Fannie Mae finally de-listed from New York stock market.

The creation of Fannie Mae as part of Roosevelt's New Deal in 1938, read here, was designed to solve the problem of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Regular readers of this blog will be aware that the later mishandling of the liabilities of these companies is what I believe caused to sub-prime crisis itself leading to the the recent recession. Good news then that the pretense that they continued as viable entities up to yesterday has at last ended. More worryingly is the fact that the huge bulk of new mortgages issued in the USA this year have (in combination with various veteran associations) been issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Restoring economic stability

William Rees-Mogg in The Times today has an interesting article, here, on the present chaos referring back to the lessons of 1931, to which I posted the following comment with very limited space: "Fannie Mae was an attempt to cure the Great Depression and is arguably a spark for the greater one now developing. Fixed exchange rates cannot be defended following decades of incompetent governance. Restore stable monetary values against finite items such as land. That alone can offer security." I have commented often on this blog regarding Fannie Mae and more detailed thoughts on economic solutions to the present ongoing disaster in particular in the posting of 7th August, linked here, titled "Needed - A new Bretton Woods Agreement", from which comes this: Hard-working and comparatively vacation-starved US families who became used to watch their work rewards grow through their 401(k) pension schemes before the Clinton stock market bust have now watched with dismay as the alternative calculator of land and property values rapidly head south as accentuated by the plight of the formerly solid institutions of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The crying need for a stable calculator for value for America's hard-working families could surely not be any clearer or yet more urgent than with the coming election. In spite of the WTO, Nixon's precedent of a temporary import surcharge will not be something to be easily ignored. George W Bush, whose Presidency already appears likely to be viewed by history as far more successful than contemporary pundits might ever have imagined now has the chance to leave a legacy of a secure and strengthened dollar as his overarching achievement for posterity. Fixing a value for the dollar requires no international agreement, it can be accomplished by the best brains and economists from across the parties, political spectrum and diverse interests of the nation. With modern vast number crunching computing power it could be as complex and regularly reviewed as any might wish or as simple and eternal as the value of gold or the wheat yield of land. Anything is possible - anything is essential. In spite of the posting's title what I was proposing was something quite different from the original Bretton Woods agreement and initially only involved the US Dollar, I quote again: Fixing a value for the dollar requires no international agreement, it can be accomplished by the best brains and economists from across the parties, political spectrum and diverse interests of the nation. With modern vast number crunching computing power it could be as complex and regularly reviewed as any might wish or as simple and eternal as the value of gold or the wheat yield of land. The same solution could be available for the Pound Sterling, but a fixed currency demands honest politicians, while the incoming Obama administration might offer Americans such a prospect, none such seem to exist in the UK!

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Fellatio!

Yesterday was not just the anniversary of the beginning of The Blitz of Britain by the Germans 70 years ago, no doubt being gleefully drooled over on the next morning by German leaders as the aerial reconnaissence photographs revealed the gruesome details of the death and destruction wrought by Germany's might, just as this morning, no doubt, a new generation in Berlin and Frankfurt relish the economic humbling of the City of London brought about by the humiliation of Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, in Brussels yesterday in an event that appears to have deliberately taken place on this hugely significant and bloody anniversary, no indeed, for it also marked the second anniversary of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac being taken into the custody of the US Government. Does yesterday then perhaps also mark the end of the era of US moral leadership, might and world domination? Fannie and Freddie brought the pride of home ownership to many lower income Americans over many decades. They helped in pulling the country out of the Great Depression of the nineteen-thirties. Has the US Government, Congress, the Federal Reserve or any other body used the past two years to address the underlying problems of these two grossly over indebted mortgage suppliers? It appears not. In fact the very opposite has been the case. Over the past two years these now government controlled institutions have been the major supplier or underwriters of most of the new mortgages recently issued, therefore merely compounding their underlying problems, read a Bloomberg report from here, tellingly titled "Subprime 2.0 Is Coming Soon to Suburb Near You: by Edward Pinto". The housing crisis, such as that in the US and in Britain is the main underlying economic crisis on both sides of the Atlantic and it appears for the entire english speaking world, yet neither the US nor the UK Governments will face up to that fact. Solutions have been regulary suggested from this blog. Most recently David Cameron and Nick Clegg have been urged to return their property portfolios to the state from which they have indirectly been drawn. Other Cabinet Ministers would be wise to follow suit so that they can address the economic disaster in which the country now lies with clear eyes and from a sensible starting point. A man is worth more than the value of his home or the marque of his car. Economic might when misused can be overcome by ordinary people pulling together, that was the lesson of The Blitz. We can overcome this economic mess by grasping the fact that homes have values because they are secure, situated near schools and jobs priced at a wage which makes them affordable. Bricks and mortar torn down and resold with flat screen TVs or used modern kitchen gadgetry in an environment where no building is taking place have little value at all. Look round your possessions at home today, what are they really worth and if mortgaged to a typical bank, building society, or even Fannie or Freddie ------ what could these failing institutions obtain for their supposed secured assets when society has no hope?

Fannie and Freddie, the fundamental failure that has not yet been addressed.

This blog has repeatedly tried to alert its readers to the true depths of disaster represented by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the US economy.

Most recently it has revealed the involvement of President Obama in fuelling the problem the causes of which lie even further in the past. So many powerful people under various administrations have had a hand in running up the horrendous debts, that politics itself has become one of the major impediments to finding a solution.

On Monday on Bloomberg Television's Charlie Rose programme, Gretchen Morgenson was interviewed about her book 'Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon' its co-author is Joshua Rosner.

Any concerned with the similar problems afflicting UK property owners, should try to find time to watch this interview, which lasts about twenty minutes. It is linked from here.

Read a review of the book from the New York Times, (which employs one of the authors,) from here.

Previous posts on Ironies Too on Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, from here.

Fannie Mae, Walkaways and Sovereign Debt Stormclouds mount

Fox News reports on Fannie Mae one of the main factors behind the present crisis as this blog has always maintained, read it here. Negative homeowner equity will shortly become the major problem facing the coalition government yet no plans are in place to avoid the disaster sure to result. This blog made a suggestion to the disaster that was the Brown Government. I repeat that post below, will anybody now listen:

Monday, September 22, 2008

Curing Britain's Property Price Crash.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, in an interview on the Radio 4 Today programme this morning gave no sign that he was ready to confront the UK housing crisis as I feel sure will still be the case in his conference speech later this morning and that of his Puppet Master tomorrow. The steps being undertaken in the USA over the weekend as reported from an EU perspective are fairly well ( although sometimes inaccurately) summarised in this link. Britain, it is generally acknowledged, has the second gravest property price crunch in the world, yet unlike in the USA with the magic Mr Paulson, the UK government, oh so typically, seems to be doing nothing to address it, content with ignorant BBC interviewers throwing out suggestions of bonus caps in the city and windfall taxes for the energy sector while chucking ever more billions of pounds yet further down the drain for added liquidity for the institutions at fault. In my post of yesterday, immediately beneath this posting, I addressed the problem of the householder in negative equity - particularly in my example number 2, of a family with a mortgage in excess of the value of his home but not yet in default - a potential 'walkaway mortgagee' as separate from one in default and given notice of re-possession. In my view it is the potential 'walkaway' who must first be helped. A decision to quit one's home is grave indeed and places that family in a position of effectively turning their back on the system. It is therefore an action that the government must endeavour to discourage even at great cost. (Re-possessions follow from a considered action of the mortgage holder and form a separate problem). Nobody yet knows how far UK property prices will plunge but it is essential to be aware that a fall of 20 per cent from peak levels requires a rising property market of 2 per cent above inflation for a period of twelve years before the original peak value is once again achieved. That is far too long to expect an ordinary mortgage holder to maintain mortgage payments for zero return. Once 'walkaways' begin they will spread like a plague with all kinds of consequences such as cross-squatting which will make counter-measures practically impossible - effectively anarchy could be an end result. Mortgages have always assumed the equity provided by the mortgagee is the first at risk. In this crisis that has to be changed. I suggest that for houses purchased since Gordon Brown, in the words of incoming BoE Governor King, to paraphrase 'moved the Goal Posts and excluded house prices from the CPI' any loss of value on the resale of such houses be directly proportioned between the first mortgage holder and the mortgagee. This is potentially expensive, but less so if it halts further slides in house prices. As the country is effectively bankrupt such a move will need financing and as a further step to somewhat also put the cost of the greed at the door where it lies I would further suggest the exemption of the first home from capital gains tax be withdrawn.

Fannie Mae losses now at 200 Billion Dollars

Note this particular horror from the CNN Report linked here: Government influence: Fannie Mae said it imposed a moratorium on foreclosures for most of the quarter. But that failed to stop foreclosures from increasing, compared to the prior quarter. The company said it acquired 25,374 single-family homes through foreclosure in the first quarter of 2009, compared to 20,998 in the fourth quarter, 2008.

Fannie Mae assets down $21billion losses $29 billion

Bloomberg reports on the continuing Fannie Mae mess, linked here. One explanation: Forrest Gump Explains Mortgage Backed Securities Mortgage Backed Securities are like boxes of chocolates. Criminals on Wall Street stole a few chocolates from the boxes and replaced them with turds. Their criminal buddies at Standard & Poor rated these boxes AAA Investment Grade chocolates. These boxes were then sold all over the world to investors. Eventually somebody bites into a turd and discovers the crime. Suddenly nobody trusts American chocolates anymore worldwide. Hank Paulson now wants the American taxpayers to buy up and hold all these boxes of turd-infested chocolates for $700 billion dollars until the market for turds returns to normal. Meanwhile, Hank's buddies, the Wall Street criminals who stole all the good chocolates, are not being investigated, arrested, or indicted. Mama always said: "Sniff the chocolates first, Forrest".

Fannie Mae 30 year bond yield soars skywards!

Is QEII in the USA about to crash and burn? The jump in yield of the mortgage rate setting Fannie Mae 30 year bond seems to indicate things are going badly awry. Read the LA Times item from here. It is the mortgage debt in Ireland that now is the greatest threat to that nation's survival, officially not even being discussed at the Eurozone Ecofin meeting, read what I blogged and linked on that topic last week, from here. The UK is in the same boat as both Ireland and the USA yet the Coalition Government pretends no such worries or even concerns really exist. Oh Really!

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

Hang on! AND not for the high winds. Now when we talk trillions I begin to get confused, but I believe 4.9 trillion dollars comes out as: 4,900,000,000,000,000,000 This from the Houston Chronicle:

While the government isn't obligated to assist Fannie or Freddie in a financial emergency, many on Wall Street believe it would bail them out if there is a collapse. The idea that they are "too big to fail" enables the two companies to borrow relatively cheaply by issuing top-rated securities backed by mortgages.

Fannie and Freddie hold or guarantee around $4.9 trillion in home-loan debt, though under a 1992 law they are required to hold in reserve only a fraction of what is mandated for commercial banks.

Mae, Mac and the fading magic of minus one!

Minus one was a magical invention! Mystical even Majestic and certainly magnificently beneficial. It allowed us to eat three apples when our present yield had been only two. Of course, next harvest, when the twelve we usually anticipated actually arrived only allowed us to eat eleven caused it to be viewed in not such a charitable light. Hence the danger signs! BUT! Where did the possibilities of minus one end? Minus infinity to any rational thinking, common sense person (by definition therefore - not an economist) had to be an impossibility. Yet we have passed in recent years from minus millions to minus hundreds of millions to minus billions to minus hundreds of billions! In September 2008, we have finally set a temporary bar, which according to my blog last February which predicted the nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac then seemed set at 6 trillion. The US Government and Treasury Department have this weekend finally bit the bullet and decreed that minus 6 trillion (on last February's figures) is an impossibility! Manipulators of the dark arts of economics have always known that minus one is a convenience based on strong governance. Admitting that minus six trillion is the limit will give the world unconsidered problems! If the UK Government was tomorrow minus one at its head - things might improve! BUT Gordon Brown, an Historian as I understand things - does not understand minus one!

Five trillion increased indebtedness heads for the US

As this blog forewarned last March, here, the next Tsunami to crash against the West's economies will come with the quaint sounding names of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These 'government backed'/ 'not really government backed' financial institutions holding trillions of the lower income mortgage debt of the US housing market typify the kind of murky financial practises that have now brought us to the brink of Phase II of the credit crunch. As I blogged earlier this month, here, only a restoration in the belief in the dollar can supply relief - summed up - that means "sound money" folks! Read Fannie and Freddie hit the skids from the Wall Street Journal Blogs, here. UPDATE on 22/8/08 View this interview on YouTube from Bloomberg with Harvard's Marty Feldstein from Jackson Hole, here.

Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac continued.

This blog has had much to say down the years on the housing crisis on both sides of the Atlantic. On Fannie and Freddie, this link is to a few of such postings.

It is good to see that a web site of the calibre of Acting Man has today tuened again to that issue, that posting is linked here.

The unmitigated disaster of scrapping UK mortgage interest tax relief!

Tax relief in the UK was known as Miras, read here, it was introduced in a bid to encourage home ownership. It followed along from the earlier abolition of annual taxation assessed on the market value of property.

Is home ownership a sensible objective? A few minutes spent watching the following video clip may well incline one to that view, albeit relying on the exagerated comedy features of a popular British TV show:



In the UK today, the three main political parties, compete to claim themselves as being the most "progressive", of which, after any brief  analysis, independently minded researchers would likely be convinced is merely a new word describing modern day marxism, it is unlikely therefore that many proponents of the case for private home ownership can be found amongst their ranks.

Amazingly I have recently been informed by e-mail, that such an aboilition is starting to be considered in the USA itself. I provide a link to a site dedicated to fighting such a disastrous course. Read here and here.

Home ownership benefits society in a miriad of ways providing employment not just to local builders, carpenters and plumbers but countless other service providers attracted by serving communities with a vested financial stake in making their communities attractive and prosperous. The one serious drawback I have been offered being that it may have a slight tendency to reduce the mobility of labour.

What can be learnt from the situation that has developed in the UK since Miras was withdrawn by the social engineering New Labour Party at the beginning of this new century?

Robbed of mortgage interest tax relief, the benefits of property ownership became confined to the imperative for an ever escalating price of property. Britain's politicians, beneficiaries of tax-payer funded second home allowances and thus with a double (in some cases even treble) stake in ever overinflating house prices, connived to ensure this could initially be achieved. This corrupt conspiracy peaked when house prices were deliberately removed from the Bank of England's target inflation figures, which revised inflation calculation method was imposed upon (and/or accepted by) the BoE's new Governor, Mervyn King, upon his appointment.

A reintroduction of mortgage interest relief in the upcoming budget of George Osborne would be the first sign of a return to sanity by the supposedly "conservative" portion of Britain's coalition Government. As the sub-prime mortgage debacle has proven, a property owning democracy depends on a decent education system, as a re-introduction of Grammar Schools are similarly not on this government's agenda, a return to a decent society capable of prudent mortgage management, seems mere wishful thinking for the UK.

I hope the USA has more success in fighting off the removal of the small subsidy central government supplies when providing mortgage interest income tax relief. Considering this provides so many other, often intangible benefits, the actual costs must be minimal. Where have the tax funds thus saved by Britain over the past ten years been spent? An area too murky and dreadful even to begin to contemplate.

Other posts from this blog on the present housing crisis may be found by entering some of the following key words in the "Search" section at the head of this blog or clicking on the links:

Walkaways

Fannie Mae

House Price Crash

Mortgages

Other episodes from Keeping up Appearances, illustrating the inevitable delapidation of socially provided housing versus private property (although the implied social divisions are not an essential prerequisite!!!) are available on YouTube. (I believe the programme has been seen on Public Service Broadcasting in the USA, please note we Brits are not all in one category or the other!).

"HOUSE PRICE" not "Banking" Crisis

Across the world this weekend national leaders and heads of international organisations are meeting to come up with new sticking plaster cures for a banking crisis they state has caused a stock market collapse. Unless they address the real crisis their cures are doomed to failure - for this is a financial crisis caused by the house price bubble. It started in the US with its roots in the Democratic Party inspired reckless lend by Fannie Mae, itself a creation of the supposed cure for the Great Depression. The publicly underwritten mortgage debts together with those of its sister organisation Freddie Mac were never carried as public debt. These organisations lent to low income people incapable of responsible mortgage and lifestyle management. Similar crazed lending policies were adopted in the UK under the New Labour Government and Chancellorship of Gordon Brown. Unless the artificially high house prices in these two countries are addressed the banks cannot be the source of salvation. Other countries may well have similar but not necessarily identical problems. If taxpayers money is to be liberally thrown away, aiming it to reduce house prices in the US and UK would certainly make more sense.

House Prices and Recessions

This blog has long maintained that the house price crisis, which governments and politicians in the UK and USA have both tried to ignore, remains basic to the dire and contnuing economic crisis, which is now quite clearly once again rearing its head.

The sell off on Wall Street, already well down today on the turmoil underway across the EU, got new legs when US home sales last month were announced as down another 3.5 per cent to the lowest levels for fourteen years!

Amongst all the numbers from the press release, this paragraph in particular caught my eye:

Foreclosures and short sales — when a lender agrees to sell for less than what is owed on a mortgage — made up about 29 percent of all home sales last month. That's up from about 10 percent in past years. And a wave of foreclosures are being held up, either by backlogged courts or lenders awaiting state and federal probes into troubled foreclosure practices.

In the UK the ongoing manipulation of house price statistics, that amazingly contiues in the mainstream media, month after month will quite soon inevitably be sussed out by the intending buyers who are its victims.

A Buyer's Strike is coming, sped on its way by the rapid realisation that owning a property to which you are heavily mortgaged and thus indebted for life, and will likely never more appreciate, is even less likely to prove sensible, when looting, arson and riot could occur anywhere, at any time once our democracy is totally abandoned, as is now becoming the case!

I have suggested possible solutions again and again on these pages, if any interested readers remain, you can find some on the following search links:

Walkaways

Fannie Mae

House Price Crash

Mortgages

Freddie Mac CEO Quits

After only six months of "conservatorship" the Chief Executive of the huge US mortgage lender has had enough. The CNN report of the resignation is linked here. As this blog has frequently pointed out the seeds of the present Crash may be partly found in the creation of the federally subsidised mortgage lenders for low income US families, known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which served (together with the industrialisation required to mount WWII) to drag the western world out of the Great Depression. The loans made by these organisations were never properly carried on US Government books and the situation was further compounded when greater quantities of such lending were undertaken in recent years in what has been called the sub-prime crisis. We are therefore trying to grapple with the results of decades of irresponsible lending, will the next CEO last any longer?

Obama falters

This blog wished President Obama good luck on the day of his inauguration. Today in Denver, speaking live at this moment, he will sign a huge 787 billion dollar package, no doubt full of the normal Democratic pork spending, which makes hardly a nod towards the real cause of the credit crunch - a solution for the non-financed debts, best represented by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, spreading their poison up through the housing market - even to those sitting in homes once valued in the millions of dollars. In that respect he joins the blindfolded British Government who have done nothing to address the credit crunch problem where it began - in the over-inflated housing market!

Ireland's Mortgage Mess - Another warning for the UK

The property price crisis remains the biggest danger§ How many times must we point this out but helplessly look on as the second government in a row does absolutely nothing to address the approaching disaster. A report in the Irish Independent this morning, linked here, details the numbers of mortgagees within the Irish Republic having their mortgage interest payments met by the state, an incredible 17,500 recipients, such policies are not sustainable and merely serve to maintain house prices at their ludicously high levels to the benefit of nobody while steadily eroding the resources of the state! In the USA such numbers appear microscopic, in the two years since the US Federal Government assumed responsibility for the mortgage providers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the cost to the Treasury in direct government aid was 150 Billion, that is correct 150 Billion dollars, see Reuters from this link if you do not believe me. Government Ministers who rate their own wealth in the value of their property portfolios, often obtained on the basis of capital gains accrued on mortgages funded by the taxpayer, seem unlikely to be able to grasp this nettle, hence the lack of any plan let alone rational consideration of the true awfulness of the crisis being faced. Such wealth is illusory, grasp that fact and go from there. Exchange rate depreciation and inflation will not cure the problem that exists up and down the country where professionals necessary for the provisions of community services cannot afford the properties in which their families need to live at the salary levels the local communities can afford to pay. This blog has tried to suggest sensible solutions which I have now become tired of linking. State payments to subsidise underwater homeowners is like the squillions paid to the failed banks, waste pure and simple.

House Prices Emergency

Reuters reports that in the UK the house price index had its biggest monthly fall in August since May 2009, read it here. The reality of the crisis now re-appearing will be aggravated by the past government's efforts to keep underwater borrowers, as those with negative equity are sometimes known in the USA, in their home even if unable to meet their mortgage repayments. This category of borrowers will now grow in the UK as the masses of public sector parasites are necessarily shed by a bankrupt state employer. Things are developing faster in the USA where a short term refinancing programme is now being pushed by Fannie Mae, becoming known as an Obama Refi, see this explanatory link which includes the following interesting but alarming fact (with my added emphasis): One of the biggest dangers facing the housing market is the glut of underwater homeowners who could default if their financial situations or home prices worsen. About 11 million borrowers, or 23% of households with a mortgage, were underwater as of June 30, 2010, according to CoreLogic Inc. That number is expected to double next year. The constant stream of encouraging forecasts of stronger economic growth, activity and recovery in the near future presently flowing from the European Commission, the ECB and various former national European Governments, all in direct contradiction of the factual information of deteriorating conditions in the real world can, at the end of the day only make matters worse. If 23% of homeowners are in negative equity today and that number doubles in the coming year to almost half of all homeowners, how many will then become Walkaways sending back their keys? What effect will that have on the still floundering, and in the UK nationalised, banking (so-called) business?

Needed - A new Bretton Woods Agreement.

A year into the crisis and the FT is doing a review into what happened, linked here. All who believe in individual liberties and democracies have lived through a perilous year and while the recent 15 per cent fall in the oil and gold price with a slight recovery of the dollar might be a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel, there seem many more and greater risks ahead. In a posting beneath this, made earlier in the week, I linked to a You Tube video of Republican President Richard Nixon's speech in 1971 when he scrapped the convertibility of the dollar to gold and imposed a ten per cent surcharge on imports. This bought a quarter a century of controlled depreciation of the dollar. Oil producers and other suppliers of basic commodities have now given notice that they will no longer accept ever greater quantities of potentially worthless paper in exchange for their precious and finite natural resources. Hard-working and comparatively vacation-starved US families who became used to watch their work rewards grow through their 401(k) pension schemes before the Clinton stock market bust have now watched with dismay as the alternative calculator of land and property values rapidly head south as accentuated by the plight of the formerly solid institutions of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The crying need for a stable calculator for value for America's hard-working families could surely not be any clearer or yet more urgent than with the coming election. In spite of the WTO, Nixon's precedent of a temporary import surcharge will not be something to be easily ignored. George W Bush, whose Presidency already appears likely to be viewed by history as far more successful than contemporary pundits might ever have imagined now has the chance to leave a legacy of a secure and strengthened dollar as his overarching achievement for posterity. Fixing a value for the dollar requires no international agreement, it can be accomplished by the best brains and economists from across the parties, political spectrum and diverse interests of the nation. With modern vast number crunching computing power it could be as complex and regularly reviewed as any might wish or as simple and eternal as the value of gold or the wheat yield of land. Anything is possible - anything is essential. New Hampshire is the perfect setting in Fall for such a conclave. Lock them up in Bretton Woods if Bush might so wish, but I would suggest the recently refurbished Wentworth Hotel (golf and sailing on hand) on Newcastle Island near Portsmouth NH, there they may not just observe the splendour of natures change from green to red to gold, but also be reminded by the sea of their duty not just to the citizens of the US, but also to the world and the nearby presence of the US Navy Yard will recall the reality of US power in its nuclear submarines, aircraft carrier battle fleets and giant superiority in space technology. Restoring the power and strength of the dollar seems as nothing when recognising the true underlying power of the United States of America which, of course, is bedded in its democracy. The stunning discovery of water on Mars by US scientists just this summer surely must highlight once again the stupidity of leaving the dollar, the currency of such an innovative nation, to drift and dangle. Either or both Presidential candidates could endorse the consensus concept of this Economic Conclave, which should be compulsorily achieved by an end October deadline. Congress would then have the utmost legitimacy for implementation early next year. By the Autumn of 2010 other Central bankers could attend a second Bretton Woods Conference to fix their currencies against the new dollar bench-mark, whether they do so or not is irrelevant as the spendthrift and deceitful politicians of the world will once again have a benchmark via which they can be exposed.