That thou doest, do Quickly
Jesus’ words to Judas fit Today
To avoid a massive U.S. Recession
If Congress does not heed the Advice
Many congressmen will go in next Election
I Pity the Man Who Wins the Next Presidency!
September 25, 2008
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
Congress is dragging its feet and it is causing jitters and ripples in the stock market. Instability is being clearly manifested by very dramatic irregular movements in daily transactions.
The world is so tied up in its problems that Syria is doing pretty much as it pleases in northern Lebanon.
The three excerpts which follow describe the situation.
Begin Excerpt 1 from DEBKAfile
Syria masses 10,000 commandos on border to invade N.
Lebanon
DEBKAfile Exclusive Report
September 23, 2008, 9:39 AM (GMT+02:00)
Damascus is pressing forward with its plan to occupy Greater Tripoli, Lebanon’s second largest city and port, DEBKAfile’s military sources report.
To this end, 10,000 Syrian commando troops have massed at Abboudieh on the Lebanese border ready to follow an advance force which occupied seven villages around the northern city earlier this month, as first disclosed by DEBKAfile on Sept. 20. A Lebanese army spokesman first denied the concentration while the mainstream Israeli media ran the official denial without checking the story out.
However, when witnesses said the boosted Syrian deployment was visible from the Lebanese side of the border Tuesday, Sept. 23, the spokesman issued a new statement. He said Beirut had asked Damascus for clarifications and was told the measure was “internal and in no way directed against Lebanon.” This left the deployment with the option of striking at anti-Syrian militias operating outside the Lebanese army in the Tripoli region.
Damascus stressed the move was linked to a crackdown against smugglers (sic).
In yet another “clarification,” the measure was linked to digging new wells along the Syrian-Lebanese border.
These various “clarifications” are so implausible that Damascus is obviously unconcerned about any serious challenge to its sudden build-up of a 10,000-strong special forces deployment.
This sort of strength, say DEBKAfile’s military sources, is deployed for war operations, not anti-smuggling policing.
Tuesday, unofficial Lebanese sources confirmed that Syrian commandos had occupied Wadi al-Ashaer, a village in the Rashaya district in the North.
Our sources add that this is only one of the seven villages captured by an advance Syrian force in northern Lebanon last week, after which Damascus advised Washington and Paris not to interfere. It is now engaged in building fortifications and paving military road links for the main body of special forces to move in.
Syrian occupation of northern Lebanon will make profound inroads on the strategic position of the United States and Israel in this part of the Middle East, yet Washington and Jerusalem are turning a blind eye.
Begin Excerpt 2 from DEBKAfile
John McCain, Barack Obama pledge joint support for Bush economic package
September 25, 2008, 12:40 AM (GMT+02:00)
The Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, agreed that the crisis was close enough to catastrophe to set partisan considerations aside and help President Bush push his bailout package through Congress before the markets open Monday.
In an unconventional step, McCain announced he was suspending his presidential campaign to focus on the crisis after conferring with his rival.
He asked to postpone Friday’s televised debate between them at Mississippi University. Instead, he proposed a leadership meeting at the White House between the president, Obama and himself, to hammer out a solution to the crisis. The Democratic candidate replied that the debate should take place.
Obama laid down three conditions for throwing in his support behind the package compiled by the president, the treasury secretary and the head of the Federal Reserve:
1. Distribution of the bailout funds must be subject to oversight by a bipartisan committee every step of the way.
2. Every dollar spent to rescue financial institutions must be returned
to the American taxpayer when the crisis blows over.
3. There must be no “golden parachutes” for CEOs of failing financial institutions.
4. Help must also be extended to home-owners and ordinary Americans who have fallen victim to the crisis.
DEBKAfile’s political sources report that the treasury secretary and Fed director are facing massive Democratic resistance in Congress to the proposed rescue package. If it does not go through quickly, the upheaval predicted for Wall Street and world markets is expected to far surpass the disruptions of the last ten days. There are also grave fears in Washington that the US dollar will slide further.
The President and the two candidates hope to push both their parties into supporting the emergency package.
Many economists in the West think the $700 billion bailout is not enough to save the day because the crisis is a lot deeper than US economic leaders are saying.
Begin Excerpt 3 from UK Independent
Leading article: Ominous signs that this crisis is far from over
Our governments still have much to do to rescue our economies
Thursday, 25 September 2008
The bulls charged back into the arena much too soon. When news filtered out a week ago of an unprecedented United States Government plan to nationalise the toxic debt of Wall Street, American stock markets responded as if salvation was finally on its way. The euphoria was shared here in Britain. Our own FTSE 100 registered its biggest single-day jump in its history last Friday.
After months of panic selling, investors suddenly began to buy banking shares. Our own Government’s orchestrated merger of the sickly HBOS with Lloyds TSB helped generate a perception that the financial services sector was emerging from the woods.
Rarely has the colour drained away so quickly from a new dawn.
The two candidates for the White House, John McCain and Barack Obama, have been objecting to the $700bn plan of the US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and the Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. And the US Congress is refusing to sign off on it until members are satisfied that certain safeguards are met.
The delay has depressed markets anew.
Share prices on both sides of the Atlantic have been tumbling again. And the banks are once more in the firing line. HBOS shares have been subject to a renewed pounding, as investors begin to doubt whether the merger will actually go through. If it fails to do so, the implications for Gordon Brown, who made much of his brokering of the deal, will surely be dire.
Meanwhile, Congress has woken up to the implications of the plan for US taxpayers. They are holding the process up with demands that the reckless speculators be punished.
They also want the plan to help those poor Americans at risk of losing their homes.
The call on Capitol Hill is to save Main Street, not just Wall Street.
Mr McCain and Mr Obama are right to want to ensure the greed-driven architects of this mess do not get away scot-free. Radical new regulation of the global financial sector is surely a political inevitability. But the frustrations of Mr Paulson and Mr Bernanke over these delays to the implementation of their rescue plan are equally understandable. Every day that the banking sector remains too scared to lend imperils further the wider economy. Businesses are being starved of money. Householders are unable to get mortgages at reasonable rates. As the world’s most successful investor, Warren Buffett, put it yesterday, the West is facing “an economic Pearl Harbor”.
The primary goal of policy-makers must be to protect the wider economy.
Questions of moral hazard and regulatory reform should not be ignored, but they must be dealt with after the financial system has been stabilised.
Yet the larger problem with the Paulson/ Bernanke plan is not that it encourages moral hazard, but that it might not get to the root of the sickness in the credit markets. Some economists have made the case in recent days that the true cause of the banks’ failure to lend to each other is not too many illiquid debts on their books, but simple insolvency among many of them. In other words, the banks need to recapitalise by raising vast sums from their existing shareholders or new investors (possibly the US Government) before funds begin to flow on a healthy scale again.
Mr Paulson and Mr Bernanke should use this hiatus to evaluate this argument. If it turns out to be close to the truth, the plan before Congress can be altered accordingly. This delay might just save the American taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars and give investors all around the world a genuine reason for optimism.
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