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Israeli security risks mount from Obama's so called friends. (See 1 below.)
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I am in total disagreement with this article. Why? Because in my opinion the answer given begs the question. Banks are willing to make loans but there is too much uncertainty and not enough consumer demand to warrant a lot of loans.
Furthermore, with interest rates where they are why would banks want to lock themselves into a risk when they can borrow from the government arbitrage and get about the same return but risk less.
Finally, most corporations are flush with cash and corporate liquidity and world economic conditions are flaccid at best. You decide (See 2 below.)
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Obama must think Brokaw and the "greatest generation' were behind the times and lived in a wimpy past!
Obama cannot make a positive unless he uses a negative foil. He always has to tear down to make his point. Sick leadership!
My father in law came home from WW 2, with two Purple Hearts, one Silver Star, Two Bronze Stars, several various theater citations, opened a business , sent his two kids to college and sat in front of a black and white TV with ears and watched sports played by athletes that did not take dope enhancing drugs.
He did not complain about his entitlements, he did not expect the government to do anything for him and he received a $50 disability check /month because of his wounds.
Clint was right to tell Obama GFY!
You decide (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)Egypt confronts Israel with 6,000 Sinai Islamists as an approved militia
Egyptian tanks at Rafah terminal
To keep the truce with the Islamist terrorist networks in Sinai in place, while avoiding a large-scale military operation to suppress them, Egypt is now releasing dozens of jailed Salafist gunmen in batches every few days, so feeding the Islamists a steady supply of reinforcements. Cairo is also in negotiation with Bedouin tribal elders to grant a body of 6,000 Al-Qaeda-linked Salafi gunmen the status of an approved, independent militia. Armed with up-to-date Egyptian weapons, this militia is to be charged with responsibility for maintaining security in the peninsula.
This may be a neat way out for Egypt and let the Morsi government off the hook of grappling with the violent Islamist networks infesting Sinai. But it leaves Israel squarely face to face with a whole new terrorist outfit which has the freedom to choose between operating in the service of Al Qaeda or Cairo – or playing both sides.
Israeli security circles on the southern front familiar with the Sinai security situation explain that the Egyptian army’s claim Monday, Sept. 3 that it pulled “another 20 tanks” out of the peninsula, marking the tail end of its putative counter-terror military offensive, was therefore the reverse of welcome news for Israel.
All the same, out of certain diplomatic considerations, Israelis officials are collaborating with the US and Egypt in drawing a veil over this dangerous downturn in security along its southwestern border.
This may be a neat way out for Egypt and let the Morsi government off the hook of grappling with the violent Islamist networks infesting Sinai. But it leaves Israel squarely face to face with a whole new terrorist outfit which has the freedom to choose between operating in the service of Al Qaeda or Cairo – or playing both sides.
Israeli security circles on the southern front familiar with the Sinai security situation explain that the Egyptian army’s claim Monday, Sept. 3 that it pulled “another 20 tanks” out of the peninsula, marking the tail end of its putative counter-terror military offensive, was therefore the reverse of welcome news for Israel.
All the same, out of certain diplomatic considerations, Israelis officials are collaborating with the US and Egypt in drawing a veil over this dangerous downturn in security along its southwestern border.
Thursday, Aug. 30 Defense Minister Ehud Barak said: ”The Egyptians must combat terror and if they need to bring extra military strength into Sinai [for this purpose], we should let them.”
As he spoke, Egyptian spokesmen claimed the tanks, illegally deployed in breach of the peace treaty with Israel, were being withdrawn at the end of a “successful military offensive” to root out the terrorists.
This statement, say DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources, contains at least two untruths: The tanks were falsely presented as backing a fictitious Egyptian operation, just as the Cairo communiqué pretended that large numbers of terrorists were killed and wounded “in action” or detained.
There were no terrorist casualties because the entire operation was made of whole cloth, a Sinai desert mirage.
That the Netanyahu government and defense chiefs went along with this fiction is the real issue.
They have committed Israel to accepting the entry of Egyptian military forces into Sinai for the stated purpose of combating terror – a stipulation the Cairo government under the Muslim Brotherhood has demonstrated it has no intention of upholding. Just the reverse: The Egyptian troops positioned in Sinai are ordered to keep their powder dry and stand by as the terrorist cells of the “Mujaheddin Brigades in the Jerusalem Vicinity” - which is closely allied to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula - goes from strength to strength.
Yet some Israeli media have suggested sympathetically that the Egyptian army was forced to slow down its counter-terror operations for lack of intelligence on the armed cells’ whereabouts.
An Israel officer serving in the sector retorted angrily that every Egyptian and Israeli officer serving anywhere in or near Sinai knows exactly where the gunmen are skulking and their training facilities located. “The trouble is that Egyptian officers who go past those places look the other way,” he said.
The only action the Morsi government has taken on the quiet is to place a security buffer strip along the Egyptian-Israeli border off-limits to civilian traffic.
Our military sources report this strip has been dubbed “The American Highway” of Sinai, because its 260 kilometers were paved in secret by US military engineers. It runs from the MFO peacekeepers' Mediterranean base at Sheikh Zuweid in northern Sinai down to Taba, providing a safe route for the peacekeepers, most of them members of the US 82nd Airport Division, between their northern base and their headquarters at Sharm el-Sheikh.
Large sections of the American Highway run parallel to Israel’s Route 12 from Nitzana to Eilat, Israel’s southernmost town.
Egypt no doubt intended this buffer strip to serve additionally for keeping terrorists at a distance from its border with Israel. But IDF observers in that area see very little Egyptian military activity for keeping it sterile and closed to hostile movements.
Once the Salafis are organized in a militia and formally recognized as such by Cairo, it will be that much harder to keep them from breaching the buffer strip abutting the Israeli border.
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2)-
1 Reason the Recovery Is So Slow
Even though it's been nearly five years since the onset of the financial crisis, the economy continues to suffer from its effects. GDP growth remains lackluster andunemployment seems to have stalled above 8%, nearly twice the so-called natural rate.
With the campaign season in full swing, it's easy to blame politics. If you're a Democrat, you likely pin it on the Republicans for their refusal to underwrite fiscal stimulus akin to the New Deal. If you're a Republican, meanwhile, you probably think the stunted recovery has more to do with big government and overburdensome regulation.
In reality, however, if you were to isolate only one group, the responsibility lies most on the banks, gatekeepers of the nation's credit. The purpose of the banking industry is simple: to accept money from depositors like you and me, and reallocate it to businesses and entrepreneurs who use it for productive purposes such as investing in capital improvements and expanding production.
With this in mind, it should be no surprise that the trend in deposits and loans have traditionally paralleled each other; when one goes up, so does the other. But as you can see in the chart below, this relationship has broken down since the onset of the financial crisis. While deposits continue to rise, loans remain at precrisis levels.
Source: FDIC statistics on depository institutions.
The explanation for this breakdown is threefold. First, until recently, many banks had been reluctant to make new loans while they're still working through the toxic mortgages dating to before the crisis. While more traditional lenders like New York Community Bancorp (NYSE:NYB ) have been able to rein this in, the nation's largest banks remain ominously weighed down.
In the case of Bank of America (NYSE: BAC ) -- the nation's second-largest lender by assets-- a staggering7.5% of its loans are noncurrent. This is double the industry average and over seven times the 1% level that an otherwise healthy institution would report. And the nation's third-largest bank by assets, Citigroup (NYSE: C ) , has a staggering $100 billion in potentially toxic loans squirreled away in a much maligned division known as Citi Holdings.
Second, banks are operating under the twin clouds of regulatory and economic uncertainty. On the regulatory side, the biggest banks remain pitched over the implementation of Dodd-Frank, and most particularly its so-called Volker rule, which seeks to prohibit them from speculating with depositors' money in a manner reminiscent of Glass-Steagall. On the economic side, alternatively, all eyes are on Europe, which seems to be on the brink of failure every other week.
Finally, and for understandable reasons, lenders are stockpiling high-quality liquid capital. In the aftermath of the crisis, as already noted, rising loan losses caused many banks to watch as their capital levels depleted. This is the reason so many banks have failed over the last few years, the largest of which, Washington Mutual, was seized by federal regulators in September 2008 and sold to JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM ) shortly thereafter.
In addition, due to important lessons learned over the last few years, both domestic and international banking regulators are starting to require that banks hold more and better assets in reserve to help protect against similar crises in the future. Under the new regime, known as Basel III, banks may soon be required to hold 4.5% of common equity, up from 2% in Basel II,
and 6% of Tier I capital, up from 4% in Basel II, relative to risk-weighted assets. According to a study from the OECD, this could lower global GDP growth by 0.05 to 0.15 percentage points annually.
Waiting for the recoveryIt isn't an exaggeration to say that credit is the lifeblood of our economy. It allows consumers to buy houses and cars, and companies to finance current operations and expansion. Indeed, as we learned when the credit markets seized in the depth of the financial crisis, business literally comes to a stop without credit greasing the wheels of commerce. It's for this reason that all investors should keep one eye on trends in this area, as it's likely here that we'll first see signs of recovery and progress.
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3)President Obama Slams the ‘Greatest Generation’
By Gary DeMa
“The Greatest Generation” is a term coined by journalist Tom Brokaw to describe the generation that grew up in the United States during the deprivation of the Great Depression, and then went on to fight in World War II, as well as those whose productivity at home made a decisive material contribution to the war effort. My father served in the Pacific during World War II and my mother worked in a factory at home.
President Obama just slammed their values at a rally in Urbandale, Iowa, by declaring that “the agenda set out by nominee Mitt Romney and other speakers in Tampa was ‘better suited for the last century.’” He went on to say:
“It was a rerun. We’d seen it before. You might as well have watched it on a black-and-white TV. . . If you didn’t DVR it, let me recap it for you. Everything is bad, it’s Obama’s fault, and Gov. Romney is the only one who knows the secret to creating jobs and growing the economy.”
How many times have we heard President Obama blame present economic conditions on George Bush? But that’s the least of the historical fiction and insults in his “black-and-white TV” campaign quip.
It was that black-and-white-TV generation that created the moral, economic, and political capital that he and his leftist minions are squandering and attacking. It was the WW II generation and its children that built a nation that was a beacon to the world.
That generation was not perfect, but it was the generation that made home ownership a reality for most Americans and put men on the Moon. It was that generation that saw the inequities among the races and did something about it that many in the Democrat Party opposed, including Al Gore’s father.
Obama and Co. are all about reestablishing racial divisions to score political points. If a Republican had used the phrase “black-and-white TV,” Obama’s surrogates and the slurping media would have read racial overturns in it. It’s gotten that bad.
“I wouldn’t have to seal ‘if the government gave us more money.’”
It was an embarrassment for most people in the black-and-white-TV generation to “go on relief.” Not anymore. It’s a badge of honor to make the rich pay their “fair share.”
Sometimes old ideas like saving for a down payment and pulling your own weight are the best ideas that never change. We’re not chronological snobs where only new ideas are the right ideas. The majority of people in the black-and-white-TV generation would never have thought of killing their pre-born babies or normalizing homosexuality. These new immoral trends are said to be “progressive values.”
Forcing banks to lend money to people who couldn’t afford a down payment is a new idea that had terrible ripple-effect economic consequences. It was the Democrats who came up with the policy for the government to guarantee no-collateral loans if they went bad. And they went bad by the tens of thousands and it nearly destroyed the housing industry.
Staying out of debt is an old idea that has served prosperous nations well. The principle goes back to biblical times where debt is akin to slavery, no matter who’s doing the lending, the rich or the government (Prov. 22:7).
So give me some of those black-and-white-TV values. Give me Father Knows Best rather than The New Normal. Give me the black-and-white-TV Andy Griffith rather than the supporter of Obamacare Andy Griffith.
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