"We could put a band-aid on this thing and through a few hundred billion dollars at it, or we can fix it," Postma said.
His take on the credit crisis led to the Federal Reserve, the declining value of the dollar and the gold standard. The basic idea is that the feds should focus not on buying and stabilizing securities that include bad mortgages, but instead work on backing up the dollar.
"I'm not casting in concrete, its just something I'm thinking about it," he said. "What if the Treasury took back the power of the purse, and tried to control the money supply instead of the credit supply?"
This is something Postma says he thinks a lot about, especially President Richard Nixon's decision to move away from a gold standard for U.S. currency.
"That was the worst thing he did, Watergate is a small piece of the puzzle," Postma said.
Then he got into some dodgy territory about the specter of George Soros, a immigrant from Hungary turned billionare financier, who opposed President Bush in the 2004 election and has taken other politically charged stands.
"George Soros is spending billions of dollars of his money on Barack Obama. Hes not even an American," Postma said.
Billions? That's a lot. Postma backed off a bit.
"It's rumored that George Soros is a big backer of Barack Obama. Im just spreading rumors, but its so widespread that its common knowledge," he said. (Wikipedia says he's supported several Democrats running for president.)
Anyway Smith voted for the bailout package. You can read his take on it here. General idea is that the bill isn't great, but the credit crisis is very, very bad.
"I now believe strongly that this crisis affects all Americans. If it only impacted the financial institutions on Wall Street who made outrageously risky investments then I would not have supported this plan. But the credit crunch and the economic slow down will hit us all," Smith wrote.
