But first of all, do we want the federal government having that kind of control over the states?
This is nothing new. The Fed collects the money from the states and then uses it as a stick in order to push their will back onto the states. Sure, it was the states money to begin with, but the only way to get it back is to comply with whatever the Fed wants the state to do.
IMHO, the likely upcoming of legalization in CA will be very fun to watch. Federal agents can (and most likely will) keep arresting those who are using pot, while it's completely legal in the state. Hopefully more and more states will start giving the finger to the Fed and do what's in their best interest and not some random law passed from on high in DC.
You're making the assumption that a global correction was a) bad and b) not warranted. I'm saying that a global correction was needed.
Look at where house prices were. At completely unsustainable levels. The only way to fix them were to have them collapse.
Look at where commodity prices were. Again, unsustainable levels.
The correction was worldwide and needed to happen. It sucks, but that's what happens when you let nearly free money flow through the system for so long. It's politically unpopular to slow the growth, but that's what should have happened years ago. Eventually the hangover must come, but like a real hangover it will eventually pass.
So why was it sold that we needed something right now that would spend lots of money right now? Heck even today the administration is saying how much the stimulus has helped by creating or savings lots of jobs.
As a side note, did you notice how originally the rhetoric said the stimulus would create jobs and then later it subtly changed to create or save. I'm guessing soon it will simply say it's saving jobs since the unemployment rate is still climbing even though the velocity is slowing.
And yes, it's a failure because it wasn't needed. All we did was allow the government to take a crisis and use it substantially grow the government. Bush (and the rest of the government) did the same thing with 9/11 and the Patriot Act. "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste!"
Um, how much did we just spend?! You're also assuming that every bank would have failed which is very very far from the truth. Many many small regional banks are just fine. Many of the big banks were fine during the mess also. The investment banks are the ones that would have failed and gone away.
I'm not sure how people don't see this was friends at the top helping friends at the top. They let investment bank after investment bank fail (or forced absorption) until the sharks started circling GS. Woah, you don't mess with GS because frankly they own the government. That day trading rule changes were put in place, discount window rules were changed, money was handed out all in order to save our most precious GS. And now GS is still enjoying access to free cash from the fed discount window at near 0% interest. Brilliant!
BTW, don't look behind the curtain where a large majority of the AIG bailout went. Want to take a guess? Yeah, paid off GS at 100% on the dollar to tune of about $15B iirc. Everyone else who had AIG contracts for similar securities lost their shirts, not GS though. Nope, nothing to see here, move along and keep thinking the bailout was for the common man on main street.
The bailout was completely different than the stimulus. The bailout was sold as stopping the 'systemic risks' that I call BS. The bailout was to protect all the rich political donors on both sides of the isle at the expense of the American tax payer.
The stimulus that was proposed to save jobs has barely even started to get spent yet so how is it doing anything? If we had just done nothing things would have slowed and then bottomed and eventually started up again. Don't buy into the fear that was used to get the average person behind spending the amount of money that has now been promised for years into the future.
Oh and as someone mentioned above, real unemployment is closer to 20%. The government has a habit of changing formulas when they don't like the data they are seeing. Inflation for example removes things like energy costs. That wasn't expensive at all in the last few years was it??
Doing the same thing that other people who were laid off, looking for work. The particular people in question make a lot of money. I would hope that they put some away in case of a crash. Also, in terms of people these companies were not that big. They had a lot of wealth in them, but were not the largest employers. I do agree that NYC would have been hurt a lot more though than other cities.
Explain to me how not doing the bailout would have destroyed mainstreet? Oh, a bank fails? FDIC is there for that. Loans get harder to get? Happened anyways. Unemployment goes up? Happened too. The only thing the bailouts did was keep the rich guys who gambled and lost....still rich.
This also ignores the hundreds of small local and regional banks that are absolutely fine because they properly managed their risks.
Actually he only takes his salary as a percentage of profits. If no money is made he doesn't get paid. He's made a pretty steady return for years. When things cratered he lost very little for his clients (down ~1%).
The beauty of the algos running the show is that they can trade out instantly when things appear to be going bad. The FX is also a 24/7 market so you can always get out. BTW, anyone who does currency trading is using large amount of leverage because the moves are generally very small (called PIPs).
It's hard, but not as expensive as you think. I have a acquaintance who developed an algorithm in grad school to trade currencies. His algo wasn't the microsecond type, but he never keeps a position longer than an hour or two. He convinced a few people to invest in him and now he runs a small company controlling about 1B in leveraged currency. Keep in mind that the FX will let you leverage up to 100:1 so the amount of real money his company was given was not that much to start.
All you needed to stop were the bailouts. The behavior at that point would have corrected itself since many of these companies would have been out of business.
So what if they take your idea. That means they still have to do the work to execute it. Chances are you're the only one who will have the passion to pour yourself into an idea to actually execute it. This is a funny take on it.
Or just look at this quote by (and is completely true in my experience):
Don`t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you`ll have to ram them down people`s throats. --Howard Aiken
Except for the first 2 intro CS courses my school didn't teach any languages. The classes were all about concepts. The teacher would show up and say we were using X language, maybe give some pointers to websites about the language, and then expect the students to figure out the language aspect on their own.
I took an OpenGL graphics programming elective and the teacher didn't care what language we used as long as it had OGL bindings and a linux compiler/interpreter.
Also, aesthetics should have nothing--at most very, very little--to do with power generation. I think wind turbine farms are beautiful and a tribute to human ingenuity and progress.
I agree and wonder why people fight them so much when there is talk about putting them offshore. It's not like anyone wants to put a wind turbine 100 yards off the beach, but actually put them offshore so you would simply see them in the distance. I think they would look very cool, and their pilings would provide additional fish habitat.
He definitely is not a fool, he just got caught by the economic slowdown like everyone else. What people are missing is that the drop in oil prices means that the companies who get oil to the end products are cutting back on their growth. When the economy turns around (and it will), there will most likely be a large amount of pent up demand for oil based products. I'm expecting high oil/gas prices again by the end of 2010, and T. Boone will like a genius if he can get the wind mills built and installed on the cheap during the recession.
Depends if you mean that chess is simply knowing where each piece can legally move or if skill in chess is knowing when and where to move those pieces around the board.
Goldman Sachs IS the US government. It was made perfectly clear when other investment banks were failing. When the sharks started circling GS, the government stepped in and shut it down.
Well, the same can be said for alcohol, let's ban that. Wait, we tried? And failed? Damn.
Are you sure they failed? Alcohol laws continue to get stricter and stricter. The prohibitionists realized that you can't take it all away overnight, instead you have to slowly take it away.
I bet you weren't really eating as much as you thought. Metabolism does differ some between people, but most people are near the average. Daily activities can also make a difference.
I agree with about the nutrients part. If you are very lean more likely than not you are probably missing certain critical nutrients. Most people don't follow a well balanced diet so they end up having to eat more to get the same nutritional value.
They could have made a better bill by slapping tariffs on China and India until they join a global cap and trade system.
NEVER will happen. China has the US by the balls. The day the US attempts anything close to what you say here is the day China quits buying t-bills and the US economy collapses.
You're forgetting what was going on because of your list and why the politicians (from Clinton to Bush) were so reluctant to do anything to stop it. The securitization process, rightly or wrongly, allowed more people than ever to buy a house. To step out in front of the gravy train would have been political suicide. Whoever attempted to stop it would have been demonized as hating the poor. They also would have lost their lobby money from the housing industry. A double whammy.
Slashdot Mirror
This is nothing new. The Fed collects the money from the states and then uses it as a stick in order to push their will back onto the states. Sure, it was the states money to begin with, but the only way to get it back is to comply with whatever the Fed wants the state to do.
IMHO, the likely upcoming of legalization in CA will be very fun to watch. Federal agents can (and most likely will) keep arresting those who are using pot, while it's completely legal in the state. Hopefully more and more states will start giving the finger to the Fed and do what's in their best interest and not some random law passed from on high in DC.
There are the type of people you describe on both sides of the climate debate.
You're making the assumption that a global correction was a) bad and b) not warranted. I'm saying that a global correction was needed.
Look at where house prices were. At completely unsustainable levels. The only way to fix them were to have them collapse.
Look at where commodity prices were. Again, unsustainable levels.
The correction was worldwide and needed to happen. It sucks, but that's what happens when you let nearly free money flow through the system for so long. It's politically unpopular to slow the growth, but that's what should have happened years ago. Eventually the hangover must come, but like a real hangover it will eventually pass.
So why was it sold that we needed something right now that would spend lots of money right now? Heck even today the administration is saying how much the stimulus has helped by creating or savings lots of jobs.
As a side note, did you notice how originally the rhetoric said the stimulus would create jobs and then later it subtly changed to create or save. I'm guessing soon it will simply say it's saving jobs since the unemployment rate is still climbing even though the velocity is slowing.
And yes, it's a failure because it wasn't needed. All we did was allow the government to take a crisis and use it substantially grow the government. Bush (and the rest of the government) did the same thing with 9/11 and the Patriot Act. "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste!"
Um, how much did we just spend?! You're also assuming that every bank would have failed which is very very far from the truth. Many many small regional banks are just fine. Many of the big banks were fine during the mess also. The investment banks are the ones that would have failed and gone away.
I'm not sure how people don't see this was friends at the top helping friends at the top. They let investment bank after investment bank fail (or forced absorption) until the sharks started circling GS. Woah, you don't mess with GS because frankly they own the government. That day trading rule changes were put in place, discount window rules were changed, money was handed out all in order to save our most precious GS. And now GS is still enjoying access to free cash from the fed discount window at near 0% interest. Brilliant!
BTW, don't look behind the curtain where a large majority of the AIG bailout went. Want to take a guess? Yeah, paid off GS at 100% on the dollar to tune of about $15B iirc. Everyone else who had AIG contracts for similar securities lost their shirts, not GS though. Nope, nothing to see here, move along and keep thinking the bailout was for the common man on main street.
The bailout was completely different than the stimulus. The bailout was sold as stopping the 'systemic risks' that I call BS. The bailout was to protect all the rich political donors on both sides of the isle at the expense of the American tax payer.
The stimulus that was proposed to save jobs has barely even started to get spent yet so how is it doing anything? If we had just done nothing things would have slowed and then bottomed and eventually started up again. Don't buy into the fear that was used to get the average person behind spending the amount of money that has now been promised for years into the future.
Oh and as someone mentioned above, real unemployment is closer to 20%. The government has a habit of changing formulas when they don't like the data they are seeing. Inflation for example removes things like energy costs. That wasn't expensive at all in the last few years was it??
Doing the same thing that other people who were laid off, looking for work. The particular people in question make a lot of money. I would hope that they put some away in case of a crash. Also, in terms of people these companies were not that big. They had a lot of wealth in them, but were not the largest employers. I do agree that NYC would have been hurt a lot more though than other cities.
Explain to me how not doing the bailout would have destroyed mainstreet? Oh, a bank fails? FDIC is there for that. Loans get harder to get? Happened anyways. Unemployment goes up? Happened too. The only thing the bailouts did was keep the rich guys who gambled and lost....still rich.
This also ignores the hundreds of small local and regional banks that are absolutely fine because they properly managed their risks.
Actually he only takes his salary as a percentage of profits. If no money is made he doesn't get paid. He's made a pretty steady return for years. When things cratered he lost very little for his clients (down ~1%).
The beauty of the algos running the show is that they can trade out instantly when things appear to be going bad. The FX is also a 24/7 market so you can always get out. BTW, anyone who does currency trading is using large amount of leverage because the moves are generally very small (called PIPs).
You should check out the NYSE weekly reports on program trading. Some weeks software is making 50% or more of the trades that occur.
It's hard, but not as expensive as you think. I have a acquaintance who developed an algorithm in grad school to trade currencies. His algo wasn't the microsecond type, but he never keeps a position longer than an hour or two. He convinced a few people to invest in him and now he runs a small company controlling about 1B in leveraged currency. Keep in mind that the FX will let you leverage up to 100:1 so the amount of real money his company was given was not that much to start.
All you needed to stop were the bailouts. The behavior at that point would have corrected itself since many of these companies would have been out of business.
Thank you for the best post ever on this subject. In fact they should remove all other posts except yours and close this thread.
So what if they take your idea. That means they still have to do the work to execute it. Chances are you're the only one who will have the passion to pour yourself into an idea to actually execute it. This is a funny take on it.
Or just look at this quote by (and is completely true in my experience):
I agree!
Except for the first 2 intro CS courses my school didn't teach any languages. The classes were all about concepts. The teacher would show up and say we were using X language, maybe give some pointers to websites about the language, and then expect the students to figure out the language aspect on their own.
I took an OpenGL graphics programming elective and the teacher didn't care what language we used as long as it had OGL bindings and a linux compiler/interpreter.
Already happening, although still expensive.
I agree and wonder why people fight them so much when there is talk about putting them offshore. It's not like anyone wants to put a wind turbine 100 yards off the beach, but actually put them offshore so you would simply see them in the distance. I think they would look very cool, and their pilings would provide additional fish habitat.
He definitely is not a fool, he just got caught by the economic slowdown like everyone else. What people are missing is that the drop in oil prices means that the companies who get oil to the end products are cutting back on their growth. When the economy turns around (and it will), there will most likely be a large amount of pent up demand for oil based products. I'm expecting high oil/gas prices again by the end of 2010, and T. Boone will like a genius if he can get the wind mills built and installed on the cheap during the recession.
Depends if you mean that chess is simply knowing where each piece can legally move or if skill in chess is knowing when and where to move those pieces around the board.
Goldman Sachs IS the US government. It was made perfectly clear when other investment banks were failing. When the sharks started circling GS, the government stepped in and shut it down.
Are you sure they failed? Alcohol laws continue to get stricter and stricter. The prohibitionists realized that you can't take it all away overnight, instead you have to slowly take it away.
I bet you weren't really eating as much as you thought. Metabolism does differ some between people, but most people are near the average. Daily activities can also make a difference.
Broccoli rocks! It's like natures multi-vitamin :)
I agree with about the nutrients part. If you are very lean more likely than not you are probably missing certain critical nutrients. Most people don't follow a well balanced diet so they end up having to eat more to get the same nutritional value.
NEVER will happen. China has the US by the balls. The day the US attempts anything close to what you say here is the day China quits buying t-bills and the US economy collapses.
You're forgetting what was going on because of your list and why the politicians (from Clinton to Bush) were so reluctant to do anything to stop it. The securitization process, rightly or wrongly, allowed more people than ever to buy a house. To step out in front of the gravy train would have been political suicide. Whoever attempted to stop it would have been demonized as hating the poor. They also would have lost their lobby money from the housing industry. A double whammy.