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-- America's Debt = "We're Screwed!"
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| Originally posted by Q5echo so what exactly are you implying? |
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| Originally posted by Krypton When the recession is over, then you should expect the government to cut deficit spending in response. |
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| Originally posted by Capitalizt hahahahahahahahahaha!!!! |
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| Originally posted by Krypton That the deficit spending is going to get cut. We'r in a recession and the government is following a Keynesian fiscal policy which dictates increased deficit spending during a recession. When the recession is over, then you should expect the government to cut deficit spending in response. |
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| Originally posted by Capitalizt hahahahahahahahahaha!!!! |
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| Originally posted by jerZ07002 unfortuantely, I think you are right. Obama is trying to do too much in this period that requires large upfront capital expenditures. The only way out of this is through a tax increase. Cutting military expenditures is probably the best way to reduce spending, but our politicians and republicans are content with blowing away tax revenue on unnecessary military technology. |
i say they're striking while the iron is stupid.
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| Originally posted by Q5echo i heard some talking heads say "the Dems are striking while the iron is hot". i say they're striking while the iron is stupid. |
Well... that second bounce was a doozy!
Well, well, well, here we are, 5 years later....
I am speechless...we saw this on the horizon and did nothing. I am enjoying reading where my thoughts were in 2006. Thank you for the bump, I think this thread will find new life!
Greatest thread ever.
I want to share a funny that happened to me today...
I went to JP Morgan/Chase today to close an account and move funds to a "locally owned" bank. The attitude I received, when I informed them of my plans to take their..errr MY money elsewhere, was so chilled that I really would not have been surprised if the bank manager "blackjacked" me in the parking lot! They tried everything to make it difficult including getting as much personal information as possible, including a FUCKING FINGERPRINT!
...all to get what is truly mine, wtf?
I have been in a information blackout for a few years now, I found that you save a ton of money by cancelling internet/cable/satellite etc, how have my fellow TA's been doing in the current climate?
Well, glad you survived with some money, lot of people didn't from all accounts and the unemployment situation in the US is probably not helping.
Real estate is extremely good here so that's pretty much a rock to rely on, kept away from the savagery on the market and currency trading wasn't as good as I hoped.
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| Originally posted by zookeeper Well, well, well, here we are, 5 years later.... I am speechless...we saw this on the horizon and did nothing. I am enjoying reading where my thoughts were in 2006. Thank you for the bump, I think this thread will find new life! |
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| Originally posted by Zharen It sure does seem odd referring to 2006 and parts of 2007 as the "good ol days. |
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| Originally posted by Lilith Well, glad you survived with some money |
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| Originally posted by zookeeper Yes, much like a drug addict refers to a bender as a good ole days! |
Obama sides with big banks
http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...r-deal-20110824
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| A power play is underway in the foreclosure arena, according to the New York Times. On the one side is Eric Schneiderman, the New York Attorney General, who is conducting his own investigation into the era of securitizations – the practice of chopping up assets like mortgages and converting them into saleable securities – that led up to the financial crisis of 2007-2008. On the other side is the Obama administration, the banks, and all the other state attorneys general. This second camp has cooked up a deal that would allow the banks to walk away with just a seriously discounted fine from a generation of fraud that led to millions of people losing their homes. The idea behind this federally-guided “settlement” is to concentrate and centralize all the legal exposure accrued by this generation of grotesque banker corruption in one place, put one single price tag on it that everyone can live with, and then stuff the details into a titanium canister before shooting it into deep space. This is all about protecting the banks from future enforcement actions on both the civil and criminal sides. The plan is to provide year-after-year, repeat-offending banks like Bank of America with cost certainty, so that they know exactly how much they’ll have to pay in fines (trust me, it will end up being a tiny fraction of what they made off the fraudulent practices) and will also get to know for sure that there are no more criminal investigations in the pipeline. This deal will also submarine efforts by both defrauded investors in MBS and unfairly foreclosed-upon homeowners and borrowers to obtain any kind of relief in the civil court system. The AGs initially talked about $20 billion as a settlement number, money that would “toward loan modifications and possibly counseling for homeowners,” as Gretchen Morgenson reported the other day. The banks, however, apparently “balked” at paying that sum, and no doubt it will end up being a lesser amount when the deal is finally done. To give you an indication of how absurdly small a number even $20 billion is relative to the sums of money the banks made unloading worthless crap subprime assets on foreigners, pension funds and other unsuspecting suckers around the world, consider this: in 2008 alone, the state pension fund of Florida, all by itself, lost more than three times that amount ($62 billion) thanks in significant part to investments in these deadly MBS. So this deal being cooked up is the ultimate Papal indulgence. By the time that $20 billion (if it even ends up being that high) gets divvied up between all the major players, the broadest and most destructive fraud scheme in American history, one that makes the S&L crisis look like a cheap liquor store holdup, will be safely reduced to a single painful but eminently survivable one-time line item for all the major perpetrators. But Schneiderman, who earlier this year launched an investigation into the securitization practices of Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and other companies, is screwing up this whole arrangement. Until he lies down, the banks don’t have a deal. They need the certainty of having all 50 states and the federal government on board, or else it’s not worth paying anybody off. To quote the immortal Tony Montana, “How do I know you’re the last cop I’m gonna have to grease?” They need all the dirty cops on board, or else the whole enterprise is FUBAR. In addition to the global settlement, Schneiderman is also blocking an individual $8.5 billion settlement for Countrywide investors. He has sued to stop that deal, claiming it could “compromise investors’ claims in exchange for a payment representing a fraction of the losses.” If Schneiderman thinks $8.5 billion is an insufficient, fractional payoff just for defrauded Countrywide investors, then you can imagine how bad a $20 billion settlement for the entire industry would be for the victims. In that particular Countrywide settlement deal, it looks like Bank of New York Mellon, the New York Fed, Pimco and other players negotiated on behalf of defrauded investors. They told the Times they were happy with the deal, but investors outside the talks told Gretchen they weren’t happy with the settlement. Schneiderman apparently listened to those voices instead of the Mellon-Fed-BofA crowd, which infuriated the insiders who struck the actual deal. In a remarkable quote given to the Times, Kathryn Wylde, the Fed board member who ostensibly represents the public, said the following about Schneiderman: It is of concern to the industry that instead of trying to facilitate resolving these issues, you seem to be throwing a wrench into it. Wall Street is our Main Street — love ’em or hate ’em. They are important and we have to make sure we are doing everything we can to support them unless they are doing something indefensible. This, again, is coming not from a Bank of America attorney, but from the person on the Fed board who is supposedly representing the public! This quote leads one to wonder just what Wylde would consider “indefensible,” given that stealing is pretty much the worst thing that a bank can do — and these banks just finished the longest and most orgiastic campaign of stealing in the history of money. Is Wylde waiting for Goldman and Citi to blow up a skyscraper? Dump dioxin into an orphanage? It’s really an incredible quote. The banks are going to claim that all they’re guilty of is bad paperwork. But while the banks are indeed being investigated for "paperwork" offenses like mass tax evasion (by failing to pay fees associated with mortgage registrations and deed transfers) and mass perjury (a la the “robo-signing” practices), their real crime, the one Schneiderman is interested in, is even more serious. The issue goes beyond fraudulent paperwork to an intentional, far-reaching theft scheme designed to take junk subprime loans and disguise them as AAA-rated investments. The banks lent money to corrupt companies like Countrywide, who made masses of bad loans and immediately sold them back to the banks. The banks in turn hid the crappiness of these loans via certain poorly-understood nuances in the securitization process – this is almost certainly where Scheniderman’s investigators are doing their digging – before hawking the resultant securities as AAA-rated gold to fools in places like the Florida state pension fund. They did this for years, systematically, working hand in hand in a wink-nudge arrangement with clearly criminal enterprises like Countrywide and New Century. The victims were millions of investors worldwide (like the pensioners who saw their funds drop in value) and hundreds of thousands of individual homeowners, who were often sold trick loans and hustled into foreclosure when unexpected rate hikes kicked in. In a larger sense, even the (often irresponsible) people who simply bought more house than they could afford were victims of this scam. That's because in many of these cases, credit simply would not have been available to those people had the banks not first discovered a way to raise vast sums of money dumping crap loans on an unsuspecting market. In other words: if Bank of America hadn’t found a way to sell worthless subprime loans as AAA paper to the Chinese and the Scandavians in May, you can be sure that it wouldn’t be going back to Countrywide in June to lend out more money for more subprime loans. And Countrywide, in turn, wouldn’t then have been sending masses of reps out into the ghettoes to offer juicy home loans to undocumented immigrants and refis to confused old ladies on social security. This is as bad as white-collar crime gets. But to Wylde, it doesn’t rise to the level of being “indefensible.” Until they do something worse than this, we apparently should support the banks, and make sure they don’t have to pay more than a fraction of what they made off of this kind of crime. What is most amazing about Wylde’s quote is the clear implication that even a law enforcement official like Schneiderman should view it as his job to “do everything we can to support” Wall Street. That would be astonishing interpretation of what a prosecutor's duties are, were it not for the fact that 49 other Attorneys General apparently agree with her. In Schneiderman we have at least one honest investigator who doesn’t agree, which is to his great credit. But everyone else is on Wylde’s side now. The Times story claims that HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and various Justice Department officials have been leaning on the New York AG to cave, which tells you that reining in this last rogue cop is now an urgent priority for Barack Obama. Why? My theory is that the Obama administration is trying to secure its 2012 campaign war chest with this settlement deal. If Barry can make this foreclosure thing go away for the banks, you can bet he’ll win the contributions battle against the Republicans next summer. Which is good for him, I guess. But it seems to me that it might be time to wonder if is this the most disappointing president we’ve ever had. |
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| Originally posted by Zharen Obama sides with big banks http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...r-deal-20110824 Now I'm no 17sss when it comes to pointing out Democrat blunders, but this decision Obummer is making is just so damn idiotic and unethical that I just have to wonder, is there anyone else out there that hasn't been corrupted by the big banks yet? |
Problems in USA:
Absolute advantage through Global labor arbitrage.Free trade Propaganda.
Decades of deregulation. Legalization of the lobby.Campaign donation. Extreme corruption, excessive loopholes.Dodd–Frank non existent rules.
Chicago economics school of thought, Neo Keynesian policies,Monetarism. Reaganomics.
Corporate Welfare.Tax favorization,Tarp, ect..
Total control of Rating agencies ,Incorrect pricing of risk, heavy corruption
fraudulent underwritings
Shadow banking.
over-leveraging
Wattering down the original Volcker Rule
Predatory lending, financialization,Easy credit conditions, ,Sub-prime lendings, and and many other deregulation policies..
The transformation from Capitalism to Corporatism.
Military complex Favorization/ Transformation to Service based economy.
Race to the bottom.
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| Originally posted by Zharen Yep, 5 years later and there are fears that the US may sink back into another recession. It sure does seem odd referring to 2006 and parts of 2007 as the "good ol days." Somehow though, I just knew this decade was going to be more rough than the previous one, I just thought the wars would be the primary factor for bankrupting this country, not toxic CDO's. |
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| Originally posted by AdagioforString Problems in USA: Absolute advantage through Global labor arbitrage.Free trade Propaganda. Decades of deregulation. Legalization of the lobby.Campaign donation. Extreme corruption, excessive loopholes.Dodd–Frank non existent rules. Chicago economics school of thought, Neo Keynesian policies,Monetarism. Reaganomics. Corporate Welfare.Tax favorization,Tarp, ect.. Total control of Rating agencies ,Incorrect pricing of risk, heavy corruption fraudulent underwritings Shadow banking. over-leveraging Wattering down the original Volcker Rule Predatory lending, financialization,Easy credit conditions, ,Sub-prime lendings, and and many other deregulation policies.. The transformation from Capitalism to Corporatism. Military complex Favorization/ Transformation to Service based economy. Race to the bottom. |
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| Originally posted by EddieZilker I take it you've read Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine? |
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| Originally posted by AdagioforString How about Steve Keen,Roubini and many others? |
Happy New Year all..
2012: year 4 of the "New Depression" for the United States.
I have stayed off the internet for a while now, and I look at the mindset I was in, almost 6 years ago, when I first started this thread. I am a very different person now, and I wonder if others share my new perspective on things.
An update:
I have a feeling that I have lost some of my 'humanity', from working all the time just to provide basics of existing, I have become apathetic to media portrayal of suffering. I watched images of the Japanese tsunami/earthquake and was unmoved. I have no charity now, I see fund raising attempts for natural disaster relief, medical research, starving children relief, animal cruelty relief and many others...I feel nothing for them. I am no longer a generous person, feeling that I have been (and continue to be)taken from enough...I have become "hard" and indifferent to my fellow man. In the 1980s & 1990s, the United States and Canada were the leaders in public donations, generosity was a deeply held cultural value. I believe we will see an abandonment of these values as we continue down this path.
Am I alone in this new mindset, or are there others who share this "hardened" view of the world, due to the crippling debt bestowed upon us by our "elected officials"?
I've only just started to read this thread, but I just wanted to step in and say: WOW. Can't wait to read it all.
This thread was started approx. a year before I started at university in Denmark. I remember we being told that no one would have trouble finding jobs as long as they made sure to study hard. Shortly after the crisis kicked in and we started to feel it in Denmark as well. I must admit I've never been into politics. I have of courses voted and I have opinions. But I didn't (and probably still don't) know enough about all this. I must say I'm interested in knowing more though, and not only watching those movies.... Zeitgeist, The Inside Job etc.
Great read here.
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