Funny Money Idea

Gretchen's Modest Proposal

I think it's a fair assumption that to the extent  congressional democrats know anything about finance and business, they learned it from the New York Times. Gretchen Morgenson is New York Times assistant business and financial editor.    Today she teams with Jonathon Glater in A Fight for a Piece of What’s Left. It's here that I pass the baton to Tanta, at Calculated Risk . 62.5 million loans “ I thought maybe we'd need some comic relief on a day like today. And there's nothing like Gretchen Morgenson for comedy. This may be the single dumbest thing Morgenson has ever written. I had to read this over several times, aloud, to make sure I wasn't misreading it: “ Here is a modest suggestion for James B. Lockhart, chairman of the F.H.F.A., to consider: Do the new owners — us deep-pocketed taxpayers — a favor, and open up Mac ’n’ Mae’s books so we can see exactly what we own. Also, force both companies to disclose details on every mortgage they guaranteed or purchased in the last 10 years. This would include loan type, the year when the loan was made, the original rating on the security and its originator. That way, the new owners would be able to see  ... blah-de-blah-blah ” g So how are Billy Joe and Bobby Sue Taxpayer going to examine a database of 62.5 million loans? Fairly slowly, I'd guess. Since the Taxpayers don't generally run mainframes, it just wouldn't do to "disclose" this information on magnetic tape. A lot of them do have PCs, of course, and many of those PCs run Excel. Excel 2003 has a maximum number of rows per spreadsheet of 65,536, so you could get 62.5 million loans into no more than about 950 separate spreadsheets. Gretchen't Modest Proposal, continued ”