And that accounting doesn't even include the costs of recounting contested ballots. Since the paperless voting can't really count them at all, the costs of the extensive circumstantial forensics are either extremely high, or have to be counted as the costs of leaving the ballot unprovable at all. Which costs can be extremely high, perhaps higher than the entire budget controlled by the people "elected".
The main purpose of a house is keeping people outside from looking in on your private affairs. As such, the outside of a house is the part offered for public consumption.
Anyone has the right to look at the outside of a house visible from a public place to stand. And we have the right to publish photos of anything we've rightfully seen.
If they want more privacy, they can draw the shades. They can raise a hedge. Or they can accept the reality that a "private road" doesn't prohibit people from looking past it, unless they make it really big. And then they'll probably get fined for raising a public eyesore on their property, which should really show them where the line lies.
Indemnifying the risk of the bank, now JP Morgan, is most certainly a bailout. You're just buying into the shell game.
Those assumed mortages are already defaulting, and a large fraction is guaranteed to default as the next months march on. But in this deal, that's not JP Morgan's problem - which is a bailout, even a pre-bailout.
The Fed hasn't reformed any rules for more discipline. The Fed, and the (mainly Republican) Congress more broadly, has reregulated banks solely to deregulate them for decades, starting most dramatically under Reagan/Bush (when their William Casey left his heading the SEC to run their campaign, then helped Bush deregulate those Savings and Loans that funded the CIA Casey got to run, along with giving away $1.5 TRILLION out of a $3T GDP). The main reregulation was in 1998 when the 1934 "firewall" rules decoupling different financial services like brokerage from insurance from banking were thrown out so CitiCorp could aggregate. Shortly afterwards Long Term Capital's $11B bailout sent the signal that the Fed will bail out the rich banks when they overextend their profit machines out of unsustainable greed. Of course they all know they can economically blackmail that kind of bailout every time: they've never seen any reason to believe anything else.
The bottom line is that the Federal government is assuming the risk, and on failures that are certain that's assuming the cost, while JP Morgan gets to make the profits. While the people, many of whom are equally guilty but many of whom are not, are the only ones still facing the risks and costs. Even though their tax money (no longer available to pay their mortgages) is going to bail out the banks. It might turn out to be a little less stark, if the government waives foreclosure on failed loans so the defaulters can keep their homes. But that still maintains the moral hazard that undermines the entire financial industry.
A few cycles of consistently transferring that risk to the government only when it costs, never when it profits, has created an industry that always embraces overextended risk. But the public money to fuel that machine is running out, as it never gets paid back before it's paid out again.
What's funny to me is that I absolutely expect that a flat sales tax (with just a few exemptions for necessities - for everyone) instead of any income tax, would make taxation fair, and collect plenty to fund even our bloated budgets. It's funny because most of the people who will criticize my take on taxation also prefer a flat sales tax (though they haven't thought through the needed exemptions to protect poor people whose desperation is even more costly).
If we charged a total of 25% sales tax, probably 17-20% Federal, 5-8% state, depending on a real economic analysis, we'd collect close to $3 trillion, plus other Federal fees that would fund our entire usual $3-3.5T budgets without debt. By necessities I mean taking the lowest 20%ile (bottom 20% of people) by cost of rent/mortgage, marking those people's median cost of utilities (including sewer/water/heat/electric/Internet) and transportation as exempt, used clothes and raw cloth, raw groceries, all certified education and their county's median healthcare costs (including insurance premiums).
Everyone would get those exemptions, though some (the poorest) people would benefit from them more as a fraction of their making ends meet. The partial exemptions based on the median expenses of the poorest people would be covered by tax credit checks to cover the taxes everyone would pay at purchase time (or just keep, if they instead just saved their money, which gives banks more to invest in the economy, as well as a cushion so government doesn't have to bail people out as often).
The entire IRS system, with all its loopholes, cheating, corruption and privacy invasion, and its vast expense both by the government and private people to comply with its complex rules (and the withheld surplus currently returned as refunds but without the interest) would all disappear. Replaced by a system so simple it could be a one-page law, if our pompous legal system allowed such a sane way to govern some of our most impactful rules. So the system would be fair, based on something reasonable (those benefiting the most from our society, as measured by how much they consume, pay the most, while those benefiting the least, measured by mere survival, pay the least), and get collected from a vastly smaller population (sellers) which already do their accounting formally, and can be much more easily shut down or forced to pay because they operate a public business.
I hope that some of the accumulating pile of failed candidates talking up conversion to a "flat tax" or a sales tax help create demand for such a system. Without scaring too many people off because they're really hiding a system rigged to feed the rich, or to starve the poor, or to crush the government protecting us from corporate predation. People like Forbes and Ron Paul (whose iceberg tip of sanity on the war and other government aggression hides the massive frozen load of crazy beneath the surface) have got people thinking. I hope someone reasonable can eventually capitalize on that movement towards sanity and replace our system with something like what I describe. Because we really can't take much more of the endlessly perverted income tax system.
Oh, I'm educated. I'm in NYC, I used to write the infosystems for the banks and brokerages on their way up, lots of my friends from the 1990s, too, and the sweet BS/JPM deal is what everyone's talking about.
You left out the part where JP Morgan got to buy Bear Stearns, but the Federal government converted $30B in bad loans into good loans by guaranteeing them. That's not really eliminating the moral hazard.
You also left out the part where Bear Stearns raked in several $billion in profit every year through the Bubble without regulations holding them back, floating on the cheap credit from the Fed, which was a lot more take than the cost (especially if you ignore the decreased share price as purely paper opportunity cost measured against a P/E inflated by by the injection of that cheap credit into a synthetic barrel-bottom market expansion).
That heavy hand that took the buyout (which doubled over the weekend, and will go higher as the spotlight moves further away) didn't take anywhere near the full cost of its bad deals, while collecting the maximum profit on them for years. I'd love that kind of deal every time I fail. And on the argument that Bear Stearns was too big to be allowed to fail, I stand the millions of people who made bad mortgage deals on their side of the table, who are allowed to fail.
I don't say bail all them out, either. I say that this country has sown an unprecedented crop of failure now ripening on the vine and forcing the harvest. If we just leave it to rot, while drinking some of the bankers' grapes in fancy, socialized bottles, we're going to drown in poison from now until the BS fertilizer runs out.
If the government helped me buy JP Morgan for pennies on the dollar, it would still be socialism. Or buy Bear Stearns, with JP Morgan's guarantees.
But if you want to find excuses to pay your taxes for socialism for banks while your fellow Americans get forced out of their homes, you socialists will invent any propaganda that suits your needs.
NYC has been recycling with a "big apple" in the signage for 20 years or more. "Greener" is a dictionary word. At least 10 million people living here already know that the apple and "green" on the NYC promotions mean the City's programme, but you had to dig up some obscure programme (for which I thank you for the enlightenment). There is absolutely no case here for Apple - NYC has the case for infringement.
And the logos aren't similar enough to confuse anyone. Except maybe Apple's lawyers.
Er, the government "guaranteeing" the bad mortgages means the taxpayers will pay them off when the bad mortgage holders don't. It's the most obvious kind of bailout. What is there to not understand?
I asked you to explain your guilt, or at least what it's like to live in denial. You asked a bunch of disingenuous questions. I never screamed at you. All I did was remind you of a few truths about the blood on your hands. Now I'm a "crack-pot".
But you're the one who's crazy. I'm not trying to change you: you're obviously too far gone. But it's been instructional to march you back and forth as an exhibit of the kind of mentality it takes to be an owner of some oil corps and get through every day on your way to your retirement.
You don't have to thank me. Unless later you get a chance to actually think about your guilt, and start to change your mind.
We should pay taxes according to what Jesus said, and the corporate news broadcasters are "Communists". And the people who make the same as you are probably crackheads.
Predicting a recession because growth has slowed to nearly zero, for reasons that are just getting worse, isn't the same as saying that we're already in a recession, though there's room for that because "we" is a fake average that's raised by the richest, who don't get hit with the slowdowns. A $13 TRILLION economy like the US doesn't grind to a halt because the news says it is, but because it has run out of the credit that's been propping it up. Though the news telling everyone that the economy is doing great when it's fake certainly can fool its people into never fixing its problems until it's too late.
Y'know, I agree with you on Bear Stearns and people who bought mortgages they couldn't afford. But I'm not really proud of that, since your way of thinking has so much wrong with it.
No, you're the one who's trolling. You know exactly what I'm talking about. Oil companies. You know, environmental destruction, endless wars, climate change, global corruption. You've probably heard something about it by now.
But I guess you're just sharing the bliss of deep denial. It actually sounds like it sucks to have to pretend not to know what the hell is going on in a world you're helping destroy.
"-millions of people are getting their homes foreclosed" As pointed out elsewhere in these threads, 1% of America's over 113,000,000 households are already in the foreclosure process. Mean household size is about 3 people. This crisis will last many more months, and get worse before it starts getting better. We're already at 3*113M, and those millions will grow.
"-millions more are always 6 weeks paychecks from losing their homes"
It's surprisingly hard to find year by year stats on "real income". But what I could find in documentation showed that during the 2000s, real income has shrunk. And that includes the incomes of people at the top, which has grown.
"-But that [bs stock price] high was built on a bubble inflated by money lent from the Fed (taxpayers)"
I'm not going to bother working up the stats for that one. The Bear Stearns stock price was based on its expected profits, like any stock. Those profits were derived from the real estate bubble, which was derived from the artifically low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve, both in the inflation of prices from the increased credit and from the more complex "instruments" (bets on increases) derived from them. That's why Bear Stearns was in danger of collapsing, when the credit dried up. If you need citations to explain that to you, you're not going to understand them.
"-Bear Stearns (and its shareholders, brokers and execs) raked in so many $BILLIONS over the past 10-20 years running the way that eventually ran out, that it was totally worth the price of doing business when its shares collapsed"
Bear Stearns hit the wall with a 61% profit drop at the end of last year, which cost it a few $billion at the end, its first loss in 83 years. Well, in just 2003Q4 the BS profits were over $288M, or over $1.15B in just one annualized year, fairly early in the bubble. As BS started to decline with the bubble that had sustained it, it's profit could still drop to over $361M, even though dropping by a third, still an annualized profit of about $1.5B - while declining. If you look at 7 years where its profits were well over $1.5B average a year, that's over $10B in profits. Even a possible $3B loss is worth it to make over $7B in net profit on it.
"-(much of which ultimately came from the Fed - taxpayers)"
The banks loan money retail that they get wholesale from the Federal Reserve, which is backed by the Federal government. Which is paid by taxpayers. The Federal Reserve loaned JP Morgan extra money to buy out Bear Stearns and prop it up.
"-since your [GP]lies (FYI, he posted 52wk high and low stock price.)"
I don't know what that challenge is supposed to mean. But Before I do any more work to cite the facts I offered, I want to see you accept them. Because I expect you wont. You want to find fault with my "presentation". What's really a problem for you is that you are all too happy to accept the good news about the economy, but the bad news shocks you too much. You want to dislike the messenger, and reject their message. Which makes you a completely typical American.
Well, the "nerve" that generates your comments comes from someone who would also fall into the 60M or so Americans (not 150M: the childen, retired, imprisoned, sick, military, etc aren't counted towards the media income) would by definition be described in your terms as someone who
manage[s] to not make more than me. I find myself wondering if they're just lazy, or if we have that many drug addicts, or that many people addicted to government assistance. Are there really people content to run a cash register at the local Quick-E-Mart, who are willing to do nothing to better themselves and improve their family's quality of life?
The nerve that thinks that the Federal government, which publishes the GDP stats showing us grinding to a halt, is "the liberal media". That thinks the corporate media is liberal.
But on to the economics, not the Rush Limbo version of them. The bottom 50% collected 12.83% of all income in 2005. The top 1% collected 21.2%, the top 10% collected 46.44%. The 50% mark fell at about $46,000 in 2005. Since tax rates increase the further people get from the poverty level (about $13K per family in 2005), because more of their income is discretionary, not necessities, the bottom 50% was paying those lower tax rates on something like $30,000, under 2/3 of their full income, while the top 50% was paying higher rates on nearly their full income. So the bottom 50% paying 3% (assuming your uncited figures are correct) at lower rates on something like 8% of the income seems fair. If you exclude all the corporate expenses that aren't taxed which the top 50% get a lot more of, that is.
But hey, you're a truckdriver making about triple the poverty level. You should be paying more taxes, and rich people should be paying less, right? Because you're on the road hauling pellets 300 days a year, and they're flipping their fifth and sixth extra homes to exhaust our banking system.
Thanks. I think these problems through to keep my sanity. Especially when others will attack me with all kinds of fallacies, thinking it through to a workable, just solution beats back the anxiety that the impending doom might bring.
The most important part, after the pushback to those who'd bail out banks, after denying the "necessity" of bailing out bad faith and stupid borrowers, is the real approach I found to liquidity. If the government simply screwed down that hierarchy of those liable, keeping those liable from making further profits from their failed liability, there's plenty of money for most people to pay their way out of this mess. Americans with their backs up against a wall they made with their bad choices should be faced with the new choice of whether to use their IRAs (and other "locked up" liquid assets) to pay their mortgages, or even to buy a new (cheaper, I'd expect) home if they lose the first one. The alternative is to leave these people homeless, or bail them out with taxpayer money, while letting them avoid taxes on that money locked in the bank. The fraudulent loans would direct their interest to a fund from which new loans could be made. And people tapping their unlocked funds could opt to pay back what they had to use, with interest, to themselves, so we don't have to bail them out again when they retire (and have only a cheaper house to sell to pay for it).
The other side of what we could do would be to assign banks a "creditor rating". Fraudulent banks, after paying fines, if they're still in business, would get a creditor rating on their performance. Their rating would determine how low a rate they borrow at wholesale. They can raise it the same way debtors raise theirs: accumulating better history for a while. They could even raise it faster by managing riskier investments in less profitable markets, like rehabilitating borrowers' credit ratings. Financing more loans for people with worse (but not hopeless) credit ratings and successfully collecting would rehab both their ratings, while also moving us all through the credit crunch based on real risks, real competition, real management, real development.
I'd like to think that Congress is thinking that way. I doubt it.
Or sell downloaded music, or music players or anything else Apple markets under its logo.
This suit is frivolous. Trademarks aren't vague references just to a corporation in a vacuum. They are the mark under which a mark holder markets its product, which is in a specific business sector, under which the holder registers the mark. The test of whether someone else is infringing the held mark is whether the other use would cause confusion to a consumer looking for the first mark holder's product, who would be confused into thinking that the other mark's product is the one they're looking for. There's no way someone looking for any of Apple's products would think that the GreeNYC offerings are what they were looking for from Apple.
The trademark laws are very simple, clear, and probably the most sensible of all the intellectual property laws. There is no way that Apple's lawyers pressing this claim could possibly be unaware that they have no legitimate claim. They are just hassling a City government hoping to intimidate it.
Well, they picked the wrong city. Our city will kick their corporation's ass. Besides, we've been using an apple as our logo for centuries before Apple ever put sandals on its feet.
The court should not only immediately dismiss this frivolous suit, but it should sanction the lawyers, putting a "frivolous" mark in their lawyers' licenses. After a few of those, they should have their licenses shredded.
And then recycled. I'm sure NYC would be glad to dispose of it for them.
Well, I haven't even used BitTorrent much, because every time I've tried, it's been extremely slow. So I'm not the right one to write such an app - though I'd be one of those who'd use it if it were fast and easy. BTW, is there a good commandline client for Debian/Ubunutu that does nothing but quickly download the file when I pass the.torrent URL on its commandline?
I'm also not familiar with the programming model you describe. Would I have to manually install one of those javascriptable libraries on my PC, then hit a remote Web page that includes the Javascript in its HTML that would start up their external process, which would run in the background? Would they notify me in a GUI when complete (or had exceptions, and show status)?
I might not write this project's code, but I'd like to use it, and to understand how it could work. Or at least get an explanation someone else can use to write it for us:).
The Federal government is covering these collapsing banks with money it gets through taxes and selling Federal debt (which is repaid by taxes and more/renewed Federal debt).
The richer quarter of Americans might pay over 3/4 of the taxes, but they've got a lot more than 3/4 of the income.
You've really got a lot of nerve claiming that the poorer half of Americans pays no Federal taxes, in the month when we're all staring at the tax bills. And those are the bills artificially lowered by instead buying Federal debt, which just means bigger tax bills later (or, for a while, bigger debts, until eventually it means the biggest possible - or bigger - tax bills).
But maybe you've somehow managed to pay no Federal taxes, without being in the top 50% of Americans by riches (without being a corporation, which usually pay no taxes), let's hear the secret to your success.
Your parting statement is perfectly self-reflexive. If only you'd started your reply with "this post is an interesting...", you'd have scored an A+. But you do get a passing grade for taking your toys home and going away.
Of course it's politics. Nothing affecting the economy that deeply can be nonpolitical. Especially when those who control it are all politicians and their political appointees. When the entire system itself was developed during an era of Party monopoly (and near monopoly), though led by Treasury Secretaries who come from running Goldman Sachs, the top investment bank.
And of course you want to see it roll on. You make your living participating in the economy according to its rules. Of course you want to see the banks get bailed out, despite the moral hazard that encourages them to do it all over again. Sure you hate the Republicans, that's easy now, but that didn't stop you from living off their largesse the past 7-13 of your 16 years in the business. Now, it's not just the Republicans - there have been plenty of Democrats along for the ride, though in a largely marginalized minority, except if they'd go along with the bankers' dream deregulation regime.
I don't know why you're asking me what Bernanke should have done differently, since you're so gung-ho on not looking at the past. Because of course it's not just Bernanke, he's an arbitrary starting point. Greenspan is the main schmuck, but so are all those Treasury Secretaries, including Robert Rubin and of course Paulson today, and a cast of thousands of supporting actors. Mainly the people who deregulated the 1934 banking regulations that made firewalls between financial service industries, which were all thrown away to accommodate Citibank in 1998, which puts our entire capital market, now dangerously interconnected, at risk at once.
But since you asked, I'll tell you. In fact, I already explained in a separate post how to put out the fire. As for those who sold matches and newspapers next to the sparking explosives factory, I'd let them burn into firebreaks, while using the available money to put out other critical fires that don't produce even more moral hazard and liabilities than we can douse.
What do you do? You just sell it short. I don't expect you to do more, because that's how you make your living from these markets. But I also don't expect you to play that hand into talking like you've got some authority on how to properly land this runaway train whose firebox you've stoked at every turn.
I live debt-free, and always have. But if these people who bought homes too expensive to afford get to keep them, if the flippers get to keep all their profits, if the banks get to keep all their profits after mismanaging the entire catastrophe, but I've got to pay to bail them out, then I look pretty stupid for not getting in on the action, don't I?
Which lots of people "smart" enough to have stayed out will also see if that all comes down. And so the next time, the rolls of the exploiters will be full, and the rolls of those left standing to bail them out, to keep the whole system going at all, will be empty. Now that sounds pretty stupid. Almost as stupid as remaining among those who will not have benefited, but will be asked to bail out the even more extreme next catastrophe.
Because Richardson's immaterial, because he didn't stand a chance. He was also the Clinton Energy Secretary who set up our energy economy after the Cold War to leave us in such a terrible position that we're getting raped now since the oil barons (who you voted for twice) have been running us into the ground. Richardson is a good demonstration that most political success can be had by just showing up and getting access, if you're not a total incompetent.
But hey, since you figured I'd let alone the irrelevant Democrat you mentioned, I must always embrace all Democrats. Thanks for confirming your political sense, as if you hadn't already made its worthlessness perfectly clear.
I know what I'm talking about. I'm not going to bother with your "credentials" question, because credentials are a fallacy, especially since the army of credentialed people in this country have just dragged us into a nearly intractable banking crisis.
If you want some evidence of some specific statements, challenge them specifically and I'll supply them.
As for what I think should have happened to Bear Stearns, of course I think that it should have been regulated to prevent its irresponsible actions before it created such a crisis. I think it should have been forced either to reform its practices or to get out of its favored position mediating in the US economy, presenting a risk when it was so risky.
But once it went under, I think that indeed it should have taken its losses. Do you want to see banks fail to correct now, and crank up this unsupportable behavior as they all expect bailouts when they hit the wall? Do you want to see the next cycle end with the US unable to afford to mitigate any collapses, because they're so much bigger after compounding this one, and because the money's already spent hiding this one?
I explained in another post how the mortgage borrowers can be kept liquid while stopping fraudulent banks from recovering more than the principal, but letting all those who made bad bets take their losses, which is how business works. And it can work. It just doesn't work when it's propped up at every turn, and banks get paid to take risks that cannot injure them.
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And that accounting doesn't even include the costs of recounting contested ballots. Since the paperless voting can't really count them at all, the costs of the extensive circumstantial forensics are either extremely high, or have to be counted as the costs of leaving the ballot unprovable at all. Which costs can be extremely high, perhaps higher than the entire budget controlled by the people "elected".
The main purpose of a house is keeping people outside from looking in on your private affairs. As such, the outside of a house is the part offered for public consumption.
Anyone has the right to look at the outside of a house visible from a public place to stand. And we have the right to publish photos of anything we've rightfully seen.
If they want more privacy, they can draw the shades. They can raise a hedge. Or they can accept the reality that a "private road" doesn't prohibit people from looking past it, unless they make it really big. And then they'll probably get fined for raising a public eyesore on their property, which should really show them where the line lies.
Indemnifying the risk of the bank, now JP Morgan, is most certainly a bailout. You're just buying into the shell game.
Those assumed mortages are already defaulting, and a large fraction is guaranteed to default as the next months march on. But in this deal, that's not JP Morgan's problem - which is a bailout, even a pre-bailout.
The Fed hasn't reformed any rules for more discipline. The Fed, and the (mainly Republican) Congress more broadly, has reregulated banks solely to deregulate them for decades, starting most dramatically under Reagan/Bush (when their William Casey left his heading the SEC to run their campaign, then helped Bush deregulate those Savings and Loans that funded the CIA Casey got to run, along with giving away $1.5 TRILLION out of a $3T GDP). The main reregulation was in 1998 when the 1934 "firewall" rules decoupling different financial services like brokerage from insurance from banking were thrown out so CitiCorp could aggregate. Shortly afterwards Long Term Capital's $11B bailout sent the signal that the Fed will bail out the rich banks when they overextend their profit machines out of unsustainable greed. Of course they all know they can economically blackmail that kind of bailout every time: they've never seen any reason to believe anything else.
The bottom line is that the Federal government is assuming the risk, and on failures that are certain that's assuming the cost, while JP Morgan gets to make the profits. While the people, many of whom are equally guilty but many of whom are not, are the only ones still facing the risks and costs. Even though their tax money (no longer available to pay their mortgages) is going to bail out the banks. It might turn out to be a little less stark, if the government waives foreclosure on failed loans so the defaulters can keep their homes. But that still maintains the moral hazard that undermines the entire financial industry.
A few cycles of consistently transferring that risk to the government only when it costs, never when it profits, has created an industry that always embraces overextended risk. But the public money to fuel that machine is running out, as it never gets paid back before it's paid out again.
What's funny to me is that I absolutely expect that a flat sales tax (with just a few exemptions for necessities - for everyone) instead of any income tax, would make taxation fair, and collect plenty to fund even our bloated budgets. It's funny because most of the people who will criticize my take on taxation also prefer a flat sales tax (though they haven't thought through the needed exemptions to protect poor people whose desperation is even more costly).
If we charged a total of 25% sales tax, probably 17-20% Federal, 5-8% state, depending on a real economic analysis, we'd collect close to $3 trillion, plus other Federal fees that would fund our entire usual $3-3.5T budgets without debt. By necessities I mean taking the lowest 20%ile (bottom 20% of people) by cost of rent/mortgage, marking those people's median cost of utilities (including sewer/water/heat/electric/Internet) and transportation as exempt, used clothes and raw cloth, raw groceries, all certified education and their county's median healthcare costs (including insurance premiums).
Everyone would get those exemptions, though some (the poorest) people would benefit from them more as a fraction of their making ends meet. The partial exemptions based on the median expenses of the poorest people would be covered by tax credit checks to cover the taxes everyone would pay at purchase time (or just keep, if they instead just saved their money, which gives banks more to invest in the economy, as well as a cushion so government doesn't have to bail people out as often).
The entire IRS system, with all its loopholes, cheating, corruption and privacy invasion, and its vast expense both by the government and private people to comply with its complex rules (and the withheld surplus currently returned as refunds but without the interest) would all disappear. Replaced by a system so simple it could be a one-page law, if our pompous legal system allowed such a sane way to govern some of our most impactful rules. So the system would be fair, based on something reasonable (those benefiting the most from our society, as measured by how much they consume, pay the most, while those benefiting the least, measured by mere survival, pay the least), and get collected from a vastly smaller population (sellers) which already do their accounting formally, and can be much more easily shut down or forced to pay because they operate a public business.
I hope that some of the accumulating pile of failed candidates talking up conversion to a "flat tax" or a sales tax help create demand for such a system. Without scaring too many people off because they're really hiding a system rigged to feed the rich, or to starve the poor, or to crush the government protecting us from corporate predation. People like Forbes and Ron Paul (whose iceberg tip of sanity on the war and other government aggression hides the massive frozen load of crazy beneath the surface) have got people thinking. I hope someone reasonable can eventually capitalize on that movement towards sanity and replace our system with something like what I describe. Because we really can't take much more of the endlessly perverted income tax system.
Oh, I'm educated. I'm in NYC, I used to write the infosystems for the banks and brokerages on their way up, lots of my friends from the 1990s, too, and the sweet BS/JPM deal is what everyone's talking about.
You left out the part where JP Morgan got to buy Bear Stearns, but the Federal government converted $30B in bad loans into good loans by guaranteeing them. That's not really eliminating the moral hazard.
You also left out the part where Bear Stearns raked in several $billion in profit every year through the Bubble without regulations holding them back, floating on the cheap credit from the Fed, which was a lot more take than the cost (especially if you ignore the decreased share price as purely paper opportunity cost measured against a P/E inflated by by the injection of that cheap credit into a synthetic barrel-bottom market expansion).
That heavy hand that took the buyout (which doubled over the weekend, and will go higher as the spotlight moves further away) didn't take anywhere near the full cost of its bad deals, while collecting the maximum profit on them for years. I'd love that kind of deal every time I fail. And on the argument that Bear Stearns was too big to be allowed to fail, I stand the millions of people who made bad mortgage deals on their side of the table, who are allowed to fail.
I don't say bail all them out, either. I say that this country has sown an unprecedented crop of failure now ripening on the vine and forcing the harvest. If we just leave it to rot, while drinking some of the bankers' grapes in fancy, socialized bottles, we're going to drown in poison from now until the BS fertilizer runs out.
It must be hard to be you, who can only see that you're a useful idiot, who begs not to turn your brain on.
If the government helped me buy JP Morgan for pennies on the dollar, it would still be socialism. Or buy Bear Stearns, with JP Morgan's guarantees.
But if you want to find excuses to pay your taxes for socialism for banks while your fellow Americans get forced out of their homes, you socialists will invent any propaganda that suits your needs.
NYC has been recycling with a "big apple" in the signage for 20 years or more. "Greener" is a dictionary word. At least 10 million people living here already know that the apple and "green" on the NYC promotions mean the City's programme, but you had to dig up some obscure programme (for which I thank you for the enlightenment). There is absolutely no case here for Apple - NYC has the case for infringement.
And the logos aren't similar enough to confuse anyone. Except maybe Apple's lawyers.
Er, the government "guaranteeing" the bad mortgages means the taxpayers will pay them off when the bad mortgage holders don't. It's the most obvious kind of bailout. What is there to not understand?
Hahahaha.
I asked you to explain your guilt, or at least what it's like to live in denial. You asked a bunch of disingenuous questions. I never screamed at you. All I did was remind you of a few truths about the blood on your hands. Now I'm a "crack-pot".
But you're the one who's crazy. I'm not trying to change you: you're obviously too far gone. But it's been instructional to march you back and forth as an exhibit of the kind of mentality it takes to be an owner of some oil corps and get through every day on your way to your retirement.
You don't have to thank me. Unless later you get a chance to actually think about your guilt, and start to change your mind.
We should pay taxes according to what Jesus said, and the corporate news broadcasters are "Communists". And the people who make the same as you are probably crackheads.
Predicting a recession because growth has slowed to nearly zero, for reasons that are just getting worse, isn't the same as saying that we're already in a recession, though there's room for that because "we" is a fake average that's raised by the richest, who don't get hit with the slowdowns. A $13 TRILLION economy like the US doesn't grind to a halt because the news says it is, but because it has run out of the credit that's been propping it up. Though the news telling everyone that the economy is doing great when it's fake certainly can fool its people into never fixing its problems until it's too late.
Y'know, I agree with you on Bear Stearns and people who bought mortgages they couldn't afford. But I'm not really proud of that, since your way of thinking has so much wrong with it.
No, you're the one who's trolling. You know exactly what I'm talking about. Oil companies. You know, environmental destruction, endless wars, climate change, global corruption. You've probably heard something about it by now.
But I guess you're just sharing the bliss of deep denial. It actually sounds like it sucks to have to pretend not to know what the hell is going on in a world you're helping destroy.
"-millions of people are getting their homes foreclosed"
As pointed out elsewhere in these threads, 1% of America's over 113,000,000 households are already in the foreclosure process. Mean household size is about 3 people. This crisis will last many more months, and get worse before it starts getting better. We're already at 3*113M, and those millions will grow.
"-millions more are always 6 weeks paychecks from losing their homes"
I'd say that the millions of Americans spending over half their income on housing would be homeless if they lost over 10% of their incomes.
"-income has shrunk over the past 25 years"
It's surprisingly hard to find year by year stats on "real income". But what I could find in documentation showed that during the 2000s, real income has shrunk. And that includes the incomes of people at the top, which has grown.
"-But that [bs stock price] high was built on a bubble inflated by money lent from the Fed (taxpayers)"
I'm not going to bother working up the stats for that one. The Bear Stearns stock price was based on its expected profits, like any stock. Those profits were derived from the real estate bubble, which was derived from the artifically low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve, both in the inflation of prices from the increased credit and from the more complex "instruments" (bets on increases) derived from them. That's why Bear Stearns was in danger of collapsing, when the credit dried up. If you need citations to explain that to you, you're not going to understand them.
"-Bear Stearns (and its shareholders, brokers and execs) raked in so many $BILLIONS over the past 10-20 years running the way that eventually ran out, that it was totally worth the price of doing business when its shares collapsed"
Bear Stearns hit the wall with a 61% profit drop at the end of last year, which cost it a few $billion at the end, its first loss in 83 years. Well, in just 2003Q4 the BS profits were over $288M, or over $1.15B in just one annualized year, fairly early in the bubble. As BS started to decline with the bubble that had sustained it, it's profit could still drop to over $361M, even though dropping by a third, still an annualized profit of about $1.5B - while declining. If you look at 7 years where its profits were well over $1.5B average a year, that's over $10B in profits. Even a possible $3B loss is worth it to make over $7B in net profit on it.
"-(much of which ultimately came from the Fed - taxpayers)"
The banks loan money retail that they get wholesale from the Federal Reserve, which is backed by the Federal government. Which is paid by taxpayers. The Federal Reserve loaned JP Morgan extra money to buy out Bear Stearns and prop it up.
"-since your [GP]lies (FYI, he posted 52wk high and low stock price.)"
I don't know what that challenge is supposed to mean. But Before I do any more work to cite the facts I offered, I want to see you accept them. Because I expect you wont. You want to find fault with my "presentation". What's really a problem for you is that you are all too happy to accept the good news about the economy, but the bad news shocks you too much. You want to dislike the messenger, and reject their message. Which makes you a completely typical American.
Which is why we're in such deep trouble.
The nerve that thinks that the Federal government, which publishes the GDP stats showing us grinding to a halt, is "the liberal media". That thinks the corporate media is liberal.
But on to the economics, not the Rush Limbo version of them. The bottom 50% collected 12.83% of all income in 2005. The top 1% collected 21.2%, the top 10% collected 46.44%. The 50% mark fell at about $46,000 in 2005. Since tax rates increase the further people get from the poverty level (about $13K per family in 2005), because more of their income is discretionary, not necessities, the bottom 50% was paying those lower tax rates on something like $30,000, under 2/3 of their full income, while the top 50% was paying higher rates on nearly their full income. So the bottom 50% paying 3% (assuming your uncited figures are correct) at lower rates on something like 8% of the income seems fair. If you exclude all the corporate expenses that aren't taxed which the top 50% get a lot more of, that is.
But hey, you're a truckdriver making about triple the poverty level. You should be paying more taxes, and rich people should be paying less, right? Because you're on the road hauling pellets 300 days a year, and they're flipping their fifth and sixth extra homes to exhaust our banking system.
Thanks. I think these problems through to keep my sanity. Especially when others will attack me with all kinds of fallacies, thinking it through to a workable, just solution beats back the anxiety that the impending doom might bring.
The most important part, after the pushback to those who'd bail out banks, after denying the "necessity" of bailing out bad faith and stupid borrowers, is the real approach I found to liquidity. If the government simply screwed down that hierarchy of those liable, keeping those liable from making further profits from their failed liability, there's plenty of money for most people to pay their way out of this mess. Americans with their backs up against a wall they made with their bad choices should be faced with the new choice of whether to use their IRAs (and other "locked up" liquid assets) to pay their mortgages, or even to buy a new (cheaper, I'd expect) home if they lose the first one. The alternative is to leave these people homeless, or bail them out with taxpayer money, while letting them avoid taxes on that money locked in the bank. The fraudulent loans would direct their interest to a fund from which new loans could be made. And people tapping their unlocked funds could opt to pay back what they had to use, with interest, to themselves, so we don't have to bail them out again when they retire (and have only a cheaper house to sell to pay for it).
The other side of what we could do would be to assign banks a "creditor rating". Fraudulent banks, after paying fines, if they're still in business, would get a creditor rating on their performance. Their rating would determine how low a rate they borrow at wholesale. They can raise it the same way debtors raise theirs: accumulating better history for a while. They could even raise it faster by managing riskier investments in less profitable markets, like rehabilitating borrowers' credit ratings. Financing more loans for people with worse (but not hopeless) credit ratings and successfully collecting would rehab both their ratings, while also moving us all through the credit crunch based on real risks, real competition, real management, real development.
I'd like to think that Congress is thinking that way. I doubt it.
Or sell downloaded music, or music players or anything else Apple markets under its logo.
This suit is frivolous. Trademarks aren't vague references just to a corporation in a vacuum. They are the mark under which a mark holder markets its product, which is in a specific business sector, under which the holder registers the mark. The test of whether someone else is infringing the held mark is whether the other use would cause confusion to a consumer looking for the first mark holder's product, who would be confused into thinking that the other mark's product is the one they're looking for. There's no way someone looking for any of Apple's products would think that the GreeNYC offerings are what they were looking for from Apple.
The trademark laws are very simple, clear, and probably the most sensible of all the intellectual property laws. There is no way that Apple's lawyers pressing this claim could possibly be unaware that they have no legitimate claim. They are just hassling a City government hoping to intimidate it.
Well, they picked the wrong city. Our city will kick their corporation's ass. Besides, we've been using an apple as our logo for centuries before Apple ever put sandals on its feet.
The court should not only immediately dismiss this frivolous suit, but it should sanction the lawyers, putting a "frivolous" mark in their lawyers' licenses. After a few of those, they should have their licenses shredded.
And then recycled. I'm sure NYC would be glad to dispose of it for them.
Because the Federal government is indemnifying its purchase, with cash handouts.
Well, I haven't even used BitTorrent much, because every time I've tried, it's been extremely slow. So I'm not the right one to write such an app - though I'd be one of those who'd use it if it were fast and easy. BTW, is there a good commandline client for Debian/Ubunutu that does nothing but quickly download the file when I pass the .torrent URL on its commandline?
:).
I'm also not familiar with the programming model you describe. Would I have to manually install one of those javascriptable libraries on my PC, then hit a remote Web page that includes the Javascript in its HTML that would start up their external process, which would run in the background? Would they notify me in a GUI when complete (or had exceptions, and show status)?
I might not write this project's code, but I'd like to use it, and to understand how it could work. Or at least get an explanation someone else can use to write it for us
Yes you do. You're an owner of those corporations that are doing all that wrong, and you absolve them of it because you expect to profit by it.
So is it worth living in denial of that?
The Federal government is covering these collapsing banks with money it gets through taxes and selling Federal debt (which is repaid by taxes and more/renewed Federal debt).
The richer quarter of Americans might pay over 3/4 of the taxes, but they've got a lot more than 3/4 of the income.
You've really got a lot of nerve claiming that the poorer half of Americans pays no Federal taxes, in the month when we're all staring at the tax bills. And those are the bills artificially lowered by instead buying Federal debt, which just means bigger tax bills later (or, for a while, bigger debts, until eventually it means the biggest possible - or bigger - tax bills).
But maybe you've somehow managed to pay no Federal taxes, without being in the top 50% of Americans by riches (without being a corporation, which usually pay no taxes), let's hear the secret to your success.
Your parting statement is perfectly self-reflexive. If only you'd started your reply with "this post is an interesting...", you'd have scored an A+. But you do get a passing grade for taking your toys home and going away.
Goodbye.
Of course it's politics. Nothing affecting the economy that deeply can be nonpolitical. Especially when those who control it are all politicians and their political appointees. When the entire system itself was developed during an era of Party monopoly (and near monopoly), though led by Treasury Secretaries who come from running Goldman Sachs, the top investment bank.
And of course you want to see it roll on. You make your living participating in the economy according to its rules. Of course you want to see the banks get bailed out, despite the moral hazard that encourages them to do it all over again. Sure you hate the Republicans, that's easy now, but that didn't stop you from living off their largesse the past 7-13 of your 16 years in the business. Now, it's not just the Republicans - there have been plenty of Democrats along for the ride, though in a largely marginalized minority, except if they'd go along with the bankers' dream deregulation regime.
I don't know why you're asking me what Bernanke should have done differently, since you're so gung-ho on not looking at the past. Because of course it's not just Bernanke, he's an arbitrary starting point. Greenspan is the main schmuck, but so are all those Treasury Secretaries, including Robert Rubin and of course Paulson today, and a cast of thousands of supporting actors. Mainly the people who deregulated the 1934 banking regulations that made firewalls between financial service industries, which were all thrown away to accommodate Citibank in 1998, which puts our entire capital market, now dangerously interconnected, at risk at once.
But since you asked, I'll tell you. In fact, I already explained in a separate post how to put out the fire. As for those who sold matches and newspapers next to the sparking explosives factory, I'd let them burn into firebreaks, while using the available money to put out other critical fires that don't produce even more moral hazard and liabilities than we can douse.
What do you do? You just sell it short. I don't expect you to do more, because that's how you make your living from these markets. But I also don't expect you to play that hand into talking like you've got some authority on how to properly land this runaway train whose firebox you've stoked at every turn.
I live debt-free, and always have. But if these people who bought homes too expensive to afford get to keep them, if the flippers get to keep all their profits, if the banks get to keep all their profits after mismanaging the entire catastrophe, but I've got to pay to bail them out, then I look pretty stupid for not getting in on the action, don't I?
Which lots of people "smart" enough to have stayed out will also see if that all comes down. And so the next time, the rolls of the exploiters will be full, and the rolls of those left standing to bail them out, to keep the whole system going at all, will be empty. Now that sounds pretty stupid. Almost as stupid as remaining among those who will not have benefited, but will be asked to bail out the even more extreme next catastrophe.
Because Richardson's immaterial, because he didn't stand a chance. He was also the Clinton Energy Secretary who set up our energy economy after the Cold War to leave us in such a terrible position that we're getting raped now since the oil barons (who you voted for twice) have been running us into the ground. Richardson is a good demonstration that most political success can be had by just showing up and getting access, if you're not a total incompetent.
But hey, since you figured I'd let alone the irrelevant Democrat you mentioned, I must always embrace all Democrats. Thanks for confirming your political sense, as if you hadn't already made its worthlessness perfectly clear.
I know what I'm talking about. I'm not going to bother with your "credentials" question, because credentials are a fallacy, especially since the army of credentialed people in this country have just dragged us into a nearly intractable banking crisis.
If you want some evidence of some specific statements, challenge them specifically and I'll supply them.
As for what I think should have happened to Bear Stearns, of course I think that it should have been regulated to prevent its irresponsible actions before it created such a crisis. I think it should have been forced either to reform its practices or to get out of its favored position mediating in the US economy, presenting a risk when it was so risky.
But once it went under, I think that indeed it should have taken its losses. Do you want to see banks fail to correct now, and crank up this unsupportable behavior as they all expect bailouts when they hit the wall? Do you want to see the next cycle end with the US unable to afford to mitigate any collapses, because they're so much bigger after compounding this one, and because the money's already spent hiding this one?
I explained in another post how the mortgage borrowers can be kept liquid while stopping fraudulent banks from recovering more than the principal, but letting all those who made bad bets take their losses, which is how business works. And it can work. It just doesn't work when it's propped up at every turn, and banks get paid to take risks that cannot injure them.