I think American Auto companies should latch on to this marketing campaign.

Three good recent articles form the Times:

First, how Moody’s and other credit ratings agencies became part of the housing bubble.

Edmund Vogelius, a Moody’s vice president, explained the company’s business model in a 1957 article in The Christian Science Monitor.

“We obviously cannot ask payment for rating a bond,” he wrote. “To do so would attach a price to the process, and we could not escape the charge, which would undoubtedly come, that our ratings are for sale.”

These gentlemanly rules, which distilled much wisdom, were sacrificed for the almighty dollar. I’ve thought about this a lot. Milton Friedman and the Vienna School lived in the time where ethics and culture, and common sense would tell you a good ratings agency must remain independent from it’s clients. Certainly they must raise revenue, but they were able to do so without charging for ratings until the seventies. It may be the model to which they need to revert.

Chrysler’s friends in high places are working the ropes in DC to get bailed out, so that Cerberus can get a premium when they sell out to GM. This hot potato is going to land soon guys, get with it.

Also, Henry Cisneros and his role in guaranteeing cheap housing to people who can’t afford them…

A friend told me he met a colleague who insisted he was a libertarian. I bet in 2004 a lot of these guys weren’t saying how libertarian they were…

This was my rant to him on Libertarians and the bailout:

Libertarians are republicans who like to smoke pot.

That’s an old joke.

I voted for McCain and my GOP congressman, but not my Senator, since he voted for the bailout. Soon Kay Bailey Hutchinson, my other senator, will be running for governor. I will be voting against her as well. I hate not being listened to. I wrote and called both senators and my representative against the bailout and received a letter in the mail from my representative. That was pretty cool.

I voted for the libertarians on every other election. Much to my chagrin, most of the democrats won local judge elections as 2-3% voted libertarian in each election. The breakdown was 51-Dem, 49-GOP, 2 Libertarian. That is the way it breaks down when you vote libertarian. My county has had mostly GOP judges forever and that is good b/c they keep the criminals in jail, where they belong.

The sad thing about these elections is that good, smart Senators like John Sununu lost their seat whereas jerks like Ted Stevens win (they are still counting, slowly, the votes in Alaska. The best scenario is he wins and steps down and Sarah Palin nominates a new face).

But this isn’t only a GOP problem. Look at Chicago and New Jersey and see what happens when one party dominates.

The longer this thing goes on the more it becomes apparent the current crisis is due to a lack of transparency and encouraging bubblicious conditions. Sadly, everyone thinks the solution is encouraging more reckless behavior, encouraging yet another bubble, especially now that Obama is taking office. The first thing Obama will do when president is bailout GM, etc., which is corporate welfare at it’s worst, on principle even worse than the current bailout, and not change for the better. We were told that these banks needed 700 billion just to keep afloat and the signal now is that, well, now that we have this money in hand we can use it for helping this industry, which votes democrat (Michigan) and especiallly backed Obama. So I guess we really didn’t need all that money for greasing the wheels at the banks, then, right? Any argument made for the auto industry could apply to Starbucks, or Sun Microsystems, and to some extent American Express. But choosing which industry to save seems rather arbitrary at this point, and is not what gov’t does best. Over 20 American car manufacturers have gone out of business, I don’t see why all of the sudden gov’t has to start bailing them out. If GM can’t make a profit selling 9 million cars a year this is a systemic problem that a few billion free dollars won’t solve. Let them all declare bankruptcy, merge, and renegotiate their terms with the UAW and their creditors. The US auto stocks are now trading at 2$ so I don’t know think most shareholders will just have to eat it at this point. Remember that most execs are compensated mostly with stocks, most of which in their company so their holdings are now zero. So if you let them fail it is much worse on them financially, and much truer to the way a free market operates, than to bail them out and then go through the kangaroo court process of demanding limits on their compensation.