George Bush
George Bush




The uneducated masses rears its ugly head...
Not to call you personally uneducated, but Bush had little if anything to do with the current economic situation. Thanks to our wonderful friend the media most people blame Bush for everything, including when they trip down the stairs.





^^^ well, odds are that after today, or more precisely after January 17th (inauguration), the mainstream media will have a very tough time finding any republican in a position of power to blame !!!





It's so much not what Bush did; it's what he didn't do. Such as let the financial services industry turn a good system into a Vegas game parlor. Watching out fo that stuff is his job, and he didn't control it, well, maybe not himself, but the buck stopped at his desk.
I dont understand why you had to insult her very brief statement when it certainly is an arguable one, though maybe not your side of it.
I loved going to strip clubs; I actually made some friends there. Now things are different for the clubs and for me. As a result I am not as happy.
Customers are not entitled to grope, disrespect, or rob strippers. This is their job, not their hobby, and they all need income. Clubs are not just some erotic show for guys to view while drinking.
NOTE: anything I post here, outside of a direct quote, is my opinion only, which I am entitled to. Take it for what you estimate it is worth.
I have to agree. While some Dems like Dodd and Frank deserve plenty of blame; Bush is heavily responsible for the current mess. His appointees failed to see and appreciate the current problem until it was too late. His rock-bottom approval ratings made him worse than an irrelevancy. Every time he opened his mouth, the Dow went down.
I've been re-reading some historical stuff about the run up to the Great Depression and the parallels are striking. In the 1920's there were three speculative bubbles. First in oil as the price shot up to $4 a barrel before dropping to $1.50. Then in FLORIDA real estate and last in the stock market.
The difference is that after all three bubbles burst, the Federal Reserve contracted the money supply while today the Fed is expanding it.





^^^ actually, according to shadowstats, the M3 overall money supply has been growing more slowly. This isn't the same as an actual contraction, but it is a reduction in the number of 'expected' dollars.
I assume that M3 dollars wind up 'disappearing' when a US dollar denominated asset is 'written off' as worthless (like Lehman Brothers stock shares).





^^^ note that this chart shows YOY rate of change in money supply. Thus the latest data shows a positive 11% expansion. My point was that, compared to the nearly 18% expansion rate of the previous year, an 11% expansion rate is a comparative reduction in liquidity level.
Greed is a good answer but my take on matters is that deregulation is the root cause of the current mess.




Greed.
Deregulation.
Government interference with lending.
Carelessness.
Stupidity.
Too much money from the Fed. Take your pick.
The bottom line, it seems to me, is that we had three speculative bubbles that burst. Historically, there have been lots of such bubbles - the Dutch had one with tulips in the 1600's; the British have had many; the U.S. has had a lot.
The BIGGEST contributors were the careless lending and everything that flowed from that - the MBS's; the CDS's all with no clearinghouse and no regulation.
Thomas Friedman 's column in today's New York Times sums it up very nicely :
" People who had no business buying a home, with nothing down and nothing to pay for two years; people who had no business pushing such mortgages, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business bundling those loans into securities and selling them to third parties, as if they were AAA bonds, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business rating those loans as AAA, but made a fortune doing so; and people who had no business buying thiose bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so they could earn a little better yield, but made fortunes doing so." he goes on to point out that Citigroup was involved in and made gobs of money from "almost every link in that chain." The best paid bankers and Wall Street executives in this country either were too stupid to know what they were selling or did know and didn't care as long as they were getting paid.












I think my view of this is 180 degrees from your view. I must admit, I'm not well versed in the ways of Wall Street, but this looks like a top-down bubble to me.
The driving force in the mortgage market wasn't the new home buyers, it was the lenders themselves. Once the risk had been removed from the lenders and the loans could be chopped up and resold as AAA rated securities, increased profits became dependent on increasing volume, and loan vehicles were created that made it near impossible for anyone who wanted, regardless of credit worthiness, to not be approved for a loan.
Is it possible the rating agencies could be prosecuted somehow for the fraud they committed?




The next line about the people had no business pushing a mortgage should have showed up in my quote. Sorry.
It's give and take, they shouldn't have pushed those loans, AND those people shouldn't have gotten the loans. IMO one is not more guilty.





^^^ well there is one 'guilty party' at the root of all of this 'evil'. HUD ! It is that gov't department that directed Fannie and Freddie to purchase ( and thus securitize and resell ) subprime mortgages that Fannie and Freddie themselves deemed too risky to previously accept. It was that gov't department that directed Fannie and Freddie to substitute the rotten credit of many low income inner city borrowers with the implied (and later in fact) credit of the US government.
Yes the lenders certainly cashed in on the subprime mortgage machine. However, the 'motor' driving this machine was the willingness nay eagerness of Fannie and Freddie to purchase risky loans from these lenders in order to fulfill their HUD directive of increasing the percentage of low income home ownership at any cost. In that sort of environment, any lender who did NOT attempt to sell subprime mortgages was considered at a competitive disadvantage to other lenders that WERE selling such mortgages (and reselling them to Fannie and Freddie). Well today we know what that cost was (or at least SOME of what that cost was).




You see, I lump them in with latter group.
The reason I can't lay blame squarely on them is, only a complete dumb asswould take an ARM that they were not going to be able to afford when rates went up even a single percent.





This is the HOT POTATO theory, which I agree with. All the blame cannot go to the person who heated the potato in the first place. A great part of it must go to those who had to keep passing it around so they wouldn't get burned. Must have given them a great deal of pleasure to devise schemes to quickly pass it onto others when they saw how hot it was and yet greatly profit from its passing. Then they tossed it to us, and we have no schemes and no one else to pass it onto.
They saw enough profit in it to hold out their hand and then they began to find some other patsy to pass it onto. Problem is that with the cost of housing beginning to bubble, many others got into the game who were never intended to be players in this HOT POTATO game. This greatly increased the stakes of the game and exponentially increased the profit for doing so. The metaphorical POTATO got even HOTTER. Until the game became just another house of cards game. When fuel prices became to rise because of speculators and gamblers, the wind started knocking down that unstable house. Then all those potatoes started burning their hands, hands that even now reach out to the government/public repair centers for free salve and bandages.
Last edited by threlayer; 11-27-2008 at 10:01 PM.
I loved going to strip clubs; I actually made some friends there. Now things are different for the clubs and for me. As a result I am not as happy.
Customers are not entitled to grope, disrespect, or rob strippers. This is their job, not their hobby, and they all need income. Clubs are not just some erotic show for guys to view while drinking.
NOTE: anything I post here, outside of a direct quote, is my opinion only, which I am entitled to. Take it for what you estimate it is worth.
Exactly ! And you indirectly raise an even more important question : What was the government doing in the mortgage business in the first place ?
Another twist on this mess was that a substantial percentage of sub-prime borrowers actually qualified for traditional mortgages i.e. they were steered into sub-prime mortgages when there was no reason for it other than broker and lender greed.
It was falling apart before these boys got into the sandbox. People losing jobs, jobs going over seas, stagnant wages for more than half a decade, personal debt, commercial debt, government debt (at all levels.) The majority of us were living on borrowed time on a borrowed dollar.





If it were ONLY one person's fault, we would be able to find a solution. Unfortunately this is the fault of many, many people. And if society doesn't recognize that,we will NEVER find anything like a solution. So don't start that fault-finding with Obama; it's his job to clean up all the mess that so many others have positioned us into. That would just be passing the buck to whomever you don't happen to like, and that's stupid.
I make this prediction: Obama will try harder than Bush ever did or could.
Last edited by threlayer; 11-29-2008 at 02:39 PM.
I loved going to strip clubs; I actually made some friends there. Now things are different for the clubs and for me. As a result I am not as happy.
Customers are not entitled to grope, disrespect, or rob strippers. This is their job, not their hobby, and they all need income. Clubs are not just some erotic show for guys to view while drinking.
NOTE: anything I post here, outside of a direct quote, is my opinion only, which I am entitled to. Take it for what you estimate it is worth.
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