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Economics creates artificial scarcity, while science and technology decrease scarcity. Economics falsely sells unemployment as the result of industrial breakdown, when in fact it represents progress. Economics is non-predictive and based on flawed axioms such as the origin of money:

a. Just in way of emphasis: economists thus predicted that all (100%) non-monetary economies would be barter economies. Empirical observation has revealed that the actual number of observable cases—out of thousands studied—is 0%.

b. Similarly, the number of documented marketplaces where people regularly appear to swap goods directly without any reference to a money of account is also zero. If any sociological prediction has ever been empirically refuted, this is it.

Your high school taught you a lot of theory.

Now, can we compare the theory to the evidence? Is it true? or does the theory need to be modified?

That's how science works, isn't it?

(seems like economics could pay more attention to that...)

How about some more links? How about the fact that the ones who thought up credit default swaps, aka economy killers, are now in charge of the carbon credit scam?

Or how about how Rev Al Gore, Mr "inconvenient truth himself" has set himself up to be the world's first carbon billionaire? BTW did you know he has the ecologically friendly brass balls to say having a house with an indoor basketball court that blows more AC than TWENTY family of four homes, and who farts around on a private LEAR JET is complete CARBON NEUTRAL? How is that miracle able to occur? By paying himself credits from his own company that's how! it would be like you moving money from your left to right pocket, calling it "wealth redistribution" and demanding AND GETTING a tax break for doing it!

One final note: You notice that NEVER, not even once, have you seen Rev Al and the AGWers call for tariffs on china and India, even though both have said they won't play his little carbon games? you know why that is? because they make money on offshoring duh! More MONIES nom nom nom!

WAKE UP! Both sides are COMPLETELY FULL OF SHIT and have been corrupted by money so damned badly that if one of the "scientists" on EITHER side tells you its raining your ass better stick your arm out the window! The winner will take BILLIONS OF DOLLARS from the people who can least afford it, the working poor. BOTH SIDES want to fuck you HARD.

A sensible plan would be to stay as we are now, to keep raising standards while investing in technology TO BE BUILT HERE that would give us the energy we need. but that will never happen if either side wins, why? because they can't make massive profits THAT way stupid! More MONIES nom nom nom!

I believe a giant asteroid is gonna hit the world in the next 50 years. Do you have evidence it is not? We have smaller ones hitting constantly, so how do you KNOW there isn't a bigger one out there? You don't.

Therefor you should give me 50 beeelion dollars so that I can build my anti asteroid protection system. We can just tax everyone, we'll call it a "mineral derivative" and we can even set up markets to trade in them! Of course coming in on the ground floor I'll make a slight profit but that's only fair, since it was my brilliance that thought it up, right?

Uh huh. you DO realize that there are BILLIONS to be made from the biggest scam since CDOs, which of course i'm referring to carbon credits, aka "indulgences for the 21st century" yes? That Mr "inconvenient truth" as set himself to become a carbon billionaire by leeching off the west with said scam, yes?

Or that rev Al also farts around in a personal Lear jet and has a house with an indoor basketball court that sucks down more AC than 30 single family dwellings while telling you that YOU must pay? That he also has the giant brass balls to say those very same energy pigs are 'carbon neutral" because he pays himself with credits from his own company which would be like me moving money from my left to right pocket and calling it "wealth redistribution" and demanding and GETTING a tax credit for doing so?

Old Rev Al Gore is just ONE example of the leeches set to make a killing from this. If you'd like I can show you the same person who helped to invent CDOs is now helping to create carbon derivatives or let you see that Goldman Sachs, kings of leeches are all ready to blow some carbon bubbles but why bother? you'll just deny it and mod me down, yes?

Anyone that thinks this whole thing doesn't come down to $$$ is frankly a fool. And notice how NEVER, not once, have you EVER seen Al Gore and friends come out in favor of heavy tariffs for China and India, who both have said they won't play the carbon game? Why is that? Because they make money off of them silly! In the end it all comes down to 'More monies for teh RICH nom nom nom" while yet again fucking the poor and if you think these people actually give a flying fuck about saving the planet I have a nice bridge to nowhere you might be interested in.

Why do we think liquidity is a good thing?” Answer, because it facilitates trade around the exchange of information. “Information about what?” one might then ask. “The company in which the investment is being made,” is the answer. Does algorithmic trading exchange information about the performance of the company? No, it is only working off information about trading behaviour. Ergo, it may increase “liquidity” but it is not fulfilling the purpose of liquidity.

That kind of shift to traders working mostly off what traders do, rather than assessing the value of what is being traded, has become an absolute plague. It has taken over most Western financial markets. Hedging, for example, used to be all about hedging bets to protect the underling exchanges (usually wheat, or pork bellies or physical things). Now, hedging is all about reading behaviour, which then leads to other hedging strategies that are based on reading the hedging behaviour, and so on.

So the disappearing point is part of the problem. In our “anthrosphere” we are increasingly staring at each other’s navels in the financial markets, trying to make money and sustainable wealth out of ether.
    -- Yves Smith:

Uhhh...been there done that. Didn't you ever see "Black Hawk Down"? That was the USA trying to keep enough order that famine relief could be brought in to help the starving. Instead every warlord and jihadist snatched everything that wasn't nailed down for their troops and for good measure used the US soldiers as target practice.

If the EU wants to go in there fine, but we kinda have our hands full with trying to keep the reps from tossing our credit rating in the hopes of stomping on the poor and elderly some more by making sure they don't get their checks next month (I swear they need to change their logo from an elephant to the monopoly guy lighting a $100 bill while standing on the poor) not to mention the THIRD war the president now has us involved in, showing us that "Hope & Change (TM)" had fine print that read "I Hope nobody notices the only Change was from a R to a D on the door".

Finally, and I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing it out but I don't give a fuck, the truth is the truth, everything I've seen proposed with regards to "climate change" (I love how they switched it from global warming, so no matter what happens the name fits) has been a GIANT SCAM like carbon credits, led by Rev Al Gore who has set himself up to be a carbon billionaire and just to show his balls are REALLY big has the nerve to claim farting around on his Lear jet and having a home so large it has its own basketball court indoors is "carbon neutral" since he pays himself credits from his own company which would be like moving money from your left to right pocket and claiming its "wealth redistribution" and demanding a tax break for it!

Oh and it might interest some here to know one of the chief architects of credit default swaps, you know the thing that helped slaughter the economy? Well guess who is writing the rules on cap & trade? Yep from the very same people who brought you "lets treat the market like Las Vegas baby!". And I would also point out that NEVER, not even once, have you seen Rev Al Gore come out for increased tariffs on China or India, two of the biggest growing polluters on the planet and who have already said they won't play the carbon swap game. Why? Because he and his friends MAKE MONIES off of them silly!

So I'm sorry but until we see a plan that doesn't consist of "hey you should give large chunks of money to me and my friends, while helping China and India to completely bury your economy!" then I say they can all fuck right off. We have three wars, an economy that has lost more than 20,000 FACTORIES to outsourcing not jobs mind you, whole factories, and a shamefully porous border that is killing Americans daily. So frankly we have bigger things to worry about that guarding some probes. Let the EU do it.

Even experienced and well know economists are now questioning the motivations and legality of "Experienced" economists running our current markets.

Seen this (newspaper link here)?

The giant computer company Cisco and U.S. prosecutors deceived Canadian authorities and courts in a massive abuse of process to have a former executive thrown in jail, says a B.C. Supreme Court judge.

The point, said Justice Ronald McKinnon in a stinging decision delivered orally on Tuesday, was to derail a lawsuit launched by the former employee, and involved a series of machinations that would make a normal person "blanch at the audacity of it all."

In a rare move, McKinnon stayed extradition proceedings against Peter Adekeye, a British computer entrepreneur who once worked for Cisco Systems, Inc.

The judge said U.S. prosecutors acted outrageously by having the respected executive bizarrely arrested in Vancouver on May 20, 2010 as he testified before a sitting of the American court he was accused of avoiding.

What you say is true (they would have to exit euro zone) - however the immediate benefits that would bring to Greece + the disadvantage of having a difficult time attracting foreign investment for some undetermined period be worse than auctioning off all public assets and assuming the corporate financial sectors insurmountable debt (i.e. a debt unrepayable by Greece, ever)? The linked article (and see my other post in this thread from Nobel prize winner's take) appear to be making a pretty convincing case based on hard evidence that it is the lesser of two evils for Greece (and Ireland, Portugal) to take. I have yet to see credible counter arguments, but not for lack of searching. By credible I mean not Financial sector shills repeating half truths and the "Intellectual Dishonesty" being outlines in the link... of which there are more than plenty. Which may not be surprising considering that the US Financial industry could lose 100 billion or so if Greece defaults, apparently (see first post after analysis here).

Today, Tetsuo Matsui at the University of Tokyo, says the limited data from Fukushima indicates that nuclear chain reactions must have reignited at Fuksuhima up to 12 days after the accident.

As Time Magazine blogger Eben Harrell pointed out on March 30th:

The IAEA has said that the Fukushima nuclear power plant may have achieved re-criticality. “There is no final assessment,” IAEA nuclear safety director Denis Flory said at a press conference on Wednesday, according to Bloomberg News. “This may happen locally and possibly increase the releases.”

Arnie Gunderson says as of June 3rd:

Unit 3 may not have melted through and that means that some of the fuel certainly is lying on the bottom, but it may not have melted through and some of the fuel may still look like fuel, although it is certainly brittle. And it’s possible that when the fuel is in that configuration that you can get a re-criticality. It’s also possible in any of the fuel pools, one, two, three, and four pools, that you could get a criticality, as well. So there’s been frequent enough high iodine indications to lead me to believe that either one of the four fuel pools or the Unit 3 reactor is in fact, every once in a while starting itself up and then it gets to a point where it gets so hot that it shuts itself down and it kind of cycles.

Another recent post points out:

Radiation levels in water inside the silt fence near reactor 2 are high and rising, despite large amounts of dilution. Continued very high levels of Iodine 131 with a half life of 8 days are very hard to explain for a reactor that has been “shut down”. Normally Iodine levels would drop several orders of magnitude below cesium activity levels over the sixty day period shown in the graph, but instead they continue to track each other. The level of 10,000 Bq/liter I-131 is very problematic. It is much higher than would be expected for a reactor in cold shut down for 2 1/2 months.

The situation at Fukushima is not stable and in fact the danger is increasing. The stopgap cooling by injecting tons of water into the reactors and fuel rod storage is creating a massive burden of highly radioactive water that is a storage and disposal nightmare. There has been some limited success in providing recirculation cooling to the spent rod pool for unit 1, but that has a modest effect on the radioactive water situation.

The plan to reduce radioactivity in existing water and recirculate it for cooling is still in process. It is not clear if the capacity of this system will be able to keep up with current cooling needs, much less deal with the backlog. If the reactors and fuel storage are generating new radioactive material, the cleanup system is even less likely to be adequate.

If there is re-criticality the cleanup becomes that much harder. There is also the possibility of more fires/explosions because of radioactive decay heat sources. Continued earthquakes or typhoons could trigger other large release of radioactive material into the general environment.

The plant is leaking highly radioactive water right now and this problem is being swept under the rug. There will be a permanent exclusion zone at the plant site. Even worse, the ocean region will have long lasting radiation contamination that will cripple the seafood industry for a large area of the Japanese coast. Things are a lot worse then anyone is willing to admit.

Obama: "We're a nation of laws. We don't let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate. He broke the law."
The impropriety of Obama's public pre-trial declaration of Manning's guilt ("He broke the law") is both gross and manifest. How can Manning possibly expect to receive a fair hearing from military officers when their Commander-in-Chief has already decreed his guilt?

Or this, an equally disturbing (though probably less obviously so because this concerns "foreigners":

When I saw that, I was going to ask how the NYT could possibly know that the people whose lives the U.S. just ended were "militants," but then I read further in the article and it said this: "A government official in North Waziristan told Pakistani reporters that five children and four women were among the 23 who were killed." So at least 9 of the 23 people we killed -- at least -- were presumably not "militants" at all, but rather innocent civilians (contrast how the NYT characterizes Libya’s attacks in its headlines: "Qaddafi Troops Fire Cluster Bombs Into Civilian Areas").

Or, about a guy who hit a bicyclist in NYC causing "spinal cord injuries, bleeding from his brain and damage to his knee and scapula, according to court documents. Over the past six weeks he has suffered “disabling” spinal headaches and faces multiple surgeries for a herniated disc and plastic surgery to fix the scars he suffered in the accident."

This kind of egregious hit-and-run is, obviously, a very serious crime. Milo is incredulous at the suggestion from Erzinger’s attorneys “that Erzinger might have unknowingly suffered from sleep apnea”, and wants Erzinger to be charged with a felony. Justice must be served: the case “has always been about responsibility, not money”, he wrote to DA Mark Hurlbert.
Yet Hurlbert, looking at Erzinger’s wealth, decided that the case really was about the money after all:

“The money has never been a priority for them. It is for us,” Hurlbert said. “Justice in this case includes restitution and the ability to pay it.”
Hurlbert said Erzinger is willing to take responsibility and pay restitution.
“Felony convictions have some pretty serious job implications for someone in Mr. Erzinger’s profession, and that entered into it,” Hurlbert said. “When you’re talking about restitution, you don’t want to take away his ability to pay.”

In other words, Erzinger has bought his way out of a felony charge, over the strenuous objections of his victim; it’s very unlikely that online petitions will do any good at this point. Just another thing to add to the list of things that money can buy, I suppose. [The story continues here]

Or this about regulators who refused to regulate banks because fining them would hurt them financially. Or this about a state AG being bought by the mortgage lenders he's supposedly investigating/prosecuting. Or

Obama: "We're a nation of laws. We don't let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate. He broke the law."
The impropriety of Obama's public pre-trial declaration of Manning's guilt ("He broke the law") is both gross and manifest. How can Manning possibly expect to receive a fair hearing from military officers when their Commander-in-Chief has already decreed his guilt?

Or this, an equally disturbing (though probably less obviously so because this concerns "foreigners":

When I saw that, I was going to ask how the NYT could possibly know that the people whose lives the U.S. just ended were "militants," but then I read further in the article and it said this: "A government official in North Waziristan told Pakistani reporters that five children and four women were among the 23 who were killed." So at least 9 of the 23 people we killed -- at least -- were presumably not "militants" at all, but rather innocent civilians (contrast how the NYT characterizes Libya’s attacks in its headlines: "Qaddafi Troops Fire Cluster Bombs Into Civilian Areas").

Or, about a guy who hit a bicyclist in NYC causing "spinal cord injuries, bleeding from his brain and damage to his knee and scapula, according to court documents. Over the past six weeks he has suffered “disabling” spinal headaches and faces multiple surgeries for a herniated disc and plastic surgery to fix the scars he suffered in the accident."

This kind of egregious hit-and-run is, obviously, a very serious crime. Milo is incredulous at the suggestion from Erzinger’s attorneys “that Erzinger might have unknowingly suffered from sleep apnea”, and wants Erzinger to be charged with a felony. Justice must be served: the case “has always been about responsibility, not money”, he wrote to DA Mark Hurlbert.
Yet Hurlbert, looking at Erzinger’s wealth, decided that the case really was about the money after all:

“The money has never been a priority for them. It is for us,” Hurlbert said. “Justice in this case includes restitution and the ability to pay it.”
Hurlbert said Erzinger is willing to take responsibility and pay restitution.
“Felony convictions have some pretty serious job implications for someone in Mr. Erzinger’s profession, and that entered into it,” Hurlbert said. “When you’re talking about restitution, you don’t want to take away his ability to pay.”

In other words, Erzinger has bought his way out of a felony charge, over the strenuous objections of his victim; it’s very unlikely that online petitions will do any good at this point. Just another thing to add to the list of things that money can buy, I suppose. [The story continues here]

Or this about regulators who refused to regulate banks because fining them would hurt them financially. Or this about a state AG being bought by the mortgage lenders he's supposedly investigating/prosecuting. Or

Hmmm, you must have the double secret annex to the constitution or something. The only provisions I see relating to government debt are that Congress has the power 'to borrow money on the credit of the United States' and that the newly formed federal government assumed the existing debt accrued under the Articles of Confederation.

If a federal government default is so impossible, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and start selling credit default swaps? By your theory they're free money, and it sure looks like there's an upward trend.

Majority of trading (at least in the US) is computer. According to this, average length of time a stock is held is under 35 seconds.

The mainstream financial reporting in the US is a complete joke -- everyone fixates on the Dow, as though it held any meaning. At the end of each day, some "meaningful" reason is given for a less than 1% move, however automated trading never seems to be included.

Netflix joins the Dow??? Is that what this country is reduced to? No manufacturing, just service?

Meanwhile, SEC regulation is a total joke, insider selling is rampant, accounting is a joke...

But, if you're a retiree, where else can you hunt down returns? CDs are long dead.

Plain and simple.

We make fun of China and other places, but it seems that our judiciary is now pretty much bought in many places.

Check out this article on how many businesses see corruption as a barrier to entry to markets.

And who do you think the judiciary (read "lawyers") has bought?

Here's a HUGE hint:

Each cycle, the contributions significantly favor Democrats. In the 2008 election cycle, the industry contributed a massive $234 million to federal political candidates and interests , 76 percent of which went to Democratic candidates and committees.

Plain and simple.

We make fun of China and other places, but it seems that our judiciary is now pretty much bought in many places.

Check out this article on how many businesses see corruption as a barrier to entry to markets.

In this case it may simply have been incompetence. Seriously. We expect to be able to hold the judiciary to a higher standard, but sometimes it just doesn't work out that way. There's also the fact that he wasn't paying an expensive attorney.

But ... yeah, when you get right down to it, he was suing lawyers. That's not so easy to do, especially if they have friends (or friends of friends) on the bench. This decision does seem pretty raw, I mean, the other side admitted wrongdoing. Something smells here.

Plain and simple.

We make fun of China and other places, but it seems that our judiciary is now pretty much bought in many places.

Check out this article on how many businesses see corruption as a barrier to entry to markets.

Wow, lets see if we can't shed some light here.

I can agree on principal that yes, the less you tax the citizenry the more disposable income a person has to spend. However, when you're in a recession, people don't spend as much. When you lower taxes, the vast majority of people just SAVE extra money rather than spend it. Which decreases tax revenue, while giving no benefits to the economy. This is why tax cuts aren't the solution to a recession, they weren't the solution in the 20's and 30's they aren't the solution now. Go ask an economist. The problem with your argument here is you assume that the only factor is the tax rate, but there are many more factors than this.

The reverse argument is equally flawed because government debt is not the same as private debt. The point of government spending is to move numbers on a spreadsheet to numbers on a different spreadsheet. Or in better terms, to move money from the public sector into the private sector.

The example you talk about, businesses sitting on cash, etc., why do you not bring that up in your first scenario? Again, there are many more factors than simply how much comes or goes in taxes. When you're in a recession, businesses and families are the same. If you lower the taxes, they just save the excess money. Sure, SOME of it will be spent, but, as mentioned in many economic analysis', for every dollar in tax cuts (as of a few months ago) the government would get back I think it was around 65 cents. Whereas for every dollar in stimulus, the government was getting back around $1.20 or something. The problem is that people were saving the extra money from the tax cuts, not spending it. Now if we weren't in a recession, I might agree with you more. The difference is I am taking into account much more than just the tax rate.

Once again, lowering taxes does not magically increase revenue. If the other factors are in alignment then it's possible that it can. But currently, right now, it wouldn't.

The Economist has a pathetic leader this week criticizing Obama for hammering BP and raising the ridiculous idea that his corporate-friendly administration is anti-business.
It actually (really!) calls the president “Vladimir Obama” and writes:
The collapse in BP’s share price suggests that he has convinced the markets that he is an American version of Vladimir Putin, willing to harry firms into doing his bidding.
The normally sober Economist has gone off the wagon here.
First, it knows better than to “suggest” what “the markets” think. Second, that blew up in its face rather quickly. Instaputz points out that BP shares soared 10 percent on news of the $20 billion fund the Economist’s spin here is obnoxious. If anything ends up ruining BP, it will have been its own actions. Go read this The Wall Street Journal piece for a look at the company’s negligence.
And BP should have to pay for all the associated costs of its actions, not just the actual bill for cleaning up the oil.they will be very, very costly.
Moreover, a company’s market capitalization is based on expectations for future earnings. This disaster will surely make it harder for BP to get drilling rights that investors expected it to have just two months ago. The political climate for offshore drilling has just undergone a seismic change.
Another big factor in BP’s share decline is pure uncertainty. Investors don’t like it. Right now, the only thing certain is that BP’s hole is going to be spewing toxic oil into the Gulf of Mexico for at least another two months

Libertarians are often ignorant of the fact that they effectively lobby against civilization. In terms of GDP per capita, life expectancy, innovation, and quality of life, the middle of the road socialist countries dominate worldwide. That's because if you shackle your society with continuous relearning of generational lessons, you can never move beyond basic progress.

If you'd like to refute the massive progress introduced by the Apollo program in the sixties, go ahead and make your case for a private corporation in the same time frame spending a good portion of the US GDP for pure research. Bell Labs is the only thing that even comes close.

A world of self regulation is just as absurd as a world with complete government control of production. Use the market for easily duplicated services that are not necessary. For everything else, try and use your brain. Mindless idealism nets nothing of value.

Summarized in economic terms by Adam Smith:

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.

Who also believed

The legal rate... ought not be much above the lowest market rate. If the legal rate of interest in Great Britain, for example, was fixed so high as eight or ten per cent, the greater part of the money which was to be lent would be lent to prodigals and projectors [promoters of fraudulent schemes], who alone would be willing to give this high interest.A great part of the capital of the country would thus be kept out of the hands which were most likely to make a profitable and advantageous use of it, and thrown into those which were most likely to waste and destroy it.

When the legal rate of interest, on the contrary is fixed but a very little above the lowest market rate, sober people are universally preferred, as borrowers, to prodigals and projectors. The person who lends money gets nearly as much interest from the former as he dares to take from the latter, and his money is much safer in the hands of the one set of people than in those of the other. A great part of the capital of the country is thus thrown in the hands in which it is most likely to be employed with advantage.

(from naked capitalism)

GDP Per Capita

Life Expectancy

Quality of Life

Well you aren't me but you put it better than I could have.

I'll cite Bill O'Reilly repeatedly telling his audience that he'd had won multiple Peabody Awards, and when it became news that he had not, he not only did a piece on "attack journalism" but loudly denied ever having said it at all, and challenged people to find instances of him doing so (he did).

Then there's more recent example of Hannity passing off footage of the much earlier 9/12 rally as relating to Bachmann's rally, and when called out on it by The Daily Show, saying it was a "mistake" (sure thing) and taking the opportunity to trot out the FNC trope about their shows not having writers while TDS does (sure thing).

Then there's the fact that they blamed Fort Hood on "political correctness" and what amounts to the lack of a ban on Muslims being in the military.

And Glenn Beck, the zoo crew radio host who figured out that by fake crying and not talking about he could drill into the emotional center of a continent's worth of disaffected rednecks. Remember when Burt Young said he was the "unsilent majority" in Rocky IV?

There's no point even being tactful about it, or about what kind of person can watch it without losing massive amounts of bile. It's a 24-hour parade of scumbags and their lies. I picked a few of my favorite things but you can literally turn it on at any moment of the day and hear someone say something disgusting or illogical.

(not a liberal, just someone who remembers what news used to be like)

The general idea being there is a lack of discord in fields of research because the money for research comes with strings attached in the form of corporate sponsored research or politically motivated public-sector grant processes.

Here's a nice example of one way the social science of economics has become irrelevant.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/09/why-economists-rarely-saw-bad-things-about-the-fed.html

I guess you're willing to steal money from peoples' retirement funds.

Worked for the UAW!

places that don't have the reporting and oversight capabilities we have here

Sorry try again. India has been better at handling this economic crisis than many of the western nations:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/20/business/20nocera.html

Lessons from India

Yup, India is corrupt and India has had it's share of scams and bad companies. However, this does not mean that all Indian companies are bad and that India has a complete lack of regulations.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/01/woefully-misleading-piece-on-value-at.html

In summary, the NY Times piece has basic assumptions of how VaR works all wrong specifically that the models assume normal distributions.

Once financial institutions are required to make subprime and interest-only mortgages available

The kicker? They weren't required to make interest only loans at all, they made those up themselves so they could soak up the interest. They weren't even required (by the CRA, a common scapegoat) to make subprime loans as long as they could find people in (or interested in moving into) the region that would qualify for prime, and you're neglecting not only the other 50% of the loans that were made by non-regulated non-bank corporations who weren't required to do anything at all, but did so because they wanted the money, but you're also ignoring that the mortgage brokers apparently routinely under-qualified applicants: "Fannie Mae has estimated that up to half of borrowers with subprime mortgages could have qualified for loans with better terms." (more details here)

In other words, all of the interest-only mortgages and quite a few of the subprime mortgages were freely offered by the brokers with no "requirement" involved but their own desire to make money.

You realize the politics involved in the enforcement of this law? The collusion between the Clinton administration and race-baiters like Acorn and Rainbow Coalition? Read The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities to see what really went on with CRA and then tell me it was a harmless, fairly-enforced policy. PLEASE, IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE, READ THIS ARTICLE.

City Journal
    is published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy research

The Manhattan Institute (MI) is a right-wing 501(c)(3) non-profit think tank founded in 1978 by William J. Casey, who later became President Ronald Reagan's CIA director.[1]

The CRA is but one of the problems I listed. Like Freddie and Fannie's effects on credit and the housing bubble? While the GOP attempted to reign in the FM's, Dems said "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" to.

Ah, yet another quote from the WSJ's "opinion" column, which is the print equivalent of the sean hannity show.

You realize, of course, that a good portion of our current crisis [wikipedia.org] is caused by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, introduced by Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), which in 1999 repealed part of the Glass-Steagall Act, opening up "competition" among banks, securities companies and insurance companies. Which in turn lead to our current set of mega-institutions that are so large and intertwined they can't be allowed to fail?

Wrong wrong wrong! That "deregulation" actually helped mitigate the crisis by allowing prudently managed banks like Wells Fargo to diversify their portfolios and products in other areas (like mutual funds, etc) besides home loans. Had they not been able to do so, the bailout would have been a lot bigger. Wamu was stupid, but some banks took advantage of the law.

I'm sorry, but you can keep praying.. in your dreams.. that freeing corporate agents (who are otherwise completely free of liability) from regulation will result in anything but abuse and malfeasance.

I would suggest this article by Stiglitz, a nobel winning economist (disclaimer: and, author of about 50% of the texts through which I earned my economics degree).
this article is also instructive.

No, McCain is too liberal and statist on too many issues, and too pandering for me. I am a Reagan Republican.

Read my sig, read the articles I quoted from someone else who is eminently competent, then realize you drank the cool-aid of the corporate fat-cat lobby hook, line, and sinker.

We did the "reaganomics" thing.

The first time it led to depression.
The second time it led to massive recession.
The third time it led to the greatest across-the-board consolidation (and related consumer abuse) in a century, a "jobless recovery" thanks to offshoring, and eventually our fine credit crisis.

I blame democrats for not pushing hard enough against it.

yet I'm guessing those same people haven't read this particular report on surival statistics.

Its very well possible competition is stifled by agreements amongst vendors. In the European Union these kind of agreements, aimed at getting the maximum money out of a market that has habituated to a certain price level, have been found in almost every industry. As your country recently overturned the law preventing mandatory minimum pricing , effectivley saying you'll always pay for store overhead even if there is no store, you can be sure you'll be ripped off.