cashing in whole life insurance policy

If you hear people adding "record deficits" to the account of the current economic crisis, are they just being hyperbolic? Nope!

The federal budget deficit hit a new record in the just-completed 2008 budget year under the latest estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.

The record $438 billion shortfall for the budget year that ended last week is up from $162 billion posted last year. The previous record of $413 billion was posted in 2004.

CBO said Tuesday that with the economy in a slump, revenues dropped by almost 2 percent. Corporate income receipts dropped by $65 billion, or nearly 18 percent. At the same time, individual income tax revenues declined by 1.6 percent.

The deficit is virtually certain to balloon even higher next year as the government sorts out the financial crisis and taps a $700 billion Treasury fund to buy toxic mortgage-related securities.

But don't worry about it. Both or either McCain or Obama are going to slash spending. And start lots of expensive new programs. And start a few new wars. And lower taxes on most of you. And supply health care and fresh energy solutions to all. And buy everything bad, and sell everything good. And do whatever is necessary to delay by one more day any bad consequences from decades of spending beyond the government's means.

Decrier of American expansionist foreign policy Chalmers Johnson gripes at Antiwar.com (scroll down a bit) about how no one paid much mind to the casual passage by the House this week of a $612 billion defense authorization:

On Wednesday, Sept. 24, right in the middle of the fight over billions of taxpayer dollars slated to bail out Wall Street, the House of Representatives passed a $612 billion defense authorization bill for 2009 without a murmur of public protest or any meaningful press comment at all. (The New York Times gave the matter only three short paragraphs buried in a story about another appropriations measure.)

........

Our annual spending on "national security" – meaning the defense budget plus all military expenditures hidden in the budgets for the departments of Energy, State, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, the CIA, and numerous other places in the executive branch – already exceeds a trillion dollars, an amount larger than that of all other national defense budgets combined. Not only was there no significant media coverage of this latest appropriation, there have been no signs of even the slightest urge to inquire into the relationship between our bloated military, our staggering weapons expenditures, our extravagantly expensive failed wars abroad, and the financial catastrophe on Wall Street. The only congressional "commentary" on the size of our military outlay was the usual pompous drivel about how a failure to vote for the defense authorization bill would betray our troops. The aged Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, implored his Republican colleagues to vote for the bill "out of respect for military personnel."

How is it that assets built out of mortgages which just yesterday were worth so much are worth so little today? Investors have only recently come to realize that the ratings for these assets were terribly biased. The question now is why we ever came to believe mortgage-backed securities were worth our investing dollars in the first place. There is of course much blame to go around. But insufficient attention has been paid to how ordinary investors—not greedy capitalists but instead those of us who are trying to save for our retirement, our kids' college education, or, indeed, the down payment for a house!—trusted the experts and got burned.

Experts are constantly telling investors what to buy. Sometimes they give us good advice and sometimes not. So surely the fact that there are experts who give investment advice can't explain the trillion-dollar bubble and subsequent meltdown we're now witnessing. The key additional fact is that experts were selling advice about mortgage-backed assets as if those assets were independent when, in reality, they weren't at all independent assets. Only once investors realized that the housing market is a national market—not a local one—did it become clear that these securities were extraordinarily risky. Hence the collapse.

Until very recently it was widely believed that all housing markets were local. If this were so, then assets constructed by pooling mortgages across different localities would consist of pooled independent assets. And these new assets would be dramatically less risky to hold than a single mortgage of similar worth: Combine a bunch of diverse mortgages and sell shares of the new security and those shares represent much less risk than holding a single mortgage of the same value as the share. Or so the story went.

All of this, however, depended critically on housing markets being local, so that the assets in the pooled security didn't move together. Not so long ago, this was the conventional wisdom. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan testified to this effect before Congress in 2005, when the housing bubble was well under way: "The housing market in the United States is quite heterogeneous, and it does not have the capacity to move excesses easily from one area to another. Instead, we have a collection of only loosely connected local markets."

So, following Greenspan's advice, a firm could build highly rated investment portfolios of purportedly uncorrelated assets out of nothing but mortgages from different parts of the country. Once these portfolios were built, it would become easier to finance houses even for buyers of dubious credit.  The problem was that these new securities, and the money which flowed into all housing markets, were sufficient to generate correlation in housing values across the country. As everyone followed the experts' advice—and invested in these new mortgage-backed assets—we began to observe correlated behavior in the housing market, nationwide. 

So how did the securities maintain their high investment grades? Once correlations were evident, once the interconnectedness of housing markets nationwide was evident, why didn't another set of experts, the rating agencies, step in and downgrade the securities? 

Because of ince