And the reason we need to 'borrow' shares would be...?
Shares are abstract instruments of ownerships. They aren't lawnmowers, people don't borrow them to cut their grass.
Borrowing a share is like borrowing a car title without the car, it makes no sense whatsoever except to manipulate the market, to be able to operate as if you have the share without actually purchasing it.
So, yes, ban borrowing shares, period. Or just take shorted shares out of play...all shorted shares should be placed in an 'escrow' that holds them until time is up, and keeps anything from being done with them. (WRT to selling and whatnot, obviously the original owners could still collect dividends and vote until the exchange date.)
People would pretty much stop 'loaning' people shares if those shares were placed in escrow and given away at the end, and it would stop this sort of manipulation of the market where shares are repeatedly shorted to drive down the price.
I'm against naked shorting or even borrowed shorting.
I have no problem with people who actually own the stock saying "In two months I will sell this stock for X dollars, if you wish to purchase it then you can buy this 'short' and we'll be legally bound to do that trade at that time."
When we let people borrow stock from others to do that, or even do that without owning the stock at all, which is 'naked shorting', we turn the market into nonsense.
I thought that if you sold short and failed to produce the share, you had to pay all sorts of penalties. Which is why you had to go out and purchase it on the open market.
In fact, I recall an episode of Hustle where con men created a company, pissed off a brokerage that shorted their shares, had some other people purchase all the shares and refuse to sell them, which essentially trapped that brokerage into, in theory, paying penalties to them forever because it could never actually purchase the shares. (Both of their behaviors were technically illegal, but the con men were able to extort money from the brokerage simply because, duh, brokerages that do illegal trades get in all sorts of trouble, whereas con men just vanish into thin air.) Supposedly this was a very old con.
So I always thought naked shorts, while extremely dangerous, and stupid to allow, couldn't actually result in badness except for the people who sold them, who might have to buy them at absurd prices. Although your point about depressing the stock price is valid.
I can't imagine how you can legally fail to produce the stock when you said you would. How the hell would shorts even work if they were somehow optional? Why would anyone pay money for them if, when the time came and the price of the stock had gone up (aka, you 'won' the bet) the other guy could just go 'Oh, nevermind, let's call it off.'?
No one is putting a gun to my--or anybody else's--head and forcing me to buy the best product for the least amount of money
What are you talking about?
I want to raise the price of foreign goods so that jobs will be created here, which, in turn, will allow us to pay more for goods.
I don't know what in what crazy world this is 'misguided'. It's exactly the opposite of what's been happening the last decade and why wages have stagnated.
Actually, only like 50% of the subprime loans were made by companies that weren't subject to the CRA at all, but another half the remainder were companies subject to it only whenever they chose to be.
I.e., they had to make X percentage of loans to 'bad areas', just like real banks had to, but they were able to choose exactly what loans actually counted under this, so as long as they made at least one such loan, they could say that was the only loan that counted under the CRA, and, hey, look, 100% of their loans were to bad areas.
This wasn't intended, it was basically an artifact of having a parts of a business covered and parts not covered. They could simply make 'not covered' loans 'over here' which were exactly identical to 'covered' loans made 'over there'.
I'm not talking about people who made idiotic loans.
I'm talking about people who made reasonable loans and were informed by everyone that 'houses were an investment' and they should be part of the 'ownership society' and whatnot and have seen their 'investment' plummet.
I'm not talking about bailing out people who got into bad contracts with stupid interests rates. There have always been people who did that.
I'm talking about bailing people out of a new problem that arrived, that results in people getting no money from that, whereas previously they'd recover some of what they put in.
Look, if I went out and purchased a home, in 1990, at an unpayable interest rate, that cost 400,000, and over the next 8 years I paid 50,000 off the principle, when the bank foreclosed on it I'd actually recover my 50,000.
Granted, I'd fail to recover any of the interest, but that's not the point. I'd still walk away with some money. Heck, the home price might have gone up and I'd make 100,000 instead. (Which is probably still less than I paid in total, thanks to interest.)
Now, move that forward in time, and reduce, but only at the end, the price of the house by 50,000, and suddenly I have no investment to 'recover' at all.
I'm not saying we reward people for stupid investments, and a hell of a lot of people with really stupid interest-only loans have paid off no principle at all and would get nothing, but there are people out there who's perfectly reasonable house purchases just dropped in value more than they've been putting into them for the past few years.
In other words, yes, it's someone's own fault if they got a stupid loan. It's not their fault if they were unaware that housing prices were in a bubble and thus got a reasonable loan that has, at this point, thanks to the housing drop, left them no equity in their house.
I say this, incidentally, as someone who knew this drop was coming for almost 4 years and was telling everyone I knew that it was exactly the wrong time to buy a house.
The unique thing about the fed is this: when it writes a check, the money does not come out of any account, but is created out of thin air, as an accounting practice.
You're the one who's stupid. Freddie and Fannie didn't need 'more regulation'. They did exactly their job, and were not mismanaged at all.
You're essentially blaming the administration of Fort Knox for costing the government money if the price of gold goes down, and claiming they needed 'better regulation'. It is hard to see exactly what sort of 'regulation' could have helped there, except for 'stop doing your government-created purpose and do the opposite'. Yeah, if you 'regulated' them into selling home loans/gold instead of buying home loans/gold, but that is certainly not the 'regulation' that Democrats were fighting against.
Their job, of course, was somewhat stupid, but it's idiotic to think 'regulation' would have stopped them from purchasing home loans, as that was the entire point of their existence, which had the amazingly obvious and unavoidable result when those loans were reduced in value of reducing their assets.
You're about to argue they bought 'bad' loans, but they didn't. The GSEs loans are actually fine. They simply don't have enough assets to cover their promises, as their assets, aka, 'houses', decreased in value, which seems rather unlikely to be their fault. Sane banks stopped making home loans at that time, but the GSEs were required by law to keep buying home loans.
I don't disapprove of it in theory, but I do in practice.
Why? Because, financially, almost all 'tax cheats' are corporations just blatantly lying to the IRS, and mysteriously never getting caught at it. We talk about 'tax loopholes', but in reality most of the loopholes are plugged, and yet companies continue to use them in obviously illegal manners.
And yet the IRS goes mostly after individuals making normal amounts of money, maybe wringing out a few hundred from them, while a big company just blatantly shorts the IRS two billion.
I bet anything the 'stings' are going to be exactly what the link describes, and not, for example, getting hired by a 'foreign subsidiary' of Blackwater and instructed how to avoid income taxes so they can pay you 33% less. Which is flatly illegal, but, hey, it's a megacorp, not someone who wrongly deduced $1000 too much of their house they're running a home business out of.
Seriously, I'll let the IRS come after us more only after they go after the big guys.
I keep hearing this. Show me one example where a bank was forced to loan out money to someone and where they instead couldn't have said "fuck this I am not lending any more money with these kind of unprofitable regulations."
He's a moron. He's talking about the CRA, which requires banks to make a certain percentage of their loans for business and home sin 'bad areas', but apparently to stupid to know that doesn't apply to 'independent mortgage companies', who made 75% of the subprime mortgages, and the ones who made all the crappy loans.
So 25% of all subprime home loans were made under institutions were covered under the CRA at all, and of the ones that were under it, they made a tiny fractions of loans they wouldn't otherwise. We're talking about somewhere between 2-4% of all subprime loans were 'required', numerically, by the CRA. Of course, banks aren't required to make any loans. It's just, if they do give them to people with specific credit rating, they must make a certain percentage in specific areas. Nothing makes them give out 'bad loans' or 'good loans' or any loans at all.
Of course, the CRA doesn't allow any sort of lawsuits at all, and has hardly any enforcement at all. Although obviously you could sue banks under generic civil rights legislation if they were actually being racist.
Ironically, these loans, the CRA loans, are failing a lower rate than other subprime loans. Presumably because, being in bad neighborhoods, the banks actually did pay attention to who they were lending too. (Because they didn't particularly care if the house was foreclosed on, but they did care if the police seized it because people were making meth there.)
Yes. The only thing that actually helped at all during the Great Depression, and what actually got us out of it, was the government borrowing money from citizens to pay them to manufacture goods or perform services.
For example, the last thing that actually got us out of the problem, World War 2, paid for via 'war bonds'. Likewise, the huge public work projects helped in the areas they happened in, although it really took a nation-wide one to get us out of it. Everything else, all the fiscal manipulation and whatnot, failed horrible at getting us out. (Although a some of it kept people from dying.)
It is a valid point, however, that the most households lost their savings, and that was a very serious cause in the first place. If the stock market had crashed and the banks had failed but everyone still had their money, it wouldn't have been anywhere near as bad, at least not at the start.
However, the correct analogy would then to not bail out banks with the 700 billion, but to keep people from losing their houses, which a lot of people mistakenly have as their 'investments' and are going to lose, just like FDIC will (now) cover their actual savings accounts. We need 'home price insurance' to go along with savings account insurance, where we cover houses that go down more than, say, 20% in value any year.
Instead of buying bad paper, we should simply start bailing out homeowners and let them, at least, recover the money they put into their house when it's foreclosed on, regardless of the change in price. I.e, if they purchased a house for 400,000, and put 250,000 in it, and it was foreclosed on and sold at auction for 200,000, they'd currently only get 50,000 for. We could pay them the rest, or some percentage of it.
Or, even better, paid it to people who weren't in foreclosure yet to help keep their house. That would have been a much more 'fair' use of the 700 billion, to help people hurt by the housing bubble, and the money still would have ended up in the banks.
But this depression is not that depression, and assuming that the same things will produce the same results when the root cause is different is not a good idea.
Although I'm not opposed to huge public works projects to reduce mass transit, which even if it doesn't help the depression much would help reduce travel costs and remaining gas prices, which will start adding to the crippling of our economy.
Who created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the true "merger of state and corporate power" in this crisis? Democrats.
Bzzzt, thank you for playing. Freddie Mac was creating in 1970 under Nixon.
Of course, neither of them caused this problem at all. They did not fail, they were not mismanaged, they did not purchase loans that failed, almost all their loans are just fine.
Ihey were created to purchase and securitize home loans, and that is what they did. The fact that housing prices dropped and resulted in them not having enough assets to cover the loses was an intended point of them existing. If it hadn't been them, it would have been the banks.
The actual problem was the drop in housing prices, which was actually caused by the current Administration. No banking system that operates primarily on mortgaged houses can survived a sudden drop in housing prices, which is why you don't let housing bubbles get that big.
Who further extended this by creating the CRA [wikipedia.org]? Democrats. Who expanded its mission [wikipedia.org] into accusing bankers of racism ("redlining") and extorting them to make more bad loans, or else be investigated? Democrats
The CRA only covers banks, not independent mortgage companies, the people who made 75% of subprime loans. That is, only 25% of all subprime loans were given out by institutions that were governed at all by the CRA. And, on top of that, the CRA doesn't actually demand that many are in bad areas, so of that 25%, less than 10% of them were actually requirements of the CRA.
So you're talking about 2.5% of all subprimes loans being mandated by the CRA, and, ironically for you, those loans are failing at slightly less than other subprime loans. (Probably because they're loans given out in bad neighborhoods so are actually examined more. Duh.)
And your 'lawsuit' comment is bullshit. Even the banks covered by the CRA do not get sued for not making enough CRA loans. They cannot be sued for that, at least not via the CRA. In fact, there's almost no enforcement at all of the CRA.
(Of course, anyone can sue anyone for any reason, but people who cannot get bank loans are unlikely to be able to launch a lawsuit.)
And if you actually knew anything about loans, you'd see Obama got a perfectly normal loan. Of course he got better than an 'average rate'. No one gets the 'average rate' unless they have 'average credit'. He, OTOH, has excellent credit, a lot of savings, and no debt at all, and three points below average is a completely normal interest for that. (And 'jumbo loan' just means it's a non-conforming-because-it's-too-large loan that Fannie and Freddie won't buy.)
No, I'm aware that a lot of 'Weird Al' songs aren't his. I actually mentioned that somewhere else on this thread.
That doesn't change the fact that I heard some other parody song by him, and I actually just remember what it was. 'That Achy-Breaky Song', which is a song about how annoying 'Achy-Break Heart' is. And now that I've remember that song, I think I can recall another parody song also.
And, yeah, I know he calls all his 'non-original music' songs parodies, but that doesn't make them so. They don't contain any of the original words, or at least not enough to be derivative, so aren't parodies of that, and they contain the exact same music, so that's not a parody either.
You could theoretically argue the piece as a whole is a parody, but I can't figure out in what legal sense that would even apply. It's sorta like redubbing a movie with random speech to make it about something else entirely. Yeah, it's funny, but not a parody.
Arguably, though, his polka sets are parody. I bet, legally, he could, and maybe does, get away without paying for the words in those. Maybe even all of Bohemia Polka, but maybe not.
Oh, and many of his music videos are straight up, scene for scene, parodies of the original video, which a changed topic. (I'm still upset that 'Smell Like Nirvana' had a few bars missing from the middle, because until that part you could play both music videos simultaneously and have identical scenes in each.)
But I still say that, ironically, almost all the 'parodies' that Weird Al does are the songs that people think aren't parodies, the genre parodies, like 'Do I Creep You Out' and 'Don't Download This Song'.
Yeah, don't even suggest that we could do what you say. That's how they managed to get that stupidity past everyone in the first place, by suggesting that 'human rights' would be a consideration.
They aren't.
And neither, more dangerously, is safety. Not for workers in the other country, but safety in manufactured products. Think China's going to be punished for any of the dangerous products it has let out? Hell no.
Heck, we get in trouble because of our refusal to import beef during mad cow scares, although, luckly, we're running the damn WTO and they can't do anything to us.
Don't try to change the system, or even suggest it could be changed. People will talk about 'reforms', some trivial things will happen, and then get undone.
And we'll be exactly where we started, it will be 2040, and there will be no manufacturing in the US at all, and companies will be demanding relaxation of safety and minimum wage laws so that US plants can be 'competitive', which they've already started to do.
Thus cleverly solving the problems they created in the first place. See, in their world the problem is that the US actually have a population that gets upset when corporations abuse it.
Well, Canada has similar worker protection, and similar taxes, and similar standards of living, and similar or even stronger environmental protections, as far as I know.
Granted, they subside government health care, thus reducing company operating expenses, but they (In imaginary world.) have to pay more taxes to cover this, so it's equal. (1)
I am not aware of any part of Canada that is significantly worse off than the poorest parts of the US. We both have expensive and cheap places to live in roughly the same proportion, and obviously blue collar industry will build in poor places and white collar in cities.
Of course, I've never actually been to Canada, so could be completely wrong.
1) In the actual world, of course, US health insurance costs a good deal more than the government provided stuff in Canada, but thanks to the political unreality conservatives live in, they can't actually admit that to complain that companies here pay more, although companies themselves have started noticing this and locating in Canada to save this cost.
Of course, speaking of Weird Al, at this point he honestly doesn't give a crap about the money. He's never going to starve, and, frankly, he could have retired a decade ago. I think he's just going to keep doing this until he get tired of it.
He's gone on record as stating that his only problem with p2p file sharing of his music isn't that he doesn't make any money from it, it's that non-PG material keeps being falsely attributed to him on it, because he tries to keep his music very clean.
I've actually argued that most of Weird Al's songs are not parodies. They are satire, of course, and 'send up', and very funny and mocking.
But very very few of them are actually parodies of the original song, with 'Smells Like Nirvana' being the only exception I can think of, although I'm almost certain I've heard at least one other.
In fact, the most 'parodyish' songs he does are his original songs, like his totally absurd love songs, which are parodies of the whole genre of love songs, and 'Don't Download This Song', which is a parody of 'charity' songs, the best example being 'We Are the World'.
And, frankly, people need to stop acting like the WTO protesters are full of shit.
The WTO is the reason we can't do what you suggest. Tariff and taxes like you propose are a violation of the WTO, the sole purpose of is to allow multi-national companies to operate wherever is cheapest.
We need to leave the WTO, we need to require companies that operate here to either be based here, pay tariffs, or at least be in other first-world countries we've created trade agreements with.
And, no, that does not include Mexico, although it obviously should include Canada. Which is why the stupidity over the NAFTA/Canada thing this election cycle was inane. Yes, we might pull out of NAFTA, but, honestly, what we actually want to do is remove Mexico...no one has any problem with Canada being in it, and we'd quickly come up with a new trade agreement. Mexico needs our help to pull it up, but not via companies building factories and paying dirt-cheap wages...they need infrastructure and working government.
Yes, yes, I know Ireland is a first-world country we'd probably have such an agreement with in this specific case, but that's not the point. Facebook is not some large manufacturing concern that we need to keep the American jobs of, it is a microscopic company that is only relevant because we're nerds.
I think the problem is that it will make your "work" people curious as hell about what's in the other folders and vice-versa. I don't know if that's a flaw though.
Why would you let anyone know there's another group?
When you add someone, you should add them to one of more groups. (Incidentally, this already exists, you can already group friends, although it's just useful for finding your friends faster.) They should only see what they can see and have no concept of anything else.
If the government can just print money, how, exactly, would that differ from the existing setup?
All you've done is stupidly tie our money to the price of gold, which fluctuates wildly. And, as the price of gold almost always, over times, goes up, would still cause inflation.
Except this inflation would be random uncontrollable inflation.
The size of the economy and the purchasing power of the money in the economy are always the same. If we did not keep printing money, as our economy grew, the same amount of money would be able to purchase more and more, aka, massive deflation. Or, alternately, if the money is pinned to some external good like gold, our economy would not grow in the first place.
No, the amount of money must be kept slightly ahead of the economy so the economy can grow into it, which in turn means slight, constant inflation. Any system that does not allow this will cripple the economy.
But like I said, people complaining about 'paper money' are a bunch of lunatics who don't understand that 'inflation' is not a failure of the system. Any economy that changes size will have inflation or deflation..it has to have that to change size. It is the job of the government to counteract this change by adding or removing currency.
Now, you can certainly argue that it's a mistake to put this power in a third party like the Federal Reserve, and that's actually a valid point. It is not, however, a mistake to operate the economy this way.
Except that intelligence people know that Fannie and Freddie didn't have anything to do with our current problems.
They were just in trouble because their assets (aka, all the home loans they own) declined in value.
They aren't even having a high level of foreclosures, because all their guaranteed loans are prime. They were just unable to back all their promises to repay the securities if their loans fail, and this fact was screwing up the market.
They are not the causes of the current problems, they are not even major players in it. They're basically victims of the housing bubble...we created them to hold good mortgages, and apparently didn't realize that they'd be SOL if housing prices ever decreased rapidly, that they'd end up in a legally untenable position where they couldn't cover their guarantees.
There's certainly no malfeasance on their part. (Actually, one of the former Freddie CEOs is under investigation, IIRC, but it's unrelated to anything that's going on, it's for minor corruption like not reporting gifts or something.)
Slashdot Mirror
And the reason we need to 'borrow' shares would be...?
Shares are abstract instruments of ownerships. They aren't lawnmowers, people don't borrow them to cut their grass.
Borrowing a share is like borrowing a car title without the car, it makes no sense whatsoever except to manipulate the market, to be able to operate as if you have the share without actually purchasing it.
So, yes, ban borrowing shares, period. Or just take shorted shares out of play...all shorted shares should be placed in an 'escrow' that holds them until time is up, and keeps anything from being done with them. (WRT to selling and whatnot, obviously the original owners could still collect dividends and vote until the exchange date.)
People would pretty much stop 'loaning' people shares if those shares were placed in escrow and given away at the end, and it would stop this sort of manipulation of the market where shares are repeatedly shorted to drive down the price.
I'm against naked shorting or even borrowed shorting.
I have no problem with people who actually own the stock saying "In two months I will sell this stock for X dollars, if you wish to purchase it then you can buy this 'short' and we'll be legally bound to do that trade at that time."
When we let people borrow stock from others to do that, or even do that without owning the stock at all, which is 'naked shorting', we turn the market into nonsense.
What the hell? Really? That's what's going on?
I thought that if you sold short and failed to produce the share, you had to pay all sorts of penalties. Which is why you had to go out and purchase it on the open market.
In fact, I recall an episode of Hustle where con men created a company, pissed off a brokerage that shorted their shares, had some other people purchase all the shares and refuse to sell them, which essentially trapped that brokerage into, in theory, paying penalties to them forever because it could never actually purchase the shares. (Both of their behaviors were technically illegal, but the con men were able to extort money from the brokerage simply because, duh, brokerages that do illegal trades get in all sorts of trouble, whereas con men just vanish into thin air.) Supposedly this was a very old con.
So I always thought naked shorts, while extremely dangerous, and stupid to allow, couldn't actually result in badness except for the people who sold them, who might have to buy them at absurd prices. Although your point about depressing the stock price is valid.
I can't imagine how you can legally fail to produce the stock when you said you would. How the hell would shorts even work if they were somehow optional? Why would anyone pay money for them if, when the time came and the price of the stock had gone up (aka, you 'won' the bet) the other guy could just go 'Oh, nevermind, let's call it off.'?
As if companies still issued dividends anyway.
No one is putting a gun to my--or anybody else's--head and forcing me to buy the best product for the least amount of money
What are you talking about?
I want to raise the price of foreign goods so that jobs will be created here, which, in turn, will allow us to pay more for goods.
I don't know what in what crazy world this is 'misguided'. It's exactly the opposite of what's been happening the last decade and why wages have stagnated.
Just google 'cra independent mortgage company'
Actually, only like 50% of the subprime loans were made by companies that weren't subject to the CRA at all, but another half the remainder were companies subject to it only whenever they chose to be.
I.e., they had to make X percentage of loans to 'bad areas', just like real banks had to, but they were able to choose exactly what loans actually counted under this, so as long as they made at least one such loan, they could say that was the only loan that counted under the CRA, and, hey, look, 100% of their loans were to bad areas.
This wasn't intended, it was basically an artifact of having a parts of a business covered and parts not covered. They could simply make 'not covered' loans 'over here' which were exactly identical to 'covered' loans made 'over there'.
I'm not talking about people who made idiotic loans.
I'm talking about people who made reasonable loans and were informed by everyone that 'houses were an investment' and they should be part of the 'ownership society' and whatnot and have seen their 'investment' plummet.
I'm not talking about bailing out people who got into bad contracts with stupid interests rates. There have always been people who did that.
I'm talking about bailing people out of a new problem that arrived, that results in people getting no money from that, whereas previously they'd recover some of what they put in.
Look, if I went out and purchased a home, in 1990, at an unpayable interest rate, that cost 400,000, and over the next 8 years I paid 50,000 off the principle, when the bank foreclosed on it I'd actually recover my 50,000.
Granted, I'd fail to recover any of the interest, but that's not the point. I'd still walk away with some money. Heck, the home price might have gone up and I'd make 100,000 instead. (Which is probably still less than I paid in total, thanks to interest.)
Now, move that forward in time, and reduce, but only at the end, the price of the house by 50,000, and suddenly I have no investment to 'recover' at all.
I'm not saying we reward people for stupid investments, and a hell of a lot of people with really stupid interest-only loans have paid off no principle at all and would get nothing, but there are people out there who's perfectly reasonable house purchases just dropped in value more than they've been putting into them for the past few years.
In other words, yes, it's someone's own fault if they got a stupid loan. It's not their fault if they were unaware that housing prices were in a bubble and thus got a reasonable loan that has, at this point, thanks to the housing drop, left them no equity in their house.
I say this, incidentally, as someone who knew this drop was coming for almost 4 years and was telling everyone I knew that it was exactly the wrong time to buy a house.
The unique thing about the fed is this: when it writes a check, the money does not come out of any account, but is created out of thin air, as an accounting practice.
I can do that too.
I just get in trouble for it.
You're the one who's stupid. Freddie and Fannie didn't need 'more regulation'. They did exactly their job, and were not mismanaged at all.
You're essentially blaming the administration of Fort Knox for costing the government money if the price of gold goes down, and claiming they needed 'better regulation'. It is hard to see exactly what sort of 'regulation' could have helped there, except for 'stop doing your government-created purpose and do the opposite'. Yeah, if you 'regulated' them into selling home loans/gold instead of buying home loans/gold, but that is certainly not the 'regulation' that Democrats were fighting against.
Their job, of course, was somewhat stupid, but it's idiotic to think 'regulation' would have stopped them from purchasing home loans, as that was the entire point of their existence, which had the amazingly obvious and unavoidable result when those loans were reduced in value of reducing their assets.
You're about to argue they bought 'bad' loans, but they didn't. The GSEs loans are actually fine. They simply don't have enough assets to cover their promises, as their assets, aka, 'houses', decreased in value, which seems rather unlikely to be their fault. Sane banks stopped making home loans at that time, but the GSEs were required by law to keep buying home loans.
I don't disapprove of it in theory, but I do in practice.
Why? Because, financially, almost all 'tax cheats' are corporations just blatantly lying to the IRS, and mysteriously never getting caught at it. We talk about 'tax loopholes', but in reality most of the loopholes are plugged, and yet companies continue to use them in obviously illegal manners.
And yet the IRS goes mostly after individuals making normal amounts of money, maybe wringing out a few hundred from them, while a big company just blatantly shorts the IRS two billion.
I bet anything the 'stings' are going to be exactly what the link describes, and not, for example, getting hired by a 'foreign subsidiary' of Blackwater and instructed how to avoid income taxes so they can pay you 33% less. Which is flatly illegal, but, hey, it's a megacorp, not someone who wrongly deduced $1000 too much of their house they're running a home business out of.
Seriously, I'll let the IRS come after us more only after they go after the big guys.
I keep hearing this. Show me one example where a bank was forced to loan out money to someone and where they instead couldn't have said "fuck this I am not lending any more money with these kind of unprofitable regulations."
He's a moron. He's talking about the CRA, which requires banks to make a certain percentage of their loans for business and home sin 'bad areas', but apparently to stupid to know that doesn't apply to 'independent mortgage companies', who made 75% of the subprime mortgages, and the ones who made all the crappy loans.
So 25% of all subprime home loans were made under institutions were covered under the CRA at all, and of the ones that were under it, they made a tiny fractions of loans they wouldn't otherwise. We're talking about somewhere between 2-4% of all subprime loans were 'required', numerically, by the CRA. Of course, banks aren't required to make any loans. It's just, if they do give them to people with specific credit rating, they must make a certain percentage in specific areas. Nothing makes them give out 'bad loans' or 'good loans' or any loans at all.
Of course, the CRA doesn't allow any sort of lawsuits at all, and has hardly any enforcement at all. Although obviously you could sue banks under generic civil rights legislation if they were actually being racist.
Ironically, these loans, the CRA loans, are failing a lower rate than other subprime loans. Presumably because, being in bad neighborhoods, the banks actually did pay attention to who they were lending too. (Because they didn't particularly care if the house was foreclosed on, but they did care if the police seized it because people were making meth there.)
Yes. The only thing that actually helped at all during the Great Depression, and what actually got us out of it, was the government borrowing money from citizens to pay them to manufacture goods or perform services.
For example, the last thing that actually got us out of the problem, World War 2, paid for via 'war bonds'. Likewise, the huge public work projects helped in the areas they happened in, although it really took a nation-wide one to get us out of it. Everything else, all the fiscal manipulation and whatnot, failed horrible at getting us out. (Although a some of it kept people from dying.)
It is a valid point, however, that the most households lost their savings, and that was a very serious cause in the first place. If the stock market had crashed and the banks had failed but everyone still had their money, it wouldn't have been anywhere near as bad, at least not at the start.
However, the correct analogy would then to not bail out banks with the 700 billion, but to keep people from losing their houses, which a lot of people mistakenly have as their 'investments' and are going to lose, just like FDIC will (now) cover their actual savings accounts. We need 'home price insurance' to go along with savings account insurance, where we cover houses that go down more than, say, 20% in value any year.
Instead of buying bad paper, we should simply start bailing out homeowners and let them, at least, recover the money they put into their house when it's foreclosed on, regardless of the change in price. I.e, if they purchased a house for 400,000, and put 250,000 in it, and it was foreclosed on and sold at auction for 200,000, they'd currently only get 50,000 for. We could pay them the rest, or some percentage of it.
Or, even better, paid it to people who weren't in foreclosure yet to help keep their house. That would have been a much more 'fair' use of the 700 billion, to help people hurt by the housing bubble, and the money still would have ended up in the banks.
But this depression is not that depression, and assuming that the same things will produce the same results when the root cause is different is not a good idea.
Although I'm not opposed to huge public works projects to reduce mass transit, which even if it doesn't help the depression much would help reduce travel costs and remaining gas prices, which will start adding to the crippling of our economy.
Who created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the true "merger of state and corporate power" in this crisis? Democrats.
Bzzzt, thank you for playing. Freddie Mac was creating in 1970 under Nixon.
Of course, neither of them caused this problem at all. They did not fail, they were not mismanaged, they did not purchase loans that failed, almost all their loans are just fine.
Ihey were created to purchase and securitize home loans, and that is what they did. The fact that housing prices dropped and resulted in them not having enough assets to cover the loses was an intended point of them existing. If it hadn't been them, it would have been the banks.
The actual problem was the drop in housing prices, which was actually caused by the current Administration. No banking system that operates primarily on mortgaged houses can survived a sudden drop in housing prices, which is why you don't let housing bubbles get that big.
Who further extended this by creating the CRA [wikipedia.org]? Democrats. Who expanded its mission [wikipedia.org] into accusing bankers of racism ("redlining") and extorting them to make more bad loans, or else be investigated? Democrats
The CRA only covers banks, not independent mortgage companies, the people who made 75% of subprime loans. That is, only 25% of all subprime loans were given out by institutions that were governed at all by the CRA. And, on top of that, the CRA doesn't actually demand that many are in bad areas, so of that 25%, less than 10% of them were actually requirements of the CRA.
So you're talking about 2.5% of all subprimes loans being mandated by the CRA, and, ironically for you, those loans are failing at slightly less than other subprime loans. (Probably because they're loans given out in bad neighborhoods so are actually examined more. Duh.)
And your 'lawsuit' comment is bullshit. Even the banks covered by the CRA do not get sued for not making enough CRA loans. They cannot be sued for that, at least not via the CRA. In fact, there's almost no enforcement at all of the CRA.
(Of course, anyone can sue anyone for any reason, but people who cannot get bank loans are unlikely to be able to launch a lawsuit.)
And if you actually knew anything about loans, you'd see Obama got a perfectly normal loan. Of course he got better than an 'average rate'. No one gets the 'average rate' unless they have 'average credit'. He, OTOH, has excellent credit, a lot of savings, and no debt at all, and three points below average is a completely normal interest for that. (And 'jumbo loan' just means it's a non-conforming-because-it's-too-large loan that Fannie and Freddie won't buy.)
No, I'm aware that a lot of 'Weird Al' songs aren't his. I actually mentioned that somewhere else on this thread.
That doesn't change the fact that I heard some other parody song by him, and I actually just remember what it was. 'That Achy-Breaky Song', which is a song about how annoying 'Achy-Break Heart' is. And now that I've remember that song, I think I can recall another parody song also.
And, yeah, I know he calls all his 'non-original music' songs parodies, but that doesn't make them so. They don't contain any of the original words, or at least not enough to be derivative, so aren't parodies of that, and they contain the exact same music, so that's not a parody either.
You could theoretically argue the piece as a whole is a parody, but I can't figure out in what legal sense that would even apply. It's sorta like redubbing a movie with random speech to make it about something else entirely. Yeah, it's funny, but not a parody.
Arguably, though, his polka sets are parody. I bet, legally, he could, and maybe does, get away without paying for the words in those. Maybe even all of Bohemia Polka, but maybe not.
Oh, and many of his music videos are straight up, scene for scene, parodies of the original video, which a changed topic. (I'm still upset that 'Smell Like Nirvana' had a few bars missing from the middle, because until that part you could play both music videos simultaneously and have identical scenes in each.)
But I still say that, ironically, almost all the 'parodies' that Weird Al does are the songs that people think aren't parodies, the genre parodies, like 'Do I Creep You Out' and 'Don't Download This Song'.
I don't give a shit about 'markets', or companies.
I'm interesting in protecting jobs.
And if people in 'poorer quarters' actually had more jobs available to them, driving up all wages, they wouldn't have to buy Made in China.
Yeah, don't even suggest that we could do what you say. That's how they managed to get that stupidity past everyone in the first place, by suggesting that 'human rights' would be a consideration.
They aren't.
And neither, more dangerously, is safety. Not for workers in the other country, but safety in manufactured products. Think China's going to be punished for any of the dangerous products it has let out? Hell no.
Heck, we get in trouble because of our refusal to import beef during mad cow scares, although, luckly, we're running the damn WTO and they can't do anything to us.
Don't try to change the system, or even suggest it could be changed. People will talk about 'reforms', some trivial things will happen, and then get undone.
And we'll be exactly where we started, it will be 2040, and there will be no manufacturing in the US at all, and companies will be demanding relaxation of safety and minimum wage laws so that US plants can be 'competitive', which they've already started to do.
Thus cleverly solving the problems they created in the first place. See, in their world the problem is that the US actually have a population that gets upset when corporations abuse it.
Well, Canada has similar worker protection, and similar taxes, and similar standards of living, and similar or even stronger environmental protections, as far as I know.
Granted, they subside government health care, thus reducing company operating expenses, but they (In imaginary world.) have to pay more taxes to cover this, so it's equal. (1)
I am not aware of any part of Canada that is significantly worse off than the poorest parts of the US. We both have expensive and cheap places to live in roughly the same proportion, and obviously blue collar industry will build in poor places and white collar in cities.
Of course, I've never actually been to Canada, so could be completely wrong.
1) In the actual world, of course, US health insurance costs a good deal more than the government provided stuff in Canada, but thanks to the political unreality conservatives live in, they can't actually admit that to complain that companies here pay more, although companies themselves have started noticing this and locating in Canada to save this cost.
That one keeps being remade, though.
Of course, speaking of Weird Al, at this point he honestly doesn't give a crap about the money. He's never going to starve, and, frankly, he could have retired a decade ago. I think he's just going to keep doing this until he get tired of it.
He's gone on record as stating that his only problem with p2p file sharing of his music isn't that he doesn't make any money from it, it's that non-PG material keeps being falsely attributed to him on it, because he tries to keep his music very clean.
I've actually argued that most of Weird Al's songs are not parodies. They are satire, of course, and 'send up', and very funny and mocking.
But very very few of them are actually parodies of the original song, with 'Smells Like Nirvana' being the only exception I can think of, although I'm almost certain I've heard at least one other.
In fact, the most 'parodyish' songs he does are his original songs, like his totally absurd love songs, which are parodies of the whole genre of love songs, and 'Don't Download This Song', which is a parody of 'charity' songs, the best example being 'We Are the World'.
And, frankly, people need to stop acting like the WTO protesters are full of shit.
The WTO is the reason we can't do what you suggest. Tariff and taxes like you propose are a violation of the WTO, the sole purpose of is to allow multi-national companies to operate wherever is cheapest.
We need to leave the WTO, we need to require companies that operate here to either be based here, pay tariffs, or at least be in other first-world countries we've created trade agreements with.
And, no, that does not include Mexico, although it obviously should include Canada. Which is why the stupidity over the NAFTA/Canada thing this election cycle was inane. Yes, we might pull out of NAFTA, but, honestly, what we actually want to do is remove Mexico...no one has any problem with Canada being in it, and we'd quickly come up with a new trade agreement. Mexico needs our help to pull it up, but not via companies building factories and paying dirt-cheap wages...they need infrastructure and working government.
Yes, yes, I know Ireland is a first-world country we'd probably have such an agreement with in this specific case, but that's not the point. Facebook is not some large manufacturing concern that we need to keep the American jobs of, it is a microscopic company that is only relevant because we're nerds.
I think the problem is that it will make your "work" people curious as hell about what's in the other folders and vice-versa. I don't know if that's a flaw though.
Why would you let anyone know there's another group?
When you add someone, you should add them to one of more groups. (Incidentally, this already exists, you can already group friends, although it's just useful for finding your friends faster.) They should only see what they can see and have no concept of anything else.
Sigh.
If the government can just print money, how, exactly, would that differ from the existing setup?
All you've done is stupidly tie our money to the price of gold, which fluctuates wildly. And, as the price of gold almost always, over times, goes up, would still cause inflation.
Except this inflation would be random uncontrollable inflation.
The size of the economy and the purchasing power of the money in the economy are always the same. If we did not keep printing money, as our economy grew, the same amount of money would be able to purchase more and more, aka, massive deflation. Or, alternately, if the money is pinned to some external good like gold, our economy would not grow in the first place.
No, the amount of money must be kept slightly ahead of the economy so the economy can grow into it, which in turn means slight, constant inflation. Any system that does not allow this will cripple the economy.
But like I said, people complaining about 'paper money' are a bunch of lunatics who don't understand that 'inflation' is not a failure of the system. Any economy that changes size will have inflation or deflation..it has to have that to change size. It is the job of the government to counteract this change by adding or removing currency.
Now, you can certainly argue that it's a mistake to put this power in a third party like the Federal Reserve, and that's actually a valid point. It is not, however, a mistake to operate the economy this way.
Except that intelligence people know that Fannie and Freddie didn't have anything to do with our current problems.
They were just in trouble because their assets (aka, all the home loans they own) declined in value.
They aren't even having a high level of foreclosures, because all their guaranteed loans are prime. They were just unable to back all their promises to repay the securities if their loans fail, and this fact was screwing up the market.
They are not the causes of the current problems, they are not even major players in it. They're basically victims of the housing bubble...we created them to hold good mortgages, and apparently didn't realize that they'd be SOL if housing prices ever decreased rapidly, that they'd end up in a legally untenable position where they couldn't cover their guarantees.
There's certainly no malfeasance on their part. (Actually, one of the former Freddie CEOs is under investigation, IIRC, but it's unrelated to anything that's going on, it's for minor corruption like not reporting gifts or something.)