Recession of 2008 Quotes

It was the souped up nature of the credit default swaps that was in part responsible for the souped up melt down of the economy of 2008 and the great recession thereafter. A credit default swap is an insurance policy that a company will pay off its bonds and not go bankrupt. It is a cross between an insurance mechanism and a stock exchange type security mechanism and through heavy lobbying escaped any kind of regulation. It cost a company no money to write a credit default swap and they were paid to do so. As long as business and the economy was good, it was a terrific business but there was no way of ever knowing how much risk they were taking. So companies who wrote credit default swaps did not have to have the money to pay to back them up if they business was bad. When that happened in 2008 even the largest insurance company in the world collapsed because of the risk of having to pay the credit default swap and the U. S. Government had to take over the insurance company. In 2010, the Obama administration passed a financial reform bill that began to regulate credit default swaps.

The Surgeon General recommended a series of tough recommendations for dealing with drunken driving:

Bush had been allowed to join the Texas Air National Guard which meant that he did not have to serve in combat in Vietnam the way most other men his age did. However, there were no records of his having reported for duty during several months when he was to be in service. Bush claimed that he was on duty and there was no action taken against him by the then authorities which detractors attribute to his father’s high position and supporters refer to as evidence of the fact that he did nothing wrong. He had been arrested for drunk driving, and the WMD dispute has ever since raged of whether he had been honestly misled by bad intelligence. Bush was not a functional illiterate but had been a college graduate and had completed graduate school studies. He was a poor public speaker and was not an intellectually curious man and did not read much, but this was a huge exaggeration.

The governor ended the practice of his predecessors of serving alcohol at receptions and other functions.