HISTORY TEACHES TRUTH. HISTORY TEACHES LIES.

History teaches us. It teaches us the truth and it teaches us the lies. We can not tell the difference.

About a long long time ago, in a college course, I learned that history could be used to support either or both sides of things. They gave an old statistical example, now modified by the pasture preacher(me):

Consider how many people die in America everyday. Death is evident, death is certain, death is a fact, and death is obvious even to our government regulators. Now consider a 93 year old man. He has never ever died, never before. When he does die, our government regulators (of the banks, of the stock exchange, of the fannies and freddies), and all our talking heads on the business channels, they all say "no one saw it coming, no one knew that he would die, he has never died before, no one could have predicted his death". The choir sings and the pasture preacher says "Bubble don't fail me now".

Now the pasture preacher contends, everybody knew that the markets (housing market, stock market, credit market) were over inflated, everybody knew that the markets were in a bubble state, everybody knew that the bubbles would burst. We did not know when, we did not know at what limit. No one wanted to sound the alarm. Not as long as the other guy appeared to be making money. No one wanted to be the one to sound the alarm, to make the cry "the king has no clothes on". They did not want to say it, but every one knew that the bubble would burst.

Now the government plan is to expand those bubbles again. Expand them more this time. Create more bad credit, create more bad debt, spend more money that we do not have. But this time we will let government regulators monitor these things. Yep, you guessed it, the same government regulators who could not have predicted the old mans death. The same regulators who never saw anything coming. The choir sings "gimme that old time religion" while the pasture preacher sings: "gimme that old time regulator, gimme that old time regulator..."

They gave the banks a lot of money and they do not know what the banks did with the money. They gave them no restrictions or requirements on the money. The banks took the money. The banks are not making loans. The banks are not stupid, it was bad loans that got them into this. The banks want more money.  They can sit on it until the economy turns around and then they will have a cow patty pot full to work with.

There is an overall common thread that runs through out this whole financial fiasco. It was all based upon dreams, it was all base upon hope and upon promises. Paper profits. Nothing was based upon value. No one bought real stuff, or real things. Futures, leverage, and other names that no one knew what they meant, names that were made up. Promises in the wind.  Frame work provided by the US government.

The choir sings and the pasture preacher says:
The preacher said he could make them whole again
The salesman said he could make them rich

Cohen said:
Everybody knew
Everybody knew the boat was leaking
Everybody knew the captain lied.