else do you think they could sell advertising.

Anyway on the Squawk this morning they where going on and on about entitlements and how the economy is in tatters because of the gimme crowd which I believe they believe are the demographic of the Democrats.

There is however as in skinning cats more than one way to look at entitlements. There is the expectation of a person who worked and paid into the system all their life that there would be something in the kitty to pay their living and medical expenses in their old age.

There is also the expectation that because we live in a democratic capitalism there is the entitlement to make some money.

And I do wonder which entitlements the entitlement basher’s are referring to.

It’s like an old fashioned boxing match with the “gimme crowd” in the blue corned and the “I’m taking it anyway crowd” in the red corner, and the economy in the middle fighting for it’s life.

A noted economist proclaimed that Wall St is not the economy and the economy is not Wall St, and what the Wall St crowd don’t seem to get is that for one person to be absurdly wealthy, many people must be absurdly poor.

And to be honest I don’t have an issue with wealth or poverty, my issue and my whole reason for writing is perception.

If people are aware of a condition but purposely mislead in an attempt to manipulate their prey that is fine, good, OK even, but when people swallow the manipulated mistruth hook line and sinker merely because they are too lazy to think, then I am mad as hell and I really don’t want to take it anymore!

The reality is that although most people possess average intelligence they are totally and completely stupid.

There was a time when money meant a great deal to me and it’s pursuit was paramount, now that I am ancient I have come to realize that money is only good for paying bills and buying stuff. It doesn’t and can never fill the vast parched void within or soothe the howling demon who demands  face to face talks with you, you know the one you have been avoiding all these years.

Self medicating and denial will only get you so far, eventually usually at 2 am you will be forced to acknowledge him/her and it may not be a pretty sight. You have after all been such a dick wad for so, so long.

I read in a book last night that if you are not enough before you make a million then you will not be enough after.

What most economist, Tea partiers, conservatives, and Wall St types don’t seem to get, is that the economy is all the people, and just like a human body if one part is unwell then the whole is unwell.

And it beats me how they expect the economy to grow when 75% of it is struggling to just keep its proverbial head above water.

So you work for 8 bucks and hour, pay your rent and utilities and even manage to buy some processed food and then you are expected to fuel the engine that pushes the economy.

Is it rocket science or are most economist stupid or is it all really about rhetoric spewed in hope of quelling the sleeping bear.

So for all the would be financial geniuses out there let me lay it out in plain American English.

The economy in the US is screwed because the vast majority of the people who make up the economy can’t afford to live in it, and to be honest the US Government can’t afford to live in it.

Economics is really simple, someone has something to sell and someone wants to buy it. If there is a lot of people wanting to buy prices rise, if no one wants to buy prices fall until a buyer emerges or the seller decides not to sell.

To buy an item you need to have access to the price of the item. America is broke and can’t afford to buy.

The government can raise the limit on its credit card and keep on spending but the broken middle classes are limited to their debt ceiling, their only option is to try and stay afloat until the unbalanced economy rights itself.

A double dip hints at a revival and re-slump. The revival was hype by Wall Street to suck in some money from  the unwary. This recession is in it’s 5th year with no sign of abatement and our commander in chief is lost, not unlike Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

I don’t have a Republican bone in my body but I have come to a place where I am willing to put up with 4 years of a Republican White House to get rid of Obama, really he was not up for the job and to be truthful we have now had a De facto 3 term Republican Presidency.

Electing Obama was akin to selecting a surgeon fresh out of medical school to perform a once in a century surgery, he looked good and sounded good but had no experience and in reality knew nothing.

The post George Bush economy needed an exceptional politician with a titanium spine (I stole this from Michele Bachmann), not a one term Senator with charisma and a dream of Republican validation.

If we as a nation are not to become a vague memory a “didn’t you used to be someone” joke we need to realize that we are in a war zone and that we are all in this together, rich, poor, entitled by promise and entitled by creed.

Remember that the alpha beggar in all this,  is our Government, We the People, Us, what we are!

So they have just released 3, I repeat 3 versions of the financial  crisis report, one democratic report and two republican reports. Most probably the republicans and the tee shirt party couldn’t agree on who shot the moose that laid the golden egg.

Anyway not being shy with comment or opinion and having the good fortune to have been involved in the real estate industry while the river of cash was flowing here is my two cents worth.

In the golden years of the early 2000′s the reality of home loans was that virtually any number that had 9 digits could get a mortgage.

I don’t know that a heartbeat was necessary but any social security or ein number worked. An ein number is a number which closely resembles a social security number and is released by the IRS to an entity or person for business tax purposes.

So we has a scenario where:

• Mortgage regulation in essence disappeared.
• The banks who where lending packaged and sold the mortgages immediately so they where never exposed to loss or default.
• Any appraisal was accepted once it could be comped (backed up by 3 recent sales within a mile)
• The packaged mortgages where basically appraised by the bond ratings agencies on wall street to look like aaa rated investment vehicles.
• There where lines of waiting  investors for the packaged mortgages which because of their bond ratings looked like easy money.

What happened was that a perfect storm of easy mortgage money met with eager buyers, Realtors and mortgage brokers who work on commission and only get paid when the deal closes, and appraisers who found a way to justify the home prices that the mortgage brokers suggested.

Then there is mortgage electronic which is a mortgage depositary created by that large financial institutions to allow them to warehouse mortgage while selling the note portion of the home loan.

A home loan has two parts

(a) a note which is the piece of paper that states the money owed and the interest rate and other financial conditions.

(b) a mortgage which is a security instrument which lays out the remedies to the note holder should a default occur.

This nice split in the financial document that is a home loan allows the financial institutions to package the notes into a mortgage backed security and sell it to investors via wall street brokerages while warehousing the mortgage documents in mortgage electronic and assigning servicing rights to one of their members so they can collect servicing fees without exposure to the actual loan that they are servicing.

Even in the event of a foreclosure the servicing lender merely collects fees for foreclosing and faces no loss.

What this allows is for the mortgage banks to write home loans earn fees and totally avoid any liability for the loans which they are making. This was the prefect recipe for the creation of extremely lax underwriting.

So the first thing that caused the financial crisis was lax underwriting in the fee feeding frenzy coupled with appraisers who wrote appraisals that sometimes resembled the very best that Hans Christian Anderson could produce.

The second thing that created or allowed the financial crisis to occur was bond ratings. In all honesty who would have bought these mortgage backed securities if they knew how the mortgages had been created.

The mortgages in most of these investment vehicles where the liar loan variety and contrary to popular opinion it wasn’t only the mortgage applicant that was the liar.

These where no doc loans, so the income and cash on hand of the mortgage applicant was stated as enough to pass underwriting. It could just as easily be 4 million as 40 K who cared there where no question asked other than how much do you make and how much do you have in the bank. There was no verification required.

Then the value of the home was appraised as the amount that the home seller could get the home buyer to offer. So with such easy money home prices went up and up and appraisals went north to match purchase and sales agreements.

Then when these time bombs went to wall street the Bond Rating Agencies basically appraised them as aaa or great or however they rate bonds.

The only safeguards built into the mortgage banking and mortgage backed security industry during the period that led up to the financial crisis where the appraisers and the bond rating agencies. Both sold out for money under duress from the people who where giving them business.

It is true that investors eager for easy income lent the money and homeowners awestruck with rising home values  took it leaving a huge mess for the taxpayers to clean up but who is really to blame.

Well in a system designed to facilitate and protect capital no one is to blame. This whole rumpus is really only rhetoric to put the American public back into their comfy slumber and allow the show to go on.

Boom and bust is a natural cycle in a monetary system based on nothing, remember that every dollar bill in your pocket is just that a bill, American currency is in fact debt, the gold and silver standard have long gone and we are now using fiat currency or faith currency.

A dollar is a good as you believe it to be.

However this boom and bust event was worsened by the reluctance of Norman Greenspan failing to raise interests and stem inflation in an attempt to make the Bush administration look like something that it wasn’t.

So in the end there is/was no financial crisis it was just business as usual in the fountain of democracy where government of the people by rich people for rich people continues to prosper.

Just because you are poor or middle class one paycheck from the gutter rich and think that there was a meltdown, don’t kid yourself. No self respecting billionaire has lost a wink of sleep over this supposed financial crisis, on the contrary they just got a little richer!

Wall Street got the latest jobs news and the DOW acted like its favorite dog just got run over by a cement truck.

Jobs are going nowhere but down and Obama the fearless tells us it will get even worst, after all folks it took us a long time to get here so expect a painful journey back to full eight dollar an hour employment.

 Here’s the list that doesn’t bear reading:

1.  At least 10% jobless for the rest of 2010 and that’s if we are lucky.
2. Seven million home loans in default.
3. Our future mortgaged to China.
4. Afghanistan is a money pit.
5. Iraq is an even bigger money pit.

 If you want to know where the economy in your area really is take a look around your local mall:

• If there is full occupancy of the mall units then the economy in your area is doing just fine.
• If a large number of units are vacant you are in trouble.
• If there is a Chinese massage therapy unit in your mall your local economy is really bad.

Things are sad and to think some dude in the white house thought it was a good idea to give like a half trillion dollars of taxpayer’s money to the banks.

Imagine a full year in office with an absolute majority in every branch of government and what did he achieve, well other than advancing the republican mandate nothing. His new nickname should be Obama the Useless. It’s like George Bush term three in the white house.

Look out for an article named Obama the Useless.