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The Biggest Financial Fraud of All Time
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from an article at Bloomberg giving an inside look at how the Libor scandal happened:
"Every morning, from his desk by the bathroom at the far end of Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc’s trading floor overlooking London’s Liverpool Street station, Paul White punched a series of numbers into his computer. White, who had joined RBS in 1984, was one of the employees responsible for the firm’s submissions for the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, the global benchmark for more than $300 trillion of contracts from mortgages and student loans to interest-rate swaps. Behind him sat Neil Danziger, a derivatives trader who had worked at the bank since 2002. On the morning of March 27, 2008, Tan Chi Min, Danziger’s boss in Tokyo, told him to make sure the next day’s submission in yen would increase, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its March issue. 'We need to bump it way up high, highest among all if possible,' [Tan wrote]. ... Events like those that took place on RBS’s trading floor ... are at the heart of what is emerging as the biggest and longest-running scandal in banking history. ... For years, traders at Deutsche Bank AG, UBS AG, Barclays, RBS and other banks colluded with colleagues responsible for setting the benchmark and their counterparts at other firms to rig the price of money, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg and interviews with two dozen current and former traders, lawyers and regulators. UBS traders went as far as offering bribes to brokers to persuade others to make favorable submissions on their behalf, regulatory filings show."
... this is no different than what Central Banks like the Federal Reserve, do every day.
From the article: âoeWhen a bank can benefit financially from doing the wrong thing, it generally will,â
how is it nerdy in the /. realm?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Free markets moderated by Democracy. B 4th July 1776. D Oct 2008. RIP.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I just want to post in this thread before all the free marketeers try to talk up the joys of unregulated capitalism.
The USA has a 140 year history of regular banking panics and collapses, inspite of the institution of regulations.
And there are those who would still insist that the industry is over regulated, in the face of flagrant and widespread fraud during the last 6 years.
"Free" markets do not lead to competition.
They consistently and repeatedly lead to fraud and monopolies.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Unconstitutional you say, so why then did the Founding Fathers and the First Congress of the United States create a central bank?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Bank_of_the_United_States
You'd think they would know what's constitutional, since they wrote it.
...people, it would seem, are quite happy to cheat when given direct incentives to do so.
I can summarize in two words: Management cock-up.
How do you figure that? The profit that was made(stolen), by individuals and institutions will never be repaid. There will be a trial and a few players, probably one big one - someone who made hundreds of millions - and a few bit-players will go to jail for a few year. Most will get off free. There'll be talk of major regulation but what will happen is this particular loophole will be closed - nothing fundamental.
A brilliant business plan, ready to be dusted off, slightly revised and reused in about 10 years or so (that's about the cycle). The profits massively cover the expenditure, no one (of consequence) gets hurt.
I'm Scottish, and while I was growing up RBOS had a branch in every Main Street in Scotland. They had a history hundreds of years old of being a solid reputable institution with a high degree of social responsibility and integrity that ensured that in the global finance world, my small country of 5 million people could punch above its weight. The word Scotland was synonymous with prudence and fiscal excellence and businesses such as RBOS were large profitable concerns employing many thousands of my fellow countrymen. The actions of individuals such as these have dragged the good name of my country into the dirt. Part of the collateral damage is that many blameless employees of the bank have lost their livelihoods, and the damage done to reputations will take generations to expunge. But what really pisses me off is that RBOS have the gall to hijack Flower of Scotland, the semi official Scottish National Anthem on one of their radio adverts. After all the damage that's been done they try to appeal to our patriotism (apparently they sponsor the 6 nations rugby competition ). Sorry but in RBOS' s case I feel anything but proud and patriotic.
So, which one of them is going to be threatened with charges up to 35 years in jail in order to squeeze out a plea bargain?
Oliver.
Lots of people were opposed to it including Jefferson and Madison. Both claimed it was unconstitutional.
They would include it in the constitution if they wanted it. It's kind of a big thing to forget to mention, don't you think?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
A lot of loans are indexed to LIBOR or the Fed Funds rate. Fed Funds rate is what interest the Fed demands be paid to lend money to banks. LIBOR is what interest rates banks in London say they will charge other banks to borrow money. It's a system that shouldn't even exist, since it is literally a daily survey. Each bank gives their answer, none are discarded as outliers, and the figures are averaged. I'm surprised it took so long to manipulate LIBOR to be honest.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
and their counterparts at other firms to rig the price of money
OMG! Who would have imagined that the global banking system is anything but a collection of honest people working hard for the betterment of society??
does this make me think of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Congress has the power to create money. No question about it. Article 1 Section 8. There is no particular reason they can't delegate that power to whoever they want.
Capitalism has got to go.
BTW... stories like this hitting the mainstream media is in part why there is such a push to limit the flow of information. Those who have become corrupted seek to silence the flow of information. While now we are slaves to debt, soon we'll be slaves because we are just plain ignorant of the world around us.
Don't forget to hug a "hacktivist" today. :)
There's no reason to suppose the economy will somehow keep growing, if the current trend continues of automation throwing everyone out of work. The whole scam of "investing in your future" only works if other people keep buying into it.
The British regulators encouraged the Bank of Scotland to lowball it's LIBOR figures. That made the bank look stronger then it was, preventing a run. That was a sad, sad day.
He's a libertarian. You don't think he's actually read the Constitution do you?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This article is missing a very important point. A lot of the LIBOR manipulation was done to artificially LOWER the rate for trading purposes or to make a bank look stronger than it actually was.
This lower rate benefited borrowers, just as much as the higher rate hurt them. It depends in detail what kind of loan was involved.
Some municipalities are actually suing based on the idea that they received artificially low interest rates on their bonds because of LIBOR manipulation.
LIBOR is the rate that banks are supposed lend to each other, As a bond market index it is one of the biggest. This has replaced the old “prime rate” index that was published in the Wall Street Journal. Most floating interest rates are tied to this index.
The index is calculated by a person calling up the banks and asking them what rate they could borrow money.
On the plus side, because it is an opinion poll, it is not distorted by temporary technical issues that can affect the price of U.S. Treasuries.
On the down side, it is an opinion poll and people can lie though their teeth, which is what was done here.
Some of the lying was reporting a lower rate, making the bank look stronger then it was. Some of the lying was to nudge the rate slightly up/down so option contracts would end up in/out of the money. A small difference (less then .1%) could cause an option contract to be worth millions or nothing.
In which article and section exactly does it say that the Congress has the power to create a central bank? Back then "creating money" meant real money, backed by gold or silver. It is irrational to believe that founders would have wanted to see a private unsupervised agency printing arbitrary quantities of paper and calling it money.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Paul White was supposed to give an unbiased opinion – LIBOR only works if it is an unbiased opinion. There should have been a thick china wall between him and Neil Danziger.
In short, White provided the market with false data (i.e. knowingly lied) to manipulate the market for Danziger gain. That's fraud, insider trading, etc.
The fascists have been attacking for longer than that.
Money is just a tool for the fascists.
It is *ALL* about control of society.
There be cylons there. They don't care about *you*.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
No one in the financial sector will get any jail time. We can't have any of that. Sure, if you steal a car you can get 10 years but if you rip of billions, it's no big whup.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
When it comes to fraud on a massive scale, this doesn't even come close to the theft of the people's gold by the government and the banks when FDR decided to renege on the promise to redeem US dollars for specie.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
People with money, power, and lax oversight behaving badly. Who could've seen that coming?
This was especially important to the 2008 crisis.
The free market will fix this.
*sips Free Market Kool-Aid*
People will stop doing business with those banks that cheated and they'll go out of business.
*another sip*
And competition will arise that will do an honest job.
*another sip*
And there's no need for government regulation.
*chokes on vomit*
Furthermore, nobody will be prosecuted.
We live in a time where justice is by the rule of men, arbitrary and opportunistic.
As long as this continues:
There will be no peace.
There will be no peace of mind.
There will only be, can only be a human race left in pieces.
People need to break up this monstrosity in the west of globalization and realize what it is doing to your communities, children and culture.
If people do not wake up and take back control of their own futures, these psychopaths we have as leaders will define a future for you and it will be more of the same: Poverty, Homelessness, More Banker Looting of your sons or daughters future and now all out war on the African continent.
You people will either wake up, or the species will cease to be.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Each bank gives their answer, none are discarded as outliers, and the figures are averaged
Rubbish ... no-one would be THAT stupid ...
It is the average of the middle 10 out of 18 responses, with the upper and lower 4 eliminated.
So you need AT LEAST 5 out of 18 banks manipulating in a single direction to have any impact AND you need an asymmetric level of manipulation (low and high) so that the competing manipulations are not averaged out.
"It's wrong to create a mortgage-backed security filled with loans you know are going to fail so that you can sell it to a client who isn't aware that you sabotaged it by intentionally picking the misleadingly rated loans most likely to be defaulted upon." -- Conor Friedersdorf.
I used to work in RBS in Tokyo in the late 2000s (I was a support staff though, not a trader).
Yes, there were frauds happening there. One day my boss tells me to engage in such frauds. I refused, and went immediately to my compliance officer and reported it and made a complaint to the FSA (Japan's SEC).
The result was that I was removed from my job a week later by RBS management, and then summarily dismissed for 'poor performance'. I was told that what I saw was all my 'imagination' and had nothing to do with removal from my job after making the complaint a week earlier. I reported it to London head office,and to Stephen Hester (the CEO) himself too, to no avail.
After the dismissal, I took it to court, where long story short, I got told by the judge (in Japan) that it would be better for me to take a small amount of money from RBS now, withdraw my complaint to the FSA, drop the issue, resign and never discuss the issue. Otherwise, I would likely 'lose the case'. I felt that was corruption, so I refused. I lost the case and got dismissed. It ended up never getting settled..
Several months later, the Japan FSA contacts me, asks me for more evidence, and tells me that everything I said was true.. turns out I wasn't imagining it I guess.
And now...the biggest fraud ever..!
The corruption goes wide and deep folks..its everywhere!..
Despite this being the largest systematic fraud in human history, not a single person involved will be executed. Not a single one will be sent to prison. Perhaps a designated sword-faller will be charged with something... but there will be no fines of any actual import, no laws passed that mandate harsh punishments in the future, in short no meaningful action of any kind.
Well ain't I psychic.
jump you fuckers
There is a substantial gold-worshiping cult online that thinks that it is something magical that solves any and all currency and banking woes. I guess none of them have studied enough history to know about the great depression or what backed the currency at the time.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I know some people are morally against capital punishment, but if the penalty for theft of >$1 million was a capital offense, it would happen a lot less.
-Styopa
What does this all mean? Is this saying that Danziger persuaded White to submit a higher rate? (using beer and hookers?)
More likely for a lower rate - but yeah -
In a normal situation at the bank, Who usually gave Mr White the rate for submission to libor... the ghost of Christmas past?
The question that Mr. White is supposed to answer is this: "If RoBS where to borrow money overnight from another bank, what would the rate be?". This is something banks do routinely as part of their cash management so Mr. White should have recent examples of RoBS doing exactly that.
as are all the other *BOR's. They are not based on actual trading. They are meant to be a self-estimate of where a bank can borrow funds from other banks. That the derivatives market, beginning in the 80s, latched onto LIBOR as a mechanism to settle vanilla interest rate and cross-currency swaps was unfortunate but could have been changed at any time if enough market participants felt compelled to do so. Bill rates, for example, might have been used.
Keep in mind too that in all this bellyaching and tear jerking over a fantasy rate being pushed a few basis points one way or another is that the parties most affected are the banks themselves. And please don't cry me a river about Joe Blow's ARM resetting as the rates were not uniformly moved higher and the movement was tiny, even in the worst case amounting to cups of coffee for the typical mortgage.
I can guarantee that the banks will have made billions more money from defrauding honest people than they will pay out in "fines". But is the term fines really applicable? When you commit a crime on a global scale, that a regular person would get 20 or more years in prison for, and you get off with paying a fine that doesn't even amount to the profit from your fraud. Isn't that really more like bribery?
Don't mix up greed with stupidity. This is all about greed. And I'm sure the people involved are anything but stupid.
Thanks dude - not only do I have a Masters in Maths, I also spend many years working in these markets.
If you want to be completely and unreasonably anal (and clearly you do posting as AC), then yes you are technically correct
All banks SHOULD be giving the same rate given they are all submitting the same market price (unless they are deliberately manipulating)- ie they are not submitting what THEY WOULD trade at given their position/risk but where the MARKET IS trading at.
It is not like a market consensus of a CPI forecast or a companies earning forecast that has a noticeable distribution. This is more like asking 18 banks what the USD/EUR market exchange rate is at exactly midday - you will get answers that vary only on a little based on timing
So yes there will can be just a little variation in practice but not always and even then typically not enough to really notice or bother with unless the market is in free-fall (eg the GFC days)
Hence the important part of the article - they need to encourage/coerce/COLLUDE WITH OTHERS to manipulate the market
It all depends on how much they need to shift the market. If they want to shift it a lot, then they need at least 5 banks. If they just want to shift it up or down the flat middle section by a fraction, one bank just needs to say higher or lower than anybody else will, and even then only by a fraction of a percent.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
Barclays paid a 290 million pound ($464 million) fine in June to settle with regulators, and three top executives, including CEO Robert Diamond, departed.
Charges are pending? Just askin'.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Guess what, if everyone thought like you do and believed the US dollar was worthless, it would be worthless. Same deal with gold, silver, sea shells, or any other token used to simplify trade. Currency works on trust, period! The fact is international investors trust US treasury bonds more than they trust gold.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It's a good way to get rid of a lot unnecessary states!
The Biggest Financial Fraud of All Time (that we know of)
An article I read a while ago said that the problem with your premise is that often times, the banks did not have a position that they were trading on. Therefore they did not have an actual figure to report on some days. That dynamic introduced additional leeway for manipulation, because in effect they were simply reporting what they "would" report IF they had anything to report.
I wish that I could find the article, because it was really detailed about exactly how the manipulation went down.
It says something about the legal systems that these banks are just getting fined a fixed sum. Why isn't it that they get fined for an estimation of the profits they made from this behaviour (as would other criminals losing the proceeds of crime) plus say, 10% - 30% for punitive damages? Does anyone know estimates of how much they profited monetarily from this in comparison to the fines?
Why is capping the debt such a good thing? What happens when the country reaches that cap? Does it stop paying it's employees? Repaying it's debts?
All other media coverage of White and Libor centers around the scandal itself and does not mention that his desk was near the bathroom at all.
In this article his proximity to the bathroom is mentioned briefly in the opening paragraph (as it should be!) and has the distinctive flavor of a lead-in -- but the second paragraph goes directly into the topic of interbank offered rate. And then goes on about that. Just like the others.
It is my impression that the sanitizing crew which had done such a fine job of excising all mentions of Whites proximity to the bathroom in the popular press... had skimmed over this article, perhaps removing blatantly direct sections about this topic that the author placed there to divert their attention.
But Vaughan and Finch have one-upped their journalistic colleagues with a teaser in the very first sentence where the censors would least expect to see it. Be sure to archive copies of this article, let us now see if that bathroom proximity reference will soon disappear. Or expect some in-your-face lame correction (we meant boardroom but of course!) as damage control.
Now that the spell has been broken and the truth is in plain sight I hope to see the investigation of Libor head for the bathroom... where it belongs.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
It isn't fraud. The rate that banks report for the purposes of calculating LIBOR is NON-BINDING INFORMATION. You can't commit fraud if thinks you say don't create or claim to fulfill any obligations. The reason the whole thing works is because both buyers and sellers are assumed to occasionally exaggerate the numbers. So the average number is actually a very accurate representation of where the rate stands.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
A true libertarian would understand those structural problems rather than attempt to slap the bandaid of "government oversight" on top.
Ahh, the No True Scotsman argument. Are you really going to trot out that logical fallacy? Understanding structural problems and seeking to solve them has nothing to do with being (or not being) a libertarian. In fact one could argue that hands-off libertarian style thinking is what caused this problem with LIBOR in the first place. No one was keeping an eye on the banks and so they behaved exactly how one would predict they would when no one was watching. While I'm certainly no fan of needless government oversight, there is a reason it exists and sometimes it is the least worst option.
Reducing the conflicts of interest are a more effective solution than having corrupt government agencies watch harder.
I don't think anyone will disagree that setting the right incentives is the most ideal solution. There is an old saying "show me my incentives and I'll tell you how I'm going to behave". Incentives are something economists focus heavily on. Problem is that setting incentives is often incredibly difficult (often impossible) to do well even if there are no conflicts of interest present in the people setting them.
Let me give an example. Let's say you own a company and you want to motivate your sales staff to go out and sell. How do you compensate them? If you pay a salary they likely will not work as hard as on commission. If they are on commission what do you base the commission on? Base it on sales and they will have no reason to care about profitability. Base it on profits and they'll try to cherry pick. If there is no sunset provision on commissions they may try to build up a few clients and then not worry about getting new ones. Basically any incentive structure you can come up with, I can tell you how people will game it. It is REALLY hard to come up with a system that provides the right incentives and eliminates motivation to game the system
Who said Goldman Sachs isn't trustworthy?
Anyone who has ever worked in or near the securities industry. GS is a company that is respected because they are smart but not because anyone thinks they are trustworthy. This is a company that has bet against their own clients. They sold clients securities and then shorted those same securities that they had good reason to believe were going to fail. That's pretty much the definition of conflict of interest.
GS is an audited and publicly traded company with pretty clean books -- at least compared to some of their competitors.
I'm a certified accountant and let me let you in on a little secret. "Clean books" means nothing. Enron had "clean" books even while they were screwing people out of billions. It is unbelievably easy to manipulate financial statements and do so without breaking any laws. Auditing is a good thing but do not ever overestimate its value. Audits are not perfect and never will be.
Furthermore if you look at GS financial statements (and I have) I defy you to tell me how exactly they are making money. They are pretty much inscrutable even to people who examine financial statements for a living. I have Masters degrees in both engineering and finance and I can't make heads or tails of their financial statements. Neither can anyone else. Let me assure you that that is no accident either. There is no large banking concern on the planet that you can read their financial statements and really, truly understand what they are doing.
All of this could have been avoided if we changed out monetary system to one that doesn't rely on these parasitic banks not only controlling the quantity of currency available, but profiting on it through the age old practice of usury. All of our money is based on debt which directly profits the banks. Sovereign countries should control their currencies, not a private industry with a huge conflict of interest. Money should be created by spending it into existence to pay for public goods, services, and infrastructure, not created as debt owed to banks who then collect interest on it. The whole system is rigged in their favor and history has shown time and time again that they will manipulate entire countries' economies simply to increase their own personal profits. The fact that we continue to tolerate this monetary system blows my mind. Right now, banks rule countries through their economies, which is monumentally fucked up.
Question everything
If Poland breaches 60% debt/GNP ratio, it cannot borrow money any more in any form - which in basic form means budget without deficit. Repaying debts is part of budget, so it is not automatically stopped.
Now, given considerable deficit each year, it would be very hard to manage it. Some immediate things would be reducing government-provided salaries and possibly pensions (which doesn't mean just politicians, it is about teachers/police/minicipal workers/etc), huge increase in taxes (which will damage economy, but in bit longer run - you would get more money for short period of time), reduction/stopping of public-funded investments (even less new roads etc). This would probably be enough for one year - but this 60% is expressed as ratio of GNP. After such action, GNP would drop dramatically, so debt as percentage would start to grow very fast next years without a real way out.
This is obvious political suicide for any party which will allow this to happen. My feeling is that if this happens, constitution would be changed - but only after opposition (which votes would be needed for that) would make sure that leading party would give up completely.
I think that similar thing happened in US - there was also some kind of spending limit and Congress just agreed to extend it multiple times, after some period of political haggling?
I think you’re wrong. You don’t Mark to (“Book”, ”Market”, ”Model”) these indexes. Unlike the Chicago Soybean index you can’t trade either LIBOR or Prime.
The Prime Rate is calculated by the Wall Street Journal polling 10 large US banks. LIBOR is calculated by British Bankers' Association polling 18 banks. Their asking different people slightly different questions but the construction of both is basically the same.
Mark to (“Book”, ”Market”, ”Model”) are ways to price a financial instrument. You use “Market” when you have good relevant trading information. “Model” is used when you don’t have good information.
Are you trying to say that a many “Mark to Model” models use LIBOR as an input? If so, that’s because LIBOR is considered to be a better index then the Prime.
And I have no idea how or why one would Mark to Market the Prime Index.
So the end result would be worse then not having that clause in the constitution - the debt would still exceed 60%, the economy would be weakened and you'd have a political crisis.
And about half the nation thinks that printing money is a great idea - I don't, but hey, democracy, not dictatorship of lgw
Nobody thinks printing money is a good idea, including Bernake.
/must/ be repaid.
/should/ be taking on debt right now, but that is no the same as printing money.
The Fed has increased the amount of money to balance to books, (and the Dems have increased the capital requirements of banks), but none of that money has entered general circulation, because the Fed has set up incentive structures for the banks to park their money with: us treasury bonds.
Those bonds
The price of creating money in this way is the interest on the debt.
Printing money would be simply stupid. Nobody wants to do that.
Basically every economist (with a few notable exceptions) thinks that the US government
So the government is more competent then you are on economic matters. Who would have thunk it.
Cue libertarian and economically incoherent rant.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The Fed Reserve bank is complicate in the on-going money laundering schemes, along with the major private institutions, that have been going on for the last 20 or so years, washing clean the money from drug cartels and terrorists networks...
How do you know that? Did you read a collection of paranoid websites put together by equally uninformed people? Know what the cognitive bubble is? Just how much do you really know about how the Fed works? Could you give a 50min lecture on it to people who work there, without having them alternatively roll their eyes and roll on the floor laughing.
Stop fooling yourself.
Set irony metre to full.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
"Real" money? That's like when my kids asks me where numbers live. Money is not real. It is nothing but a way to trade labor and goods indirectly. Gold, silver, etc. just artificial scarcity at work.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
And so, for the third time in 25 years or so, we see again just how well deregulation works, and cutting the number of auditors, and reducing their power. This is the kind of Freedom (tm) that business needs.
Btw, if you're posting here, I'd give a 99.999% chance that you're not a millionaire; therefore, if you continue thinking there should be less regulation, there's a fine old word for you: sucker.
mark
>So the end result would be worse then not having that clause in the constitution
In that particular case, but having that clause may have kept the government from digging a Greek sized debt hole before now. The point being is the government (really everyone) needs spending limits when playing with other peoples money.. what no debt limit, whoooohoo, spend it up boys, we need some diamond plated desks.
Yes, it was a tragedy that the rich (the only ones able to stockpile gold for obvious reasons) took one for the team for one time in history. Austerity is for the little people!
And more generally educated on money. In particular, I understand that it is a theoretical construct for facilitating trade. That physical objects have and continue to be used for it is of no consequence. The objects aren't what make money money.
But just a limit does not mean anything when you don't have the same people in charge of the budget all the time.
One party can run up the deficit to 59.9%, then throw the election and laugh as the other guys have to make all the unpopular changes - then extort them to get the constitution changed, other wise they're going to 'stick to their principles' and tank the economy.
Imagine if you had to share a single credit card with your (crazy) neighbor. You each get to use it one week and you also get some money each time you get the card, which you can choose to either spend or put toward repaying the bill. The card hes a certain limit, which can only be raised if both of you agree. You don't trust your neighbor and you don't particularly like him ever since he complained about you setting his car on fire after he skinned your dog.
So what do you do when it's your turn to use the card? Do you carefully spend as little as possible, buying just enough food to get you through the week and using the rest of the money to reduce the debt, or do you spend every last cent you can, then demand your neighbor give you his house in exchange for increasing the limit enough that he can feed his starving children.
Sure, that's one opinion. But you seem to have only a cartoon caricature understandiong of the opposing view. If you can't argue coherently and logically for both sides of an issue, you don't understand the issue.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Why is capping the debt such a good thing?
Because it stops self serving vultures from encumbering your unborn descendants with debt, or is that a good thing?
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
You kill your neighbour, take his house, and then eat his children. US Politics 101.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Does it? It just stop them from encumbering them with state debt. But at the same time it makes it oh so easy to stop cutting free services.
Oh you want to go to school? Sorry, we've reached the debt limit, schools now cost a few million to attend, ditto for healthcare. And forget about ever getting that pension you've been paying for your entire life. It would be unconstitutional of us to give you and money you lazy bastard.
And since the economy is likely to shrink due to the global crisis combined with a cut in government spending, the debt will have to be lowered in the next budget, leading to even less money for actually running the state.
I so hope you are in the US. You will wish you could eat your words as they are cheap.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
AKA: The Big Show
You're right. I must have read a bad article or remembered poorly. The top and bottom 4 are discarded, but with no regard to whether they are statistical outliers. Regardless, discarding data in that manner is not going to stop manipulation.
I hate grammar Nazi's.