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Everyone Hates Harvard
theodp writes: Hedge fund manager John Paulson personally took home nearly $4 billion in 2007 after convincing banks to create securities of sub-prime mortgages he could bet against. Now Harvard, which originally passed on an opportunity to join alum Paulson in his big bet, is also reaping the rewards of the nation's financial crisis as it renames its engineering school the "Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences" after receiving a staggering $400 million donation from Paulson, the largest gift in the university's history. Quartz argues that Paulson's $400 million Harvard donation just reinforces inequality. Author Malcolm Gladwell took to Twitter to voice his distaste (sampling: 1. "It came down to helping the poor or giving the world's richest university $400 mil it doesn't need. Wise choice John!" 2. "If billionaires don't step up, Harvard will soon be down to its last $30 billion." 3. "It's going to be named the John Paulson School of Financial Engineering.") And, in Everyone Hates Harvard, Philip Greenspun notes that even WSJ readers reacted with vitriol to the news. "I would have thought that Paulson would be a hero to market-following WSJ readers," remarks Greenspun, "not a villain."
If you want to become a mass-murdering politician.
Why isn't this guy in jail yet?
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Formed in 1817 with the money bequeathed by slave master Isaac Royal. The more things change ...
(To be fair, all the ivy league schools accumulated fortunes from slavery.)
>I would have thought that Paulson would be a hero to market-following WSJ readers,
What he did only profits the inner circles of the finance industry, while most "market-followers" get the short end of the stick. Of course he doesn't get much praise.
A struggling NBA team more worthy of his philanthropy?
convincing banks to create securities of sub-prime mortgages he could bet against
The article does not say that he did that. Instead, the article says that the banks bought insurance against mortgage defaults (credit default swaps), and that prices of such insurance was very low. John Paulson decided the price was too low compared to the risk, so he bought a lot of the same insurance. When the mortgages started defaulting and prices for insurance went up, he sold the insurance on to the banks at a profit.
If there had been a hundred John Paulsons out there, credit default swaps would have gone up in price much earlier, forcing the mortgage lenders to rein-in their subprime lending, thereby either defusing the crisis entirely or at least making it much less bad. Alas, there was only one, and he was good at not getting the word out, so not many copycats. John Paulson did everyone a service and should be rewarded, not punished. The people who lend out money to people who had no chance of paying back should be punished, not rewarded.
Anyway, I have not read other articles about him, so maybe he does deserve his apparently terrible reputation.
I am somewhat surprised that it has fallen to me to defend a 1%'er. This is not exactly my usual modus operandi.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
This is article is completely incomprehensible. I have no idea what the author is trying to convey. Save this type of shit for Zero Hedge.
Big endowment schools are simply not the most effective place to donate. If you have a lot of money and it's really where you want to give--or more likely if you're trying to buy someone's way in--sure, nothing's stopping you from donating. But if your goal is improvement of almost anything, it's just dumb.
Donate $1/year to keep up your alumni participation numbers, which influences the ratings of your school and the value of your degree. Aside from that, give someplace where the dollars are more effective.
If you are going to give to a school, give to a school that does a lot of public interest work but has a low endowment-per-capita. (Georgetown Law comes to mind, for example--a law school with a strong public interest program and a small endowment per capita).
If you are going to give to to another non-for-profit, look for direct aid dollars. Better yet, look at the Gates foundation or the like--the people who are spending billions and their life's fortune on this hire pretty good people to run it, aiming at maximizing long-term benefit. That is kind of awesome. Leverage their investment to direct your own. Picking a charity on your own is *hard*--too many are scams or mismanaged.
And if you take that bait, you're a sap.
The problem is that the banking system has been rigged in order to socialize risk. This guy exploited that fact, realized he made more money than an individual human being could possibly amuse himself with and decided to dispose of a big chunk of that were it might do a little good.
People are shouting "Harvard! Harvard! Harvard!" because they don't want you to think about the rigged banking system. They'd rather focus any anti-elitist backlash on intellectuals.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
A derivative, is necessarily is a zero sum, it's a bet, it pays out or it does not, but it just moves money from one place to another. That's all a derivative is.
But what happened during the banking crisis was that the US Federal Reserve turned *FAILED* derivatives into cash by Quantitative Easing. Money was created from thin air, and assets were bought that had no value otherwise. Which had the effect of diluting the value represented by the dollar into more dollars. So people with real assets whose value was represented in dollars, lost part of their real assets.
These extra dollars were handed out largely to a derivatives traders that would have otherwise lost money on these garbage sub-prime bets.
So the worlds biggest bank heist was performed right in front out everyone's eyes and made billionaires of its participants.
And Harvard is a little upset that it received a share of the bank heist? Oooo diddumms, fucking thieves.
LGBTQIA???
Bro, you're gonna run out of letters pretty soon.
Justy sayin'...
Well, I get the Lettuce Bacon and Tomato bit, but the other letters have me confused. Quinua?
I hate the useless spongers it creates.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Right now, this is the biggest story in Geekdom that nobody is covering (except for Fox News, ironically).
Really, if this is published it's gonna shake a whole lotta shit up. Big Time (tm).
It's pointless, uninteresting, completely outside of "news for nerds and stuff that matters"...
Fits perfectly with /., I agree.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
http://slashdot.org/submission...
If you went to a Harvard, a Stanford, an MIT or a Texas A&M, and you happen to end up with more money than you know what to do with, you might be inclined to give a big pile of it to the university that got you started. And while that's a noble sentiment, you shouldn't. These places will continue turning out talented graduates no matter how much money you give them: you should give your money to a less-well-endowed institution, so that a larger number of students can get the same educational opportunity you had. Maybe your spouse went to a small liberal arts college. Maybe there's a place right down the road from your mansion that could use your help. But MIT and Stanford don't need your money, and they won't do much good with it.
A bit of data: Harvard's endowment amounts to $1.7 million per student. With a reasonable return on endowment investment, hey could quite literally abolish tuition forever if they wanted to. Just across the river is Boston University, a really excellent institution with a strong research focus and really great graduates, ranked #42 by US News. Its endowment per student is 1/25th of Harvard's.
Donating money toward improving education is a worthy goal, but don't get sentimental. Put the money where it'll do the most good for the most people.
(Full disclosure: I'm a professor at a liberal arts college whose endowment per student is mediocre at best.)
Somebody who isn't giving $400 million to the poor is criticising somebody else who isn't giving $400 million to the poor for not giving $400 million to the poor?
Ok - got it.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
Now I know where the wage gap comes from. It's growing from the excrement that Harvard shat out.
Its time for quality education to go to kids that deserve it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Full stop.
They seized my haggis I bought in the UK when I re-entered through New York.
I was going to eat this with my family but US Customs ruined this.
There's no good haggis in the US.
Fuck you, TSA and US Customs.
The non-heterosexual community loves inventing new words. It allows them to easily identify outsiders. Originally, it was just "Gay", then "LGB", then "LGBT", then "LGBTQ", and now "LGBTQIA". They fabricated a distinction between the words "gender" and "sex". They invented the word "cisgender" in the 1990s, and started using it widely in 2007.
If you don't use their terminology, they might accuse you of being a bigot. For example, many of them consider the word "transvestite" to be derogotory. This practice is supported by their post-structuralist philosophy, which is founded on the belief that "The author's intended meaning is secondary to the meaning that the reader perceives." And it is difficult for an author outside their community to predict what meaning will be perceived, because the meanings are constantly changing.
Many of them actually see the broken basic economics on an institutional level and actually end up exploiting nothing other than the institutional greed and myopia of Wall Street.
What? No. It doesn't work that way. When the Wall Streeters exploit someone and make money, other people have to suffer. It's a negative-sum game when we let them play at all.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Wow, you sure pay a lot of attention to these groups.
"They fabricated a distinction between the words "gender" and "sex". "
Yeah, I remember when they meant the same thing and I bragged about how much gender I got on the weekend.
"derogotory."
Ooooooh, you're an illiterate idiot. My mistake.
...its his money to do with what he wishes?
and their ruling class. Harvard is just where their kids go to school.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Now they don't have one. What's wrong with this?
You blind haters haven't the slightest idea what you're saying. Large gifts to schools help pay tuition for the vast numbers of intelligent, ambitious students who don't have rich parents. Harvard has one of the most diverse array of students I've ever seen.
So who is going to solve problems, scholars or haters?
And I thought Queer was a derogatory word.
I still don't get the IA part
Unless its Illegal Aliens
"They fabricated a distinction between the words "gender" and "sex". "
Yeah, I remember when they meant the same thing and I bragged about how much gender I got on the weekend.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of "gender" to mean "The state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones" was in 1945 in the American Journal of Psychology. Before then, the words "gender" and "sex" were synonyms. And in fact, from 1382 to 1694 the word "gender" was used to mean "To copulate".
I take a lot of notes in my own personal wiki. For general knowledge subjects, I often copy a few paragraphs from the Wikipedia lead, and then trim it down to just the bits I care to remember.
There's a few things that I almost always redact from articles concerning people: Day and month of birth. Nobility and rank. (Even FRS.) These blatantly elitist and self-promotional Seminal J. J. Tractatus or Timothy Erasamus Highbrow or Jagadish Q. Deepocket professorships. (I even trim mention of the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics.) If I named my toenail clippings, it wouldn't pass notability in Wikipedia. Why then do the names of these blasted chairs pass notability? It's not obvious to me.
I would seriously propose making the display of these ridiculous named professorships a user preference, so that for those of us who choose to unclick the Ivy League Liberace flag, the article just says that Donald Merlin is a professor of psychology at Harvard University, or something plain-spoken and useful of that general nature.
Those who actually work at a university and don't wish to make a career-limiting faux pas by not knowing this vital data or who harbour strange dreams of becoming a named chair themselves can leave their Ivy League Liberace flags alone.
(My apologies to Liberace, who never once—so far as I know—actually named the piano bench he perched upon.)
It came down to helping the poor or giving the world's richest university $400 mil it doesn't need.
Nonsense. With $4 billion, he could have done both.
Who cares who is spawned from where... the Lawyers of MIT, engineers of Harvard, oil barons from Berkeley, nuclear physicists from Julliard or shoe-makers from Oxford... oh futz, all this bickering is just a proxy war between the Four Horsemen of the Economicalypse. Their cycles reflect the luminance and lunacy of the Moon.
1. The Anarchist/ Free Trade Absolutist (new moon)
2. The Keynesian (waxing)
3. The Oligarchy/Thin Veneer of Government, no link offered for my own protection (full moon)
4. The Austrian (waning)
We are now in a latter phase of waxing gibbous that has gone on for quite awhile. Our politicians are spineless and scripted, vetted faux-choices are the only ones presented, economies have merged and inflated to the degree that a world war is the most likely 'correction' with any historical precedent. The only choice available to us may be Hobson's, because the 'Status Quo' is unraveling in countless tiny (almost holographic) ways.
I see trees of green, red roses, too, I see them bloom, for me and you, And I think to myself, What a wonderful world. I see skies of blue, and clouds of white, The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night, And I think to myself, What a wonderful world. The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky, Are also on the faces of people going by. I see friends shaking hands, saying "How do you do?" They're really saying, "I love you." I hear babies cryin'. I watch them grow. They'll learn much more than I'll ever know, And I think to myself, What a wonderful world. Yes, I think to myself, What a wonderful world
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Wow, look at all the paid shills...
If you think anyone in the finance industry gives a rat's ass about rantings on slashdot then you are delusional. Go ahead and vent - I might even agree with you. But let's not pretend what we say here has much consequence in the real world.
He didn't con an old lady out of her savings; he made a bet with banks and other investors who should have known better.
Not entirely correct. If he is the architect behind the subprime mortgages then he did not directly con an old lady out of her savings but his actions indirectly wiped half the value off those savings. He deliberately designed an extremely risky investment vehicle to look to the banks like a low risk, high return investment and they did not spot the trick. It might have been entirely legal but it bears all the hall marks of a con and in such a case, while the mark takes some blame for letting their greed overcome their common sense, the person who devised the con takes most of the blame.
Is Harvard known for engineering?
Short answer is yes. They have a rather distinguished list of alumni. Some of the ones people here might know of include Bob Metcalf (inventor of ethernet), Dennis Ritchie (inventor of C), Fred Brooks (director of development for OS/360), Steve Balmer (yeah I know), Trip Hawkins (founder of Electronic Arts) and Bill Gates (didn't graduate but attended and yeah I know...)
Harvard engineering might not be on the level with MIT but it doesn't suck.
I remember back in high school and university I used to hate the jocks. A bunch of shallow, no good idiots. Now, 20 years later, I've realized that my hate for them wasn't actually hate at all. It was jealousy that they were getting all the hot chicks and everyone worshiped them. I, and probably most of the other "losers" too, only "hated" them out of jealously.
Probably the same for those who knock Harvard or the 1%. They wish they too were born with the skills, visions, ambition, or familial connections to become members of these groups. Rather than blame themselves for their failures or bad luck, they attack the successful folks, calling them corrupt, deceiving, or evil. In reality though, most people, if given the chance to be in one of these groups, would accept the chance hands down.
So, to rephrase the question, do people really hate Harvard or are they just jealous of the success that Harvard and its grads achieve?
They are greedy assholes. Even Adam Smith recognized that. The insight Smith had that greedy assholes actually produce beneficial outcomes for society.
Think of capitalism a bit like nuclear power. Capitalism is all about harnessing greed to the benefit of society. Unmanaged or poorly managed it results in a catastrophic meltdown to the detriment of all. With the right controls in place and good oversight (but not too much) it can be a hugely powerful force for good. This requires sensible rules fairly enforced. Too few rules and the meltdown occurs (see 2008 financial crisis). Too many rules and you don't get much benefit because nothing happens (the reaction shuts down). If things get too hot or a problem occurs you institute rules (like control rods) to throttle down the reaction before it blows.
High finance -> a gigantic shell game designed to fleece reveneue out of the mugs .. err I mean 'investors'.
:)
"Asset-backed credit default swaps are structured differently from other credit default swaps due to the nature of the instrument being hedged. For example, since many asset-backed securities amortize and pay monthly, the credit default swap will more closely match these features. The most widely used ABCDS transactions cover U.S. subprime mortgage tranches of mortgage securitizations"
Amd before you say it, yea, and it was all those liberals in the Clinton administration that caused the subprime crisis, mainly through selling mortgage to poor people and negros
I'm far from propertied, but I'm sorry to say the majority of the rants in here smack of bitter jealousy. You have one vote, and short of beheading those in power, you're going to have to make the best of it.
Wow, he could have asked Greece to change the name of their country instead if he paid off their €300 million default to the IMF. He would have won a lot more adulation from most of the country for that. This world is so unbalanced it is literally insane.
It wasn't clear to me before if Paulson was part of the crooked American establishment (he might have just been some smart or lucky guy), but after a $400 million donation to Harvard, it is now. This is quid pro quo to the establishment that he is part of.
btw, if you don't already know, the ups and downs of the economy are created by the central bank injecting and withdrawing money from the economy.
Here's the smoking gun of charts (Federal Reserve holdings of treasuries): https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/TREAST
They started vacuuming up the money supply before the end of 2007, and then juiced the economy from 2009, and every time they stop the economy falters and people debate whether it's another recession. They _choose_ if there is going to be a recession.
If the people making these decisions are your friends, then you know exactly what the market will do. It is not enough to say that sub-prime mortgages or anything else is overvalued (to successfully short the broad market), because it could keep becoming even more overvalued for years to come if they keep injecting money. You have to know what decisions are going to be made going forward for shorting the broad market to be anything other than gambling.
"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." -- Henry Ford
Just because you think of it as an out-of-control chain reaction doesn't make it so. In fact, free markets are exactly the opposite: market mechanisms give you negative feedback, not positive feedback.
Please point out a single example of an unregulated free market that has never collapsed.
As Milton Friedman put it, your fallacy is that you assume that "government is a way that you put unselfish and un-greedy men in charge of selfish and greedy men."
You must be a conservative if you are quoting Friedman. Your fallacy is that you assume greedy men will work to the benefit of society when unconstrained by rule of law. I have centuries of evidence on my side that illustrates the fallacy of that notion. A reasonable amount of regulation is necessary for markets to function. As I said previously there can be too much regulation just as there can be too little. The trick is finding that spot where you have just enough to keep things moving in a positive direction.
Financial markets were heavily regulated even in 2008; the idea that the cause of the "financial crisis" was lack of regulation is ludicrous.
As someone who actually has worked in the finance industry you could not be more wrong. The cause of the meltdown was poorly regulated derivative financial instruments. People leveraged derivative contracts with huge counter-party risk without oversight well beyond what was prudent. Market forces were unable to keep the markets working because the regulation hadn't caught up to the state of financial practices. What regulations were in place were for problems other than the one that actually occurred. The "fixes" put in place after the fact probably still haven't appropriately addressed the problems. Markets are not magic and they need some amount of rules to actually function.
When Harvard scientists do something cool, everyone thinks that's great. When someone gives them money so they can keep doing cool things, that's evil? Come on people! Harvard is mainly a research university. That's doubly true for the engineering school. This money will be used to hire world class researchers and give them world class facilities so they can do great work. I'd think Slashdotters would appreciate that.
If you think Paulson is evil, fine. I won't argue it. But giving money to Harvard is not one of his evil acts.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Paulson has no engineering background. His Harvard time was at its business school.
Yet - instead of encouraging more "financial engineering" or business education, he selects the engineering school. Why I wonder? To avoid creating more competition? Maybe he realizes engineering is the thing that actually creates the real value in society? Other?
I found the selection of the engineering school intriguing.
Posting anonymously b/c of mod points, but it sounds like he wasn't exactly a good guy. (My username is captnjohnny1618.)
http://www.deepcapture.com/201...
Yes, he did be against the overvaluation of the market. The shifty thing though is that he utilized resources that nearly 100% of people didn't have access to and ultimately designed a financial object that was certainly going to fail, ensuring a huge return on his investment. Instead of calling attention and trying to fix this major major problem that would have an effect not just on our economy and our people, but economies and people around the world, he decided to take advantage of it and make a huge amount of money at the expense of millions. (If he had done that, while at the same time making a huge amount of noise about the ways he saw the economy about to fail, this would be a different conversation).
A comparable situation in our field would be a computer person ("hacker") with significant inroads to some big chip maker (Intel let's say) identifies a weak point in the chip design exposing some hugely powerful zero day attack. He helps designs a complex "fix" that ultimately looks like it will solve the issue, yet doesn't even come close, and starts selling that to the chip company for a few millions of dollars. The complexity of it helps to obscure (for a spell) the reality that it is actually a worthless patch, and he has maintained enough separation from the issue to deny at least some of the responsibility. Selling this makes a lot of money for a lot of people, but this guys waits a little longer to cash in for himself.
Where it really gets shifty is that this guy knows that the fix is going to fail and it's only a matter of time, so he starts betting on the fix failing (in reality, he starts "hedging" on it, which is complicated and I don't understand all of its intricacies). Lots of it. So when the fix fails, as he knew it would and maybe even planned it to, he gets to cash in, and look like one of the smart ones who saw it coming.
In reality he saw it coming because he had a big hand in creating it.
Now in IT/CS/etc. we call that guy a huge dick for not telling the rest of the world about the problem and letting the free software community try and come up with a fix. If he had even remotely tried to peddle his BS fix, it would've been noticed and obvious, and people would accuse him of attempted fraud. If he tried to somehow pretend like he didn't have a responsibility to tell everyone, politicians and lawyers would be all over him with some trumped up charges that feign social responsibility, when it reality are just trying to recover the money this guy took from them. This guy just doesn't have to put up with that shit because all of those politicians and lawyers are his buddies and probably walked away pretty ok from all of this while the rest of us have to sit around and pick up the pieces.
TL;DR: You didn't have some great insight into the problem if you win by betting on a fixed fight where you knew the outcome... and helped set up the fight... and helped invent boxing.
The comments quoted all point to the fact that Harvard doesn't need the money. It's already the richest school in the US, by far and away, with an endowment fund of twenty-six billion, (it was thirty-some billion, but they lost part of it, guess how?). There are more deserving schools, to whom four-hundred million wouldn't be a drop in the bucket.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
... This is how every university gets going and how the big ones stay well funded. They ask rich people for large sums of money... in the old days that was kings, lords, and the Church.
today... it is business tycoons and big fat government checks.
And from this we conclude Harvard is bad because a tycoon gave them 400 million dollars?
Shock... gasp.... horror.
This is about the part in an article where I ask the people that take it seriously to flip a coin.
https://youtu.be/OLCL6OYbSTw?t...
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It's been pretty strongly demonstrated that a sitting president can pretty much do anything they want, regardless of congress, simply by issuing executive orders, or by ordering the military to do something (or nothing).
Want to close Gitmo? Order the soldiers out.
Want to get out of a war? Order the soldiers out.
Want to change the tax code? Issue an executive order.
Want to change how schools operate? Issue an executive order.
Want to integrate schools over the objection of the governor of the state? Federalize the national guard and do it by force.
Want to make a show of force to European involvement in the western hemisphere, but congress won't fund it? Order the navy to South America, and then let congress decide to pay for the fuel to bring them back (or not).
Want to stop riots in Baltimore or Ferguson? Federalize and send in that state's national guard.
(And if you think the state government has to ask or approve this:
"Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, assemblages, or rebellion make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State or Territory, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State"
"The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy"
"Air and Army National Guard can specifically be called into Federal service in case of invasion, rebellion, or inability to execute Federal law with active forces"
So no.)
Sitting Presidents have a lot more power than you are giving them credit for; they may unilaterally do a hell of a lot of things. They may have to face impeachment charges after the fact, but this close to the next election, there's really nothing congress can do about it; the next elected president automatically pardons any crimes of their predecessor; this is traditional, and a president probably depends on this as part of running for office. It's a gentleman's agreement that goes back to the early 1800's.
Any mess he has not addressed via executive order or via his position as commander in chief is *his mess*.
Whelp... That makes sense to me. I am going to assume it is so every time I see it now. If I reply I will be sure to include that. It is bound to make my life more interesting and more entertaining to those around me.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Stupid billionaires.
Thanks. I noted Frank's guilt above, but your post came before mine. Frank's co-conspirator in the Senate was Christopher Dodd, and no doubt Teddy Kennedy helped.
It's interesting to speculate what would have happened if W. had treated the law as Obama has, and shut down Freddie and Fannie by executive decree. Surely the same people now praising Obama for his actions and claiming the president can do whatever he wants, would have been rioting for impeachment.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
If you wanted a radical you shouldn't have picked someone as conservative as a constitutional lawyer.
As usual for Slashdot, the article description doesn't track TFA (any of them) and misses the truth. First off, the cited article doesn't talk about this guy convincing banks to create products he bet against. Rather, he noticed that the market was using insane valuations for subprime mortgages and bet against them. That is smart, not evil. To use a tech analogy, what if IT Joe recognized a Zero Day exploit, implemented a fix, warned everyone, then sat back as his network survived and everyone else's were trashed? No one here would call IT Joe a villain. No the real reason Paulson is hated is envy. Just be real, he has more than you and you want it.
Why have 1 person driving a backhoe when you could employ 20 with shovels?
How many Harvard professors does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: It is an academic question, as they are all in Washington telling the rest of us how to live our lives.
The "Everyone Must Own A Home" easy credit debacle came close to destroying the global economy. People were able to buy homes with zero down, half of their gross income to payments, and APR increases after six years ("You can always refinance!").
In the aftermath, the nation's two legacy, blue city, propaganda streams successfully planted memes that blame wall street for the implosion, but the overall concept of risky easy credit dates back to the farm loans of the 1930's -- at least they had crops to use as collateral. The process was heavily expanded with the 2nd CRA (1977, not 1964). Sharing the risk out to wall street is only part of the disease.
Easy credit artificially boosts home values and reinforces the status quo of a largely unaffordable, overvalued real estate market. If we had a housing and urban development executive cabinet that used the scientific method, rather than simply house 8,000 party bureaucrats, enslaving the taxpayers at a cost of $ 30 B. a year, decade after decade, perhaps real innovation -- a process of goals, milestones, and a well-defined definition of success -- would create human primate habitats that are as affordable and easy to buy as cars.
Harvard elites? They rarely pay taxes -- why should they care about a government loaded with do-nothing bureaucrats. That's what their 4,000,000 words of IRS Tax Code is for, to give them loopholes to escape paying taxes entirely -- taxes are for the working class. It's probably no coincidence that the Rise of the Democrats, from their roots as the political arm of the KKK, practically mirrors the growth of the IRS Tax Code, legislated at an average rate of 40,000 words per year since ~1913. It all started with a simple, three level tax formula. The agency itself pleas for reform.
While wage and salary earners are puzzled about the 30% of their paycheck that gets vaporized into the government entity every two weeks, and the Ivy League Elites pay zero taxes (legally), the Modern Democrats offer workers an increase in the minimum wage. Of course the public unions, and government funded wages and salaries are all linked to the minimum wage, so it's entirely moot and dramatically inflationary. With a ratio of about 4:1 taxpayers per government funded employee today, inflation due to minimum age increases will quickly make any temporary reprieve from economic slavery moot, while accomplishing the two actual goals : wage increases across the board for the party faithful, and votes purchased from those at the base of the economic pyramid. It's a temporary increase in affordability, a vote buying scheme that the Democratic Party trots out as elections approach. The fact that increases in average American wages are in direct conflict with the three rounds of QE deflationary efforts -- which were intended to help American labor compete globally -- means nothing to vote-buying Democrats or their incumbency schemes.
Everything the government does -- from the minimum wage, to the tax code, to the massive bureaucracies -- is carefully crafted to favor incumbency, not to improve the lives of We the People. After pseudo-socialism overtook much of Europe and China, the political science departments of Harvard and the other Ivy League institutions thought the massive, centralized government model would rule the world. The US government bootprint on American lives quickly expanded to match -- huge government bureaucracies were created in executive cabinets below the Presidency, assuming that 100% government employment with the President as CEO would come to pass. Instead, China has dramatically evolved towards partnership with the private sector and the Soviet Union collapsed.
The massive US government bootprint has yet to reform, with the Democrats angrily pushing as much propaganda and vote-buying schemes through their legacy blue city propaganda distributors (Los Angeles and New York) as quickly as possible, hoping to prevent reform of their bloated, incompetent executive cabinetry. Amusingly, a true liberal, a true scientist,