Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Sunday, October 10, 2010

Extend and Pretend

By Dave Anderson:


    As I was reading the dead tree version of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this weekend, I was bowled over by the open embrace of extend and pretend economic thinking with regards to the foreclosure fuck-ups:




In the near term, the freezes could actually benefit both homeowners and the housing market. Homeowners would have time to live rent-free and chip away at their debt. Prices might stabilize because so many homes are penned up.


But the long-term implications are grave....



The first quoted paragraph is extend and pretend.  Pretend that people can afford their debts and extend the time that the banks don't have to recognize their losses.  The rational thing for someone who is legitimately deeply underwater, who had gone through a legitimate (ish) foreclosure with bad bank paperwork is not to continue to pay their mortgage.  It is to spend the next three months to a year living without paying for their housing while cleaning up the rest of their personal balance sheet. The banks will eventually be forced to stop pretending that a particular loan was actually a profitable endeavor. 


Extend and Pretend has been the Serious response to the economic problems of the United States since 2008.  No one wants to take the losses, or more importantly, recognize the losses that they have taken from either bad luck, bad decisions or outright fraud.  So we are stuck, and will continue to be stuck as long as our political and economic elites enjoy fantasies more than reality. 



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