From what I understand, starting in about 2001 the Bush administration continually attempted - 17 times since 2001 - to get Congress to do some sort of reforms for Fannie and Freddie, and they were continually blocked by such as Dodd and his pals. Fannie and Freddie are NOT structured as normal corporations - they don't have the same accountability to shareholders as normal ones do, and their oversight was supposed to be through Congress....and they were set up that way, and set up that way with most of their lives under Democrat leadership.
Careful on the "high-level executives" line. Freddie and Fannie's "high-level executives" were political appointees, one of which (Franklin Raines) was atrocious in his management and was a Clinton appointee. Congress - from both sides of the aisle - failed in managing both companies as they were required to do partially through blocks put in place by Freddie and Fannie's DEMOCRAT protectors in Dodd and Bernie and Biden.
Understand the structure of Fannie and Freddie as governmental agencies before lumping them in with other private companies.
http://http//mutualfunds.about.com/cs/history/l/bl1929graph.htm/ may help you out some. I found plenty of historical charts. The market recovered well pretty much right before the war started to hit worldwide, and that was my main frame of reference. Yeah, it was bad, but there wasn't as big a middle class then, so there was a greater divide between haves and have-nots which was there before WWII and the industrialization it brought. Your grandfather was a practical millionaire at the time.
Keep in mind, also, that many of our grandparents were also poor and agricultural BEFORE the crash, and had a waste-little mentality even then. The Depression was bad, but just as the current economy is right now, it's not as bad as the media tries to make it out to be.
You're only partly right - but you ARE NOT taking into account the role of the left in all this as well. The dems were all gung-ho for poor people going out and buying homes they couldn't afford, and set the rules accordingly, and refused to perform the mandated CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT of Fannie and Freddie. They have a great disconnect between equal opportunity and equal outcome.
Democratic rules on the left were exploited by those on the right, and it got rid of a pretty good system where people who couldn't afford a house didn't buy it.
Better yet, it's similar to what we saw in 2000 - it's a correction. When a certain section of the economy is artifically inflated - such as real estate, particularly in CA and FL - it has to come back down to an honest market. Everything will shake out as it ALWAYS has - even right after the Great Depression, which gets more and more overrated as the years go by (though our industrialization and new training occurred due to a war there that helped lead to recovery, particularly afterward). Some people will lose out, some people will win out, but also compare this - we're dealing with LESS than double-digit unemployment.
Remember, the media ALWAYS over-hypes how good and how bad things really are.
Wasn't Opporunity half-designed by kids as well? Props to NASA for getting our money's worth out of this thing. Talk about the little engine that could.
File by paper, particularly if you have to pay out. You get it in the mail and your money stays in your account earning you a little more interest for a few more days.
I doubt all of the above. There hasn't been a single president, despite all the doomsday scariness, which has "wrecked America beyond recovery." America is TOO strong for that to happen, and I don't see what probably will be a Democratic congress allowing McCain to get that much sway in the beginning. Obama and the Obamaphiles have a FAR too inflated idea of who he is and what he can do and what he will do. What exactly CAN be done to "restore America's respect and stature abroad?" What does that even MEAN? Kowtowing to Europe's ever-leftward growing interests? No thanks. That respect I can do without. Making nice somehow with a Russia which is pushing to be more of a Soviet state with interests directly conflicting with our own? No thanks. Backing off on Iran or North Korea? Since when are THEY trustworthy?
Are you judging growth by just what the DOW shows? That's the first time I've seen that happen...ever. Besides, the DOW was on a down trend when he took office that didn't start going up until 2003 - look at the big picture.
Do you even understand the underlying structure behind Freddie and Fannie? They had NO OVERSIGHT and NO REAL ACCOUNTABILITY. They were only kept in check because of the limitations - taken away during the Clinton years, mind you - on down payments and such.
Agreed, 5% doesn't happen every day, but to proclaim the end-all when it has occurred multiple times and has been recovered from in multiple administrations - particularly since we've seen almost nothing BUT growth since the 1980s is idiotic. Economics has cycles. Deal with it.
I deal with a lot of distressed older commercial debt, so I see a lot of the backlog. There are a handful of banks, certainly, that have it right, but there are plenty out there which can't afford the expense of updating to modern data retention, or at least taking care of what is already on paper. There's a ton of paper out there in places like Iron Mountain and such which does nothing but store paper because the bank can't afford to digitize the stuff. You're partly right, at least for the bank you did work with, but I see tons of other material as well that never makes it that far.
5% a plummet? Are you kidding? Since when is that "plummeting??" The market will gain that back within months, if not weeks. Modern investors are too savvy to not see good buying opportunities.
And Fannie and Freddie did NOT "work fine." Their lack of true oversight and no responsibility to shareholders was a defective-by-design formula waiting for failure, and they were lucky to be around as long as they were without failing.
If you can't weather a 5% drop in investments, you've invested poorly and have a VERY poor view of what it means to invest.
Banks and financial firms are fairly notorious for being 5-10-15 years behind on modern data retention because it's so expensive to convert over from paper to electronic systems. Having modern systems is a true boon because you're set up to scan, store, and do everything electronically and go paperless. Catching up with past accounts and paperwork is partly ignored by some banks as well - there's lots of paperwork that is lucky to get scanned in, and may sit in boxes in warehouses, particularly in older distressed debt.
It's amazing what gets blamed on deregulation, rather than independant players. VERY few people were involved, and you immediately want to jump in and regulate an entire industry for the idiocy of a few, and that it is somehow epidemic throughout. We have had unprecedented growth ever since Carter, no matter who was in the White House and Congress, and to overturn much of what was accomplished by limiting the amount of money that can be placed into the American economy by putting it in the hands of government won't - and rarely has - worked.
As I said before, you also encourage a system which will punish for investing elsewhere rather than rewarding investing and hiring here (something neither side has done well). Of course, you don't even look at the explosive growth of the economy which occurred in the 1980s when taxes were drastically reduced, and that one of the bastions of the left - JFK - was a tax cutter?
Here's another question - how many people do you know personally who are affected by some failures? Were they properly diversified in their investments? If they were, they feel a pinch, but that's about it. Did they lose their job because Lehman failed?
There can even be plenty of blame laid at the feet of local businesspeople who were driving prices of real estate through the roof rather than the boys at the top.
And WHO in America is starving? Hardly ANYONE in America has an excuse for not being able to either find work of some sort or get an education (free in America if you're poor, or low-interest loans available if you're borderline).
You DO realize that former heads of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (Jim Johnson and Franklin Raines) are advisors to OBAMA, and that he took more money for his campaign from Fannie and Freddie than just about anyone else? Or that Fannie Mae was formed during the New Deal under a Democrat (FDR in 1938), and both it and Freddie Mac (formed in 1970 to provide competition) essentially went unsupervised by congress, including Democrat watches?
You're falling trap to something that both sides fall for every time there's a down economic cycle - looking for someone to blame, and you're borderline on claiming the fallacy that the next Great Depression is coming (it's not). Usually it's the just the few rich guys who fail, and people who weren't bright and put all their investment eggs in one basket. Guess what - we're going to come out of this.
Every time I see lefties try and blame the rich boogeymen for ruining things, when they have created a situation that discourages them from keeping their money in America where it can do more good. All the complaints about them sending their money offshore, and nothing done about it except cries to make it harder for them to invest and keep and make their money in America. It's astounding as to the idiocy. You would trust an inexperienced lawyer who never ran a business to try and fix economic issues in America rather than the businesspeople who know more how to make money and produce goods than he does.
Yeah, there were screwups and a HANDFUL of dirty players and poor decisions, but that happens (something that lefties keep insisting can be fixed instead of creating an environment for healthy investment and freer markets). Our economy is NOT RUINED. You're buying all the left-wing tripe.
I say that he wants to tax the most productive members because those members are the ones who can afford to mass produce the most expensive products, pay people to actually earn a living (where would union employees be without big business?), and invest in American institutions.
I'm not all about worshiping the rich - I have my own problems with corporatism in Washington, but I'd prefer big business over big government every time.
And I disbelieve your "evidence" about Obama's proposed tax cuts because he's proclaimed the "rich" in a debate with Hillary to be MUCH less than $250k/year, and the recent history of the left to do nothing BUT raise taxes on middle-class America and give it to people who don't pay anything.
Yay, Obama is raising taxes on the most productive, money-producing members of society. I'll believe it when I see it, particularly when he tries to raise estate taxes (which happens to hurt people who are land-rich and money poor and is a form of double-taxation), and places the money in the hands of those who don't know how to handle it properly. I find it VERY difficult to believe that Obama's tax policies won't result in a near across-the-board tax hikes on nearly everyone - particularly when the rich have their taxes raised, they simply pass the extra cost onto those with lower incomes. He also completely ignores the successes of the 1980s and Reagan's tax cutting measures, which both produced more wealth and increased government income. Money works best when it is the hands of the people who know what to do with it.
What we need is NOT a further complication of the tax system (which both candidates propose), but at minimum a re-vamping along the lines of the 1986 tax reforms which simplified the tax code.
Also, your definition of "losing" is as poor as the definition of "winning" that some on the right are trying to use. Reality is somewhere in-between.
I enjoy the democrats' definitions of "tax cutting," when it means giving money to people who don't pay any taxes at all. It's also a bit astonishing how Obama is saying he's going to cut taxes and push for some sort of socialized health care. Yeah, let's put the burden on the most productive members of society.
Neither candidate has uttered the words that would probably woo over a good portion of people - "cut the budget."
Ummmm....did that study completely gloss over the Carter and Reagan years? Does it take into account that JFK was a tax-cutter and Nixon had little idea on what he was doing economically? I look at history, instead of just numbers, and come up with interesting other conclusions...like how unemployment has been, on average, lower in a Bush Presidency than Clinton's; how we were coming out of a recession the quarter BEFORE Clinton took office, and we were tanking before he left...high debate against such a premise here...
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I wasn't using it as a metric, I was offering search terms so you could look the articles up yourself.
And you're underestimating the capabilities of senators to block dang near anything. People forget that, with the idiotic power of the filibuster.
Multiple sources. Google "bush attempts freddie reform." I think several are quite exaggerated, but there are plenty enough to prove the point.
From what I understand, starting in about 2001 the Bush administration continually attempted - 17 times since 2001 - to get Congress to do some sort of reforms for Fannie and Freddie, and they were continually blocked by such as Dodd and his pals. Fannie and Freddie are NOT structured as normal corporations - they don't have the same accountability to shareholders as normal ones do, and their oversight was supposed to be through Congress....and they were set up that way, and set up that way with most of their lives under Democrat leadership.
Careful on the "high-level executives" line. Freddie and Fannie's "high-level executives" were political appointees, one of which (Franklin Raines) was atrocious in his management and was a Clinton appointee. Congress - from both sides of the aisle - failed in managing both companies as they were required to do partially through blocks put in place by Freddie and Fannie's DEMOCRAT protectors in Dodd and Bernie and Biden.
Understand the structure of Fannie and Freddie as governmental agencies before lumping them in with other private companies.
I'm from Louisiana. You lose.
http://http//mutualfunds.about.com/cs/history/l/bl1929graph.htm/ may help you out some. I found plenty of historical charts. The market recovered well pretty much right before the war started to hit worldwide, and that was my main frame of reference. Yeah, it was bad, but there wasn't as big a middle class then, so there was a greater divide between haves and have-nots which was there before WWII and the industrialization it brought. Your grandfather was a practical millionaire at the time.
Keep in mind, also, that many of our grandparents were also poor and agricultural BEFORE the crash, and had a waste-little mentality even then. The Depression was bad, but just as the current economy is right now, it's not as bad as the media tries to make it out to be.
You're only partly right - but you ARE NOT taking into account the role of the left in all this as well. The dems were all gung-ho for poor people going out and buying homes they couldn't afford, and set the rules accordingly, and refused to perform the mandated CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT of Fannie and Freddie. They have a great disconnect between equal opportunity and equal outcome.
Democratic rules on the left were exploited by those on the right, and it got rid of a pretty good system where people who couldn't afford a house didn't buy it.
Better yet, it's similar to what we saw in 2000 - it's a correction. When a certain section of the economy is artifically inflated - such as real estate, particularly in CA and FL - it has to come back down to an honest market. Everything will shake out as it ALWAYS has - even right after the Great Depression, which gets more and more overrated as the years go by (though our industrialization and new training occurred due to a war there that helped lead to recovery, particularly afterward). Some people will lose out, some people will win out, but also compare this - we're dealing with LESS than double-digit unemployment.
Remember, the media ALWAYS over-hypes how good and how bad things really are.
Wasn't Opporunity half-designed by kids as well? Props to NASA for getting our money's worth out of this thing. Talk about the little engine that could.
So, are the Euro microbots gonna flop and fake injuries like in real life?
File by paper, particularly if you have to pay out. You get it in the mail and your money stays in your account earning you a little more interest for a few more days.
I doubt all of the above. There hasn't been a single president, despite all the doomsday scariness, which has "wrecked America beyond recovery." America is TOO strong for that to happen, and I don't see what probably will be a Democratic congress allowing McCain to get that much sway in the beginning. Obama and the Obamaphiles have a FAR too inflated idea of who he is and what he can do and what he will do. What exactly CAN be done to "restore America's respect and stature abroad?" What does that even MEAN? Kowtowing to Europe's ever-leftward growing interests? No thanks. That respect I can do without. Making nice somehow with a Russia which is pushing to be more of a Soviet state with interests directly conflicting with our own? No thanks. Backing off on Iran or North Korea? Since when are THEY trustworthy?
There's a Dade-county board of elections joke here, and I'm NOT making it.
Arrr, fixed that for ye. ;)
Arrr, fixed that for ye. P)
We're talking about dots, not feathers.
/Dives for cover...
This kid is smarter than everyone. Sheesh. You can even pick up chicks with that kind of resume.
Are you judging growth by just what the DOW shows? That's the first time I've seen that happen...ever. Besides, the DOW was on a down trend when he took office that didn't start going up until 2003 - look at the big picture.
Do you even understand the underlying structure behind Freddie and Fannie? They had NO OVERSIGHT and NO REAL ACCOUNTABILITY. They were only kept in check because of the limitations - taken away during the Clinton years, mind you - on down payments and such.
Agreed, 5% doesn't happen every day, but to proclaim the end-all when it has occurred multiple times and has been recovered from in multiple administrations - particularly since we've seen almost nothing BUT growth since the 1980s is idiotic. Economics has cycles. Deal with it.
I deal with a lot of distressed older commercial debt, so I see a lot of the backlog. There are a handful of banks, certainly, that have it right, but there are plenty out there which can't afford the expense of updating to modern data retention, or at least taking care of what is already on paper. There's a ton of paper out there in places like Iron Mountain and such which does nothing but store paper because the bank can't afford to digitize the stuff. You're partly right, at least for the bank you did work with, but I see tons of other material as well that never makes it that far.
5% a plummet? Are you kidding? Since when is that "plummeting??" The market will gain that back within months, if not weeks. Modern investors are too savvy to not see good buying opportunities.
And Fannie and Freddie did NOT "work fine." Their lack of true oversight and no responsibility to shareholders was a defective-by-design formula waiting for failure, and they were lucky to be around as long as they were without failing.
If you can't weather a 5% drop in investments, you've invested poorly and have a VERY poor view of what it means to invest.
Banks and financial firms are fairly notorious for being 5-10-15 years behind on modern data retention because it's so expensive to convert over from paper to electronic systems. Having modern systems is a true boon because you're set up to scan, store, and do everything electronically and go paperless. Catching up with past accounts and paperwork is partly ignored by some banks as well - there's lots of paperwork that is lucky to get scanned in, and may sit in boxes in warehouses, particularly in older distressed debt.
It's amazing what gets blamed on deregulation, rather than independant players. VERY few people were involved, and you immediately want to jump in and regulate an entire industry for the idiocy of a few, and that it is somehow epidemic throughout. We have had unprecedented growth ever since Carter, no matter who was in the White House and Congress, and to overturn much of what was accomplished by limiting the amount of money that can be placed into the American economy by putting it in the hands of government won't - and rarely has - worked.
As I said before, you also encourage a system which will punish for investing elsewhere rather than rewarding investing and hiring here (something neither side has done well). Of course, you don't even look at the explosive growth of the economy which occurred in the 1980s when taxes were drastically reduced, and that one of the bastions of the left - JFK - was a tax cutter?
Here's another question - how many people do you know personally who are affected by some failures? Were they properly diversified in their investments? If they were, they feel a pinch, but that's about it. Did they lose their job because Lehman failed?
There can even be plenty of blame laid at the feet of local businesspeople who were driving prices of real estate through the roof rather than the boys at the top.
And WHO in America is starving? Hardly ANYONE in America has an excuse for not being able to either find work of some sort or get an education (free in America if you're poor, or low-interest loans available if you're borderline). You DO realize that former heads of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (Jim Johnson and Franklin Raines) are advisors to OBAMA, and that he took more money for his campaign from Fannie and Freddie than just about anyone else? Or that Fannie Mae was formed during the New Deal under a Democrat (FDR in 1938), and both it and Freddie Mac (formed in 1970 to provide competition) essentially went unsupervised by congress, including Democrat watches?
You're falling trap to something that both sides fall for every time there's a down economic cycle - looking for someone to blame, and you're borderline on claiming the fallacy that the next Great Depression is coming (it's not). Usually it's the just the few rich guys who fail, and people who weren't bright and put all their investment eggs in one basket. Guess what - we're going to come out of this.
Every time I see lefties try and blame the rich boogeymen for ruining things, when they have created a situation that discourages them from keeping their money in America where it can do more good. All the complaints about them sending their money offshore, and nothing done about it except cries to make it harder for them to invest and keep and make their money in America. It's astounding as to the idiocy. You would trust an inexperienced lawyer who never ran a business to try and fix economic issues in America rather than the businesspeople who know more how to make money and produce goods than he does.
Yeah, there were screwups and a HANDFUL of dirty players and poor decisions, but that happens (something that lefties keep insisting can be fixed instead of creating an environment for healthy investment and freer markets). Our economy is NOT RUINED. You're buying all the left-wing tripe.
I say that he wants to tax the most productive members because those members are the ones who can afford to mass produce the most expensive products, pay people to actually earn a living (where would union employees be without big business?), and invest in American institutions.
I'm not all about worshiping the rich - I have my own problems with corporatism in Washington, but I'd prefer big business over big government every time.
And I disbelieve your "evidence" about Obama's proposed tax cuts because he's proclaimed the "rich" in a debate with Hillary to be MUCH less than $250k/year, and the recent history of the left to do nothing BUT raise taxes on middle-class America and give it to people who don't pay anything.
Yay, Obama is raising taxes on the most productive, money-producing members of society. I'll believe it when I see it, particularly when he tries to raise estate taxes (which happens to hurt people who are land-rich and money poor and is a form of double-taxation), and places the money in the hands of those who don't know how to handle it properly. I find it VERY difficult to believe that Obama's tax policies won't result in a near across-the-board tax hikes on nearly everyone - particularly when the rich have their taxes raised, they simply pass the extra cost onto those with lower incomes. He also completely ignores the successes of the 1980s and Reagan's tax cutting measures, which both produced more wealth and increased government income. Money works best when it is the hands of the people who know what to do with it.
What we need is NOT a further complication of the tax system (which both candidates propose), but at minimum a re-vamping along the lines of the 1986 tax reforms which simplified the tax code.
Also, your definition of "losing" is as poor as the definition of "winning" that some on the right are trying to use. Reality is somewhere in-between.
Poor people DON'T PAY TAXES, particularly on the scale that the middle class-upward does.
I enjoy the democrats' definitions of "tax cutting," when it means giving money to people who don't pay any taxes at all. It's also a bit astonishing how Obama is saying he's going to cut taxes and push for some sort of socialized health care. Yeah, let's put the burden on the most productive members of society.
Neither candidate has uttered the words that would probably woo over a good portion of people - "cut the budget."
Ummmm....did that study completely gloss over the Carter and Reagan years? Does it take into account that JFK was a tax-cutter and Nixon had little idea on what he was doing economically? I look at history, instead of just numbers, and come up with interesting other conclusions...like how unemployment has been, on average, lower in a Bush Presidency than Clinton's; how we were coming out of a recession the quarter BEFORE Clinton took office, and we were tanking before he left...high debate against such a premise here...