In other words, they knew they were committing fraud, an took a movie about fraud and said
The real fraudsters are the applicants, who were lying on their mortgage applications. The mortgage brokers and loan officers may have been looking the other way, but their obligation is only to their employers. The liars ought to be responsible for their lies, but no politician — not even McCain — can afford to say this into their faces for they are too many.
No, they were collecting mortgages to be sold on the open market, after being sliced, diced and repackaged into complex derivatives
And the primary buyers of the mortgages were? Fannie and Freddie — created to help hitherto unqualified people get mortgages.
To get product to sell, they went after people with senile dementia, and helped people lie
Far easier to blame the mortgage-issuers for merely "helping people lie", than the actual liars themselves, is not it? There are only thousands of former, but millions of the latter — and we need their votes, don't we?
Now we are recieving the payload, and we all get to pay to bail out these corrupt, incompetant charlatans.
No, what they are do avoid is not to bail out "charlatans", but to keep the world's confidence in our financial system. As other posters have pointed out already, we've been living beyond our means for the last several decades — because the world was confident in our solvency. Losing this confidence will be quite devastating... I'm not sure, whether it is better to treat this abscess by dissolving it therapeutically (as Paulson and Bernanke are proposing) or draining it surgically (by letting it all happen), but the therapy is not proposed in order to bail anybody out, even if such will be its side effect on some people, however guilty they may be in the first place.
The repubs want to pay the same morons who got themselves into this mess $17k/hr of government money, because heaven forbid someone who is rich actually have to take responsibility for anything bad.
I don't know, who the "repubs" want to pay, but the Democrats' intentions are certainly "less than honorable". Christopher Dodd and Barack Obama are the two-highest beneficiaries of the Fannie and Freddie lobbying efforts — despite the vast accountingirregularities of both monsters.
If you are looking for "morons", they aren't on Wall Street. Some of those people may be arrogant assholes, but "morons" they aren't. The morons are people, who bought houses they had no way of affording without reading the fine print. It is impossible for any democrat (and I don't mean the political party here, but anybody associating with the Demos rather than Optimates) to blame the "ordinary people", so they blame the bankers and mortgage brokers to help unqualified people get mortgages. That the "victims" who got the mortgages are morons is not explicitly stated...
The vicious irony of it all is that Fannie and Freddi were both created for the same purpose — to give mortgages to people, who were otherwise unqualified to receive them. But that was a Democratic effort (New Deal — woo-hoo!), and we can't blame them in the newspapers, can we?
It can randomly spurt out false positives, subjecting people to random stops and questioning. It can still miss the real terrorists who are doing their damnedest to look normal and unthreatening.
Humans can — and already do — do all that too. The question is, will a device ever be better at it. Will it have — not zero — fewer false-positives? Will it catch — not all — more terrorists?
In fact, it does not even have to be better. If it is the same or even slightly worse, than a human guard, it may still be worse deploying for its price (human labor is way too expensive) and objectivity, as it will not be blinded by things like
familiarity (a terrorist may try to befriend a guard in advance)
Do you honestly believe that mark to market is the main culprit in the crisis?
The main? Not sure. One of the main? Definitely. Notice, how the banks like BofA and JPM are sitting pretty — and were even in a position to buy the failing investment banks (Bear Stearns went to JPMorgan earlier this year, Merill Lynch — to BofA last week). They have the same "toxic" securities. But they don't have to account for them in the same way — they are allowed to use certain financial models to come up with a price for the paper the are holding, rather than being forced to price it at today's market prices... In a normal (liquid) market there is little difference. In one spooked (even temporarily) by mortgage-related panic — it is a difference between life and death. Because if nobody wants that paper today (even though its issuer is solvent, and continues to pay dividends, etc.), then, under the "mark to market" requirements, the paper is worth zero and you have no collateral. You lose your credit ratings (automatically). And then, immediately, your counterparties are seizing whatever other collateral you may have put up to guarantee deals, and, whooops, your (ex-)employees are carrying out their stuff out of your (ex-)offices...
Perhaps, the main culprit were Freddie and Fannie. Created to address a "market inefficiency" — no sane banker would risk giving their own money to anyone, who managed (in this blessed country!) to stay too poor to have any money for a downpayment — they grew up into two disasters. Here is one, somewhat partisan, opinion. You may disagree with person, but some of the facts there (the main beneficiaries of their lobbying efforts, and their accountingirregularities ) are indisputable.
In fact, the tearing down of the barrier between commercial banking and investment banking allowed multiple conflicts of interest in investment banks, now also involved in brokerage and insurance and other areas.
These are empty words — and a spin. Here they are restated, spun just as convincingly in the opposite direction: "In fact, the tearing down of the barriers between different financial activities allowed for greater efficiency and the benefits of the economy of scale, thus allowing better-tailored financial products to be offered to clients at lower fees."
And my spin above is closer to truth than yours. Because yours is similar to arguing against air-travel using air-crashes as an example. Yes, an air-plane can crash — in particular, if it touches the ground however slightly during flight. But it can bring passengers much further, much faster, and for much less, than any previously known method of transportation. This is little consolation, when you picking up bodies from the wreckage, but remains an objective truth.
I'd like anyone with a minimum of imagination to think about the kind of wounds these weapons will cause.
Do you know, what kind of wound a 2000 year-old sword would cause? A good fighter could cut a man across from one side's shoulder to the other side's hip with one blow — especially from horseback...
A corpse pinned to the wall with a spear is quite horrific too, especially to a 21st century westerner (who has not been to a war).
War is hell, whether you use primitive, or sophisticated weapons...
But hey, I guess more weapons is just what the world needs.
You argue that point with Putin, Al Qaeda, and Ahmadinejad. I'll watch.
RF was not formed by consensus - it was the same old country, RSFSR, merely renamed within the same borders.
At various points all of the other parts of the Federation were volunteered into RSFSR — except for Chechnya, which was brought in at (explicit) gun-point.
All countries have done it in the past, but nobody did it in the past so recent.
Oh, and that "ethnic cleansing" business, you claimed took place in Chechnya, sorry, I don't buy it. I have one account (from a granddaughter of a Grozny resident), that it was all fabrication, and no other evidence of it, except Russia's official propaganda. Of course, after their strategic bombers had a go at the city, there was no evidence any side could collect...
This is an urban legend.
Most interesting...
[Russia] was a true federative republic, nothing more.
It was not — not even then — if the central government's fiat was enough to dissolve it. And I don't mean the executive government, as you assumed earlier. You are right, that Putinista-stuffed legislature approved the necessary Constitutional changes — but it was still done in Moscow, by the central legislature, and without nation-wide referendum or anything.
initial out-of-hand dismissal of the Russian Federation as a comparative entity was plain wrong.
It was not. Having grown up in the USSR, I'm pretty sure, I know that evil (and its core) better than a westerner, no matter how educated, ever will. It was not just silly to compare their sham rules and procedures (which also change year-to-year to suit the strongman in charge) to the US' long-standing traditions, it is also insulting...
If anything, the speed and the "non-eventness" of the dissolution of the Russian "Federation" is evidence, that dismissing them as a "comparative entity" was perfectly justified.
It would seem that, in this case, you, as many other Americans, suffer from a perceived persecution complex
"Just because you are paranoid, does not mean, they are not after you."
why investments banks were not creating SIVs and trading in CDOs
You missed my hint viz Internet, didn't you... There is nothing wrong with trading in CDOs, and they (and Bush) can not be blamed for the problems any more, than the Internet (and Clinton) can be blamed for the dot-com bust of 2000.
You are right about the regulation, though — there is a problem there, but the kind you'd think. Too much of it was archaic. The accounting rules governing investment banks require them to price their assets, no matter how far from maturity "to market"... This means, that if today nobody wants the securities you are holding (such as, for example, anything to do with mortgages, even if no more than 10% of them are "bad"), you are worth nothing, even if they aren't maturing in many years, by which time they will, most likely, regain their value, etc. Other financial institutions (such as BoFA, which snapped up Merryll Lynch last weekend at a firesale price) are accounting for the same things differently and thus appear much healthier.
This is why the last two remaining investment banks got reclassified in a hurry today. Too bad, this was not allowed to Bear Sterns and Lehman earlier this year. Both would've still be standing happily today.
Arguably, if there are no specific provisions, one could say that it is an obvious right then (in the lack of any restrictions)? That was the card the Southern states played.
Wrongly...
As for Chechnya, it was conquered by and incorporated into the Russian Empire a long time ago
As were Novgorod and Tver. No. Russia's current subjects have all "volunteerly" joined into the (new) Federation in the early 1990ies. Except Chechnya, which declared independence, and was brought back under heel as a result of two wars — both waged decades after UN renounced "right of conquest".
And if you doubt the right of conquest, then what can you say about e.g. Texas in the US?
As a matter of fact, Texas joined the Union on condition of being allowed to leave. It still has that right — unlike other States. Puerto Rico's special terms are nice too.
Your attempts to portray Russia as the same (or, perhaps, only slightly worse) than US are quite ridiculous. There is nothing ugly, that US have done in the last 150 years, that Russia (or China, another big offender) have not trumped with gusto within the last 60.
Sorry, I forget I'm talking about freak country. At 16 about 84% of our teens [...]
If this is how you determine "freakiness", then your country is only a little bit less "freaky". 18 vs 21? Not much different...
Because, if you accept the validity of government limiting alcohol (or any other behavior) to people under any age, the actual figure is just a matter of quantity, not quality...
Another matter was the ethnic cleansing of non-Chechen
Yes, that wonderful excuse covers anything — from Riga to Grozny to Tskhinvali...
Then again, the USA also invaded those of its constituents that have tried to secede in the past, so I fail to see how Russian attempts to forcibly prevent Chechnya from living made Russia of the time any less a federation than the USA is.
That was during a civil war — in the middle of the 19th century. Hardly justifies Russia's barbarity at the end of th 20th... Also, the US was fighting the States, which previously agreed to an irrevocable Union — US Constitution has no provisions for a split-up. Chechnya, on the other hand, has never joined the Russian Federation — unlike Tatarstan, or anyone else.
That's quite true - the federation was effectively dismantled soon after Putin came to power
And because the dismantling was possible by the central government fiat alone, the political system can not be a positive example to anyone...
Would anyone like to guess how the throttling practice was applied to traffic that was catagorized as VOIP but was not associated with Comcast's subscription service?
Whenever there is a shortage of any resource — such as bandwidth — somebody is going to receive less of the resource, than they would like. It is inevitable. So, somehow a decision has to be made on how to divide, what's available. Other things being equal, giving a higher priority to one's own customers can hardly be illegal in such situations.
But I'd like to see your evidence of Comcast hurting other providers' VoIP traffic in favor of Comcast's own p2p downloads... Just to stay on-topic...
I don't know much about the political systems of the other countries on your list, but I will be the first to sign up in the militia against anybody, who would try to impose Russia's political system here.
Russians themselves joke, that God created their country, to show other peoples, what not to do.
Ensuring fair, reasonable, and standardized elections isn't a good reason?
They are already fair and reasonable. What's the good reason to also have them standardized? What happened to "celebrate diversity"? Oh, don't answer here — just start your Constitutional Amendment campaign...
And the failures, as 2000 showed, are fairly catastrophic (i don't mean Bush's policies. I mean the turmoil, and lack of clarity)
Actually, quite the opposite — there was no catastrophe of any kind. The Constitution prevailed — thanks to a wise decision of the Supreme Court, who reasserted each State's right to vote for President in any way they please (barring certain explicitly banned practices). The whole turmoil was in the press — law and order was not even challenged on the ground, there is more "turmoil" during a WTO meeting.
The dot-com crash is a stock market bubble, and we've been through a lot of ups and downs in the stock market due to mass speculation, etc.. throughout history.
Yes, including today.
You can trace the origins of this back when the Glass-Steagall Act (created after the Great Depression) was repealed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999.
You can "trace the origins" of the "dot-com bust" to Al Gore's inventing Internet. Do you now hate him too — and want the Internet to be either regulated or banned altogether?
This effectively allowed, amongst other things, the creation of tje MBS, CDOs and SIVs, causing the current crisis.
Causing? Wow! That's pretty cool. Except, the first Collaterized Debt Obligations were issued in 1987, so no, it can't be explained by something, that happened in 1999. But don't let this fact stop you from parroting somebody else's "analysis".
You talked about Senator McCain. Well, Phil Gramm and John McCain? They go back a long way.
No, actually, I did not. Not in this thread. Not that there is anything wrong with either of those two gentlemen or their association, however close — but let's not change the subject...
AIG knew the market risks when they offered their IPO. Investors knew the risks when they purchased the stock.
As I already said, this is done to protect AIG's customers — not the management, and not the shareholders.
It is corporate welfare pure and simple.
No, it is not. AIG will be broken up and pieces of it sold off. Kind of like in bankruptcy proceedings, except it will not be quite as rushed, and it will not be at "firesale" prices — so that the insurance claims can continue to be honored, etc.
How about we just make everyone collect signatures, including the top two parties?
That would disenfranchise the voters, who can't sign their name. There are ought to be more of them, than of those, who simply get confused by the ballots...
How is 80% ownership of a failed company good for US Taxpayers...
Maybe, you need a little more knowledge of Economics in general and this particular sorry situation in particular, uhm? The failure of this company would've left millions of people uninsured, and hundreds of thousands unemployed. Taking it over, breaking it up, and selling the pieces at normal, rather than bankruptcy (a.k.a. firesale) prices seems like a reasonable thing to do.
I just wish, they would've done better to Lehman Brothers — instead they completely botched trying to sell it to Barkley's and BoFA. Instead of asking the would-be suitors to come up with bids in secrecy, the Feds allowed reps of both to be present in the room at once. Both balked... As a result, Barkley's is now taking over the juiciest pieces of Lehman's assets at a firesale price without assuming any of the liabilities — because Lehman is bankrupt as of Monday. Had they not known (from sitting at the same meeting, that Fed organized), that BoFA is not interested, they might've bet a fair price last Sunday...
Speaking of 1999... Were you as angry at Bill Clinton, when NASDAQ halved in 2000, as dot-com bust, as you are at Bush today?
Hardly sounds like a left-wing plot of the Democrats
Of course, it does — the whole purpose of Fannie/Freddie creation (and the not-so-implicit-anymore-is-it government backing for them) was to alleviate a so called "market failure" — to lend to the poor.
Bush should've demolished those things in 2002-03 (and privatized Social Security). Unfortunately, Al Qaeda preempted it all, and all he was able to accomplish was tax cuts and education reform.
I'm going to be foreclosed because I lost my job in the operations dept at Merrill and I can't refinance my mortgage.
You made a bad bet and ended up overexposed...
[...] screw McCain-Bush.
Were you as angry at Gore-Clinton, when your dot-com stocks turned to bust in 2000? You would've been wrong then too. The president has somewhere between nothing and very little to do with any of this — in a free Capitalist society.
Slashdot Mirror
Or would you?
The real fraudsters are the applicants, who were lying on their mortgage applications. The mortgage brokers and loan officers may have been looking the other way, but their obligation is only to their employers. The liars ought to be responsible for their lies, but no politician — not even McCain — can afford to say this into their faces for they are too many.
And the primary buyers of the mortgages were? Fannie and Freddie — created to help hitherto unqualified people get mortgages.
Far easier to blame the mortgage-issuers for merely "helping people lie", than the actual liars themselves, is not it? There are only thousands of former, but millions of the latter — and we need their votes, don't we?
No, what they are do avoid is not to bail out "charlatans", but to keep the world's confidence in our financial system. As other posters have pointed out already, we've been living beyond our means for the last several decades — because the world was confident in our solvency. Losing this confidence will be quite devastating... I'm not sure, whether it is better to treat this abscess by dissolving it therapeutically (as Paulson and Bernanke are proposing) or draining it surgically (by letting it all happen), but the therapy is not proposed in order to bail anybody out, even if such will be its side effect on some people, however guilty they may be in the first place.
For a couple of hours?
I don't know, who the "repubs" want to pay, but the Democrats' intentions are certainly "less than honorable". Christopher Dodd and Barack Obama are the two-highest beneficiaries of the Fannie and Freddie lobbying efforts — despite the vast accounting irregularities of both monsters.
If you are looking for "morons", they aren't on Wall Street. Some of those people may be arrogant assholes, but "morons" they aren't. The morons are people, who bought houses they had no way of affording without reading the fine print. It is impossible for any democrat (and I don't mean the political party here, but anybody associating with the Demos rather than Optimates) to blame the "ordinary people", so they blame the bankers and mortgage brokers to help unqualified people get mortgages. That the "victims" who got the mortgages are morons is not explicitly stated...
The vicious irony of it all is that Fannie and Freddi were both created for the same purpose — to give mortgages to people, who were otherwise unqualified to receive them. But that was a Democratic effort (New Deal — woo-hoo!), and we can't blame them in the newspapers, can we?
Humans can — and already do — do all that too. The question is, will a device ever be better at it. Will it have — not zero — fewer false-positives? Will it catch — not all — more terrorists?
In fact, it does not even have to be better. If it is the same or even slightly worse, than a human guard, it may still be worse deploying for its price (human labor is way too expensive) and objectivity, as it will not be blinded by things like
The main? Not sure. One of the main? Definitely. Notice, how the banks like BofA and JPM are sitting pretty — and were even in a position to buy the failing investment banks (Bear Stearns went to JPMorgan earlier this year, Merill Lynch — to BofA last week). They have the same "toxic" securities. But they don't have to account for them in the same way — they are allowed to use certain financial models to come up with a price for the paper the are holding, rather than being forced to price it at today's market prices... In a normal (liquid) market there is little difference. In one spooked (even temporarily) by mortgage-related panic — it is a difference between life and death. Because if nobody wants that paper today (even though its issuer is solvent, and continues to pay dividends, etc.), then, under the "mark to market" requirements, the paper is worth zero and you have no collateral. You lose your credit ratings (automatically). And then, immediately, your counterparties are seizing whatever other collateral you may have put up to guarantee deals, and, whooops, your (ex-)employees are carrying out their stuff out of your (ex-)offices...
Perhaps, the main culprit were Freddie and Fannie. Created to address a "market inefficiency" — no sane banker would risk giving their own money to anyone, who managed (in this blessed country!) to stay too poor to have any money for a downpayment — they grew up into two disasters. Here is one, somewhat partisan, opinion. You may disagree with person, but some of the facts there (the main beneficiaries of their lobbying efforts, and their accounting irregularities ) are indisputable.
These are empty words — and a spin. Here they are restated, spun just as convincingly in the opposite direction: "In fact, the tearing down of the barriers between different financial activities allowed for greater efficiency and the benefits of the economy of scale, thus allowing better-tailored financial products to be offered to clients at lower fees."
And my spin above is closer to truth than yours. Because yours is similar to arguing against air-travel using air-crashes as an example. Yes, an air-plane can crash — in particular, if it touches the ground however slightly during flight. But it can bring passengers much further, much faster, and for much less, than any previously known method of transportation. This is little consolation, when you picking up bodies from the wreckage, but remains an objective truth.
Do you know, what kind of wound a 2000 year-old sword would cause? A good fighter could cut a man across from one side's shoulder to the other side's hip with one blow — especially from horseback...
A corpse pinned to the wall with a spear is quite horrific too, especially to a 21st century westerner (who has not been to a war).
War is hell, whether you use primitive, or sophisticated weapons...
You argue that point with Putin, Al Qaeda, and Ahmadinejad. I'll watch.
At various points all of the other parts of the Federation were volunteered into RSFSR — except for Chechnya, which was brought in at (explicit) gun-point.
All countries have done it in the past, but nobody did it in the past so recent.
Oh, and that "ethnic cleansing" business, you claimed took place in Chechnya, sorry, I don't buy it. I have one account (from a granddaughter of a Grozny resident), that it was all fabrication, and no other evidence of it, except Russia's official propaganda. Of course, after their strategic bombers had a go at the city, there was no evidence any side could collect...
Most interesting...
It was not — not even then — if the central government's fiat was enough to dissolve it. And I don't mean the executive government, as you assumed earlier. You are right, that Putinista-stuffed legislature approved the necessary Constitutional changes — but it was still done in Moscow, by the central legislature, and without nation-wide referendum or anything.
It was not. Having grown up in the USSR, I'm pretty sure, I know that evil (and its core) better than a westerner, no matter how educated, ever will. It was not just silly to compare their sham rules and procedures (which also change year-to-year to suit the strongman in charge) to the US' long-standing traditions, it is also insulting...
If anything, the speed and the "non-eventness" of the dissolution of the Russian "Federation" is evidence, that dismissing them as a "comparative entity" was perfectly justified.
"Just because you are paranoid, does not mean, they are not after you."
You missed my hint viz Internet, didn't you... There is nothing wrong with trading in CDOs, and they (and Bush) can not be blamed for the problems any more, than the Internet (and Clinton) can be blamed for the dot-com bust of 2000.
You are right about the regulation, though — there is a problem there, but the kind you'd think. Too much of it was archaic. The accounting rules governing investment banks require them to price their assets, no matter how far from maturity "to market"... This means, that if today nobody wants the securities you are holding (such as, for example, anything to do with mortgages, even if no more than 10% of them are "bad"), you are worth nothing, even if they aren't maturing in many years, by which time they will, most likely, regain their value, etc. Other financial institutions (such as BoFA, which snapped up Merryll Lynch last weekend at a firesale price) are accounting for the same things differently and thus appear much healthier.
This is why the last two remaining investment banks got reclassified in a hurry today. Too bad, this was not allowed to Bear Sterns and Lehman earlier this year. Both would've still be standing happily today.
Do research, what this means, before answering...
Wrongly...
As were Novgorod and Tver. No. Russia's current subjects have all "volunteerly" joined into the (new) Federation in the early 1990ies. Except Chechnya, which declared independence, and was brought back under heel as a result of two wars — both waged decades after UN renounced "right of conquest".
As a matter of fact, Texas joined the Union on condition of being allowed to leave. It still has that right — unlike other States. Puerto Rico's special terms are nice too.
Your attempts to portray Russia as the same (or, perhaps, only slightly worse) than US are quite ridiculous. There is nothing ugly, that US have done in the last 150 years, that Russia (or China, another big offender) have not trumped with gusto within the last 60.
If this is how you determine "freakiness", then your country is only a little bit less "freaky". 18 vs 21? Not much different...
Because, if you accept the validity of government limiting alcohol (or any other behavior) to people under any age, the actual figure is just a matter of quantity, not quality...
Yes, that wonderful excuse covers anything — from Riga to Grozny to Tskhinvali...
That was during a civil war — in the middle of the 19th century. Hardly justifies Russia's barbarity at the end of th 20th... Also, the US was fighting the States, which previously agreed to an irrevocable Union — US Constitution has no provisions for a split-up. Chechnya, on the other hand, has never joined the Russian Federation — unlike Tatarstan, or anyone else.
And because the dismantling was possible by the central government fiat alone, the political system can not be a positive example to anyone...
Whenever there is a shortage of any resource — such as bandwidth — somebody is going to receive less of the resource, than they would like. It is inevitable. So, somehow a decision has to be made on how to divide, what's available. Other things being equal, giving a higher priority to one's own customers can hardly be illegal in such situations.
But I'd like to see your evidence of Comcast hurting other providers' VoIP traffic in favor of Comcast's own p2p downloads... Just to stay on-topic...
... that Obama wins.
Right, especially Chechnya...
Anyway, it is all gone now — the President is now even appointing governors over there.
I don't know much about the political systems of the other countries on your list, but I will be the first to sign up in the militia against anybody, who would try to impose Russia's political system here.
Russians themselves joke, that God created their country, to show other peoples, what not to do.
They are already fair and reasonable. What's the good reason to also have them standardized? What happened to "celebrate diversity"? Oh, don't answer here — just start your Constitutional Amendment campaign...
Actually, quite the opposite — there was no catastrophe of any kind. The Constitution prevailed — thanks to a wise decision of the Supreme Court, who reasserted each State's right to vote for President in any way they please (barring certain explicitly banned practices). The whole turmoil was in the press — law and order was not even challenged on the ground, there is more "turmoil" during a WTO meeting.
Yes, including today.
You can "trace the origins" of the "dot-com bust" to Al Gore's inventing Internet. Do you now hate him too — and want the Internet to be either regulated or banned altogether?
Causing? Wow! That's pretty cool. Except, the first Collaterized Debt Obligations were issued in 1987, so no, it can't be explained by something, that happened in 1999. But don't let this fact stop you from parroting somebody else's "analysis".
No, actually, I did not. Not in this thread. Not that there is anything wrong with either of those two gentlemen or their association, however close — but let's not change the subject...
As I already said, this is done to protect AIG's customers — not the management, and not the shareholders.
No, it is not. AIG will be broken up and pieces of it sold off. Kind of like in bankruptcy proceedings, except it will not be quite as rushed, and it will not be at "firesale" prices — so that the insurance claims can continue to be honored, etc.
You try argue that with people, who claim, Republicans "steal" elections by printing confusing ballots.
That would disenfranchise the voters, who can't sign their name. There are ought to be more of them, than of those, who simply get confused by the ballots...
That would require an Amendment to the Constitution. For no good reason.
Few other countries (civilized or otherwise) are as big as to be a Union of states.
Maybe, you need a little more knowledge of Economics in general and this particular sorry situation in particular, uhm? The failure of this company would've left millions of people uninsured, and hundreds of thousands unemployed. Taking it over, breaking it up, and selling the pieces at normal, rather than bankruptcy (a.k.a. firesale) prices seems like a reasonable thing to do.
I just wish, they would've done better to Lehman Brothers — instead they completely botched trying to sell it to Barkley's and BoFA. Instead of asking the would-be suitors to come up with bids in secrecy, the Feds allowed reps of both to be present in the room at once. Both balked... As a result, Barkley's is now taking over the juiciest pieces of Lehman's assets at a firesale price without assuming any of the liabilities — because Lehman is bankrupt as of Monday. Had they not known (from sitting at the same meeting, that Fed organized), that BoFA is not interested, they might've bet a fair price last Sunday...
Speaking of 1999... Were you as angry at Bill Clinton, when NASDAQ halved in 2000, as dot-com bust, as you are at Bush today?
Of course, it does — the whole purpose of Fannie/Freddie creation (and the not-so-implicit-anymore-is-it government backing for them) was to alleviate a so called "market failure" — to lend to the poor.
Bush should've demolished those things in 2002-03 (and privatized Social Security). Unfortunately, Al Qaeda preempted it all, and all he was able to accomplish was tax cuts and education reform.
Maybe, McCain will do it, if we are lucky...
You made a bad bet and ended up overexposed...
Were you as angry at Gore-Clinton, when your dot-com stocks turned to bust in 2000? You would've been wrong then too. The president has somewhere between nothing and very little to do with any of this — in a free Capitalist society.