A few random thoughts

A few random thoughts

What do you mean we don’t grow cows?

Treasury secretary Bessent who has become the Trump translator has announced that soon the tariffs on things we do not produce like bananas, citrus and coffee (why do they keep ignoring Kona?) will be lifted. He also mentioned Argentine beef. I thought we produced cattle? What about Brazil? They produce 50 percent of our coffee and are subject to an outlandish 50 percent tariff. Some say that the president is addressing the issue of affordability. But if the export countries are paying the tariffs as he keeps insisting then there would be no need to lift the tariffs since they obviously (in the president’s mind) have no impact whatsoever on consumer prices.

Bye, bye CFPB (for now)

I guess someone in the administration has been reading my blogs and finally got the CFPB’s funding declared illegal. Elizabeth Warren’s child, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is not appropriated by the Congress but rather its funding comes solely out of the Federal Reserve. The administration tried to get the courts to rule that the funding arrangement was illegal but was rebuffed. However, the law says that the funding comes from the Fed’s profits Well the Fed has been running a deficit since 2022 so there has been no surplus earnings. Thus, when current funding expires at the end of the year, there will be no more funding of the CFPB until the Fed starts to run a profit. So if the CFPB is going to operate, it must be appropriated by the Congress. Fat chance with the republicans in control.

Housing affordability?

The notion of a 50 year mortgage won’t have any impact on home affordability. Another somewhat screwy idea is that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are dropping the 620 FICO score requirement. Supposedly this is to help first time home buyers. But isn’t this shades of what helped precipitate the mortgage crisis? Subprime lenders were vilified for not using FICO scores as an important factor in their underwriting decision. Are we going to go down that route again in the name of home affordability?

Speaking of which there are now over 900,000 homeowners who are underwater on their mortgages, meaning that they owe more than the value of their homes. Again this sounds like the mortgage crisis of 2007 resulting in many homeowners walking away from their mortgages and increased foreclosures. And by the way, foreclosures in October increased 20 percent, giving more indication of stress in the housing market. Well this time if the market collapses they can’t blame it on subprime mortgages.

How did we forget about Seattle?

With all the attention on Mamdani’s win in New York and all the gnashing of teeth from the right, little attention was paid to another democratic socialist democrat being elected in Seattle. Speaking of Seattle, Cal Raleigh not Aaron Judge should have been American League MVP. Raleigh finished second. Yes Judge had a great year but Raleigh was the best player at baseball’s most demanding position. He had 60 home runs, 125 RBIs and won both a gold glove and a platinum glove. At least it should have been a tie.

Back to the new mayor of Seattle. She is Katie Wilson who founded a nonprofit that pays her $80,000 a year. She is a college dropout, gets an allowance from her parents, doesn’t own a car, rides a bicycle or public transportation and her husband doesn’t have a job. She says that she pays $2,000 a month rent and $2,000 a month childcare. What I want to know is why does she need childcare if her husband isn’t working. Wilson says she will Trump-proof the city, institute city-run grocery stores (sounds familiar?), tax the rich and free public transportation (no kidding). She says she is a democrat and that she is a socialist which I guess makes her a democratic socialist. Sounds like the perfect person to run a city with a $9 billion budget. Wilson beat the incumbent mayor and also every incumbent (democrat) on the ballot lost to socialists. While another well known socialist AOC was a bartender, Katie says “I worked a bunch of working-class jobs” with brief stints in a lab, a bakery, a law office and in construction. Wilson who rents says she wants to fix things for regular, working people through policies like renter protections against unnecessary fees and exorbitant rent increases. Yep sounds like the perfect mayor for Seattle the home of Amazon, Costco, Microsoft Starbucks, Expedia and Weyerhaeuser.