The central bank was lending at such a low rate that it was only rational, until proven otherwise, to keep on taking as much debt as possible at massive profits.
But those "profits" were all based on the (massive) overvaluation of assets. Enron squared.
Thanks to the housing market, which was artifically propped up by the government enacting legislation which greatly reduced lending standards and increased the number of people who would qualify for the debt for a house
If you're referring to the conservative whipping boy, the CRA, that's not the case:
Federal Reserve Board data show that: * More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions. * Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year. * Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics.
* More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending * Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year. * Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics.
Yes, see the above.
No, you're lying. See above.
That is not the governments fault, but on the other hand, that had nothing to do with the current economic crisis.
Astronomical pay has everything to do with the crisis, because you give executives an enormous incentive to take enormous risk. What would you rather do: make a couple million a year with steady growth, or make $25 million a year by taking crazy risks? Even if your company goes up in 4 years, that's $100 million in your pocket.
Its something I dont understand. Blaming companies when you should be blaming the central bank and the government, for creating artifical credit bubbles and the resulting mania thereafter.
Yes, because it's the government's fault that investment firms took on 1:60 asset/liability ratios, inflated a few hundred billion in mortgages into a $45-$60 trillion bubble, and paid top executives vast sums of money even as they drove their companies into the ground.
Your argument doesn't quite add up. First you say we shouldn't be blaming the government because they aren't at fault, then you say how you'd fix it if you were the government.
Right, in the same way that expecting help from the government in dealing with an earthquake or a forest fire means blaming the government for the earthquake or forest fire.
Except of course that your source is delusional Republican crap from stem to stern, a right wing fantasy and nothing more. If giving CEO's astronomical pay is such a great idea, where the hell is our astronomical economy? Why is worker productivity far higher than it was in the 50's, 60's and 70's, yet middle class wages are either stagnant or falling?
As is usually the case, take the conservative line, flip it 180 degrees, and you have a storyline that has some relationship to the facts.
Anyway, my point stands: If you're blaming Reagan (rightly or wrongly, it doesn't really matter for the basis of this point) for the present state of the country, I have little doubt you'll be able to find cause to continue blaming Bush for our problems well into and beyond the Obama administration.
Of course we will, it's called reality. Low taxes on the rich and high defense spending are blowing a hole in our treasury, same as they were in the 80's. Iraq will still be a mess after Obama leaves office. We'll still be paying off Bush's debt after Obama's successor's successor leaves office.
Stop drinking the Kool Aid, conservative has been proven to be a failure at every level on every issue.
If the budget they proposed and passed showed any sort of restraint in expenditures, you might have a point.
The only problem with the budget is that it doesn't have enough stimulus. You need a serious plug for an economy that's losing 600,000 jobs a month, and $800 billion just doesn't cut it. Economists say we need something more in the range of $2-3 trillion.
Yes, that's going to blow up the deficit, but the threat of Great Depression 2.0 is far worse. And yes, we'll need to pay for this, and there is a simple solution: bring back the 91% marginal tax rate, apply it to everything over $4 million a year, and leave it in place until our national debt is paid off.
Exactly how long is Obama planning to keep blaming everything on Bush
He hasn't even been in office for three months yet, Sherlock. So, yes, he can still blame Bush for a lot of things.
Absolutely.
Prove it. All you've done is try to turn around problems caused by Bush to whine about Obama some more, like that crazy bitch ex-girlfriend from high school where everything is someone else's fault.
If GP is still blaming the economic problems on REAGAN he sure as hell can keep blaming them on Bush for a while longer.
Because our current problems are Reaganomics coming home to roost. Reagan slashed the income tax rate on the rich while drastically increasing defense spending in peacetime, resulting in an explosion of the deficit and the national debt. And it was Reagan who ushered in deregulation for the sake of deregulation, famously declaring "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"
You seem to think 'income inequality' in and of itself is a problem. I disagree.
Because either you're ignorant, a tool, or an ignorant tool. Severe income inequality leads to food rights, revolutions, and destruction of societies. Just ask the French and the Russians. The last time we had income inequalities this bad in the United States was right before the Great Depression. How well did that work out for us again?
Would you also argue that an actor making 500 times as much as the carpenter who built the set for the latest summer blockbuster is wrong?
Yup. Bring back the 91% marginal tax rates baby, on anything over $4 million a year.
That's really how I see CEO's these days... they're the pretty face that attracts investors because the investors believe that something is extraordinary about them. Sometimes there is... Sometimes not.
The problem is that we haven't had an astronomical economy to match astronomical CEO pay. In fact, astronomical pay is a detriment to a company, because there's a high incentive to take risks. Who cares if the company you're running goes under in 3 years, if you're making $40 million a year in the process?
So you mean to tell me that things change? Holy I-Ching Batman!
Yes, Sherlock, and with technology, they're supposed to improve, not get worse.
The providers are becoming more greedy and looking for excuses to charge more money for equipment they aren't bothering to update
Fixed that for you.
Being asked to pay $150 a month for truly unlimited internet access isn't that bad of a deal.
Sure, if you think paying $1500 for a Pentium 3 desktop in 2009 "isn't that bad of a deal".
I'm only thirty, but I'm already having an old man moment here. I don't think a lot the people posting on Slashdot realize how far technology has come.
No, the problem is you don't realize how far technology has come. Time Warner is talking about overage charges while Japan is talking about Gigabit connections to the home. And before you dig up the "but Amerika is ruuural" argument, that might explain why you can't get good access in Jerkwater, Whyoming, but not in Manhattan or San Francisco. And even that argument is shot down by countries like Sweden, which has better access but has an even lower population density than the United States.
The term "entitlement generation" has reached my ears from time to time
Yes, from Libertarians and elitists who think American workers are being self-centered for wanting at least the same standard of living as their parents, when worker productivity is far higher than it was in the 50's, 60's or 70's.
Where the hell do you people think all of this capability comes from? Do you think that the cable company just plugs in a router, and all of a sudden "the Internet" just works? I wonder how many network engineers Time Warner employees. I wonder how much those guys make a year. How about field techs? Customer service operators? Sales reps? How much do they have to pay in property taxes and electricity to keep their CO's running?
What about the fact that Time Warner keeps making more money from their ISP business, yet is looking for an excuse to raise their rates higher without upgrading their equipment?
"In 2007, TW made $3,730 Million, on high speed data alone, and then had to turn around and spend $164 Million to support the cost of the network. 2007 total profit on high speed data: $3.566 Billion"
"In 2008, TW made $4,159 Million, on high speed data alone, and then had to turn around and spend $146 Million to support the cost of the network. 2008 total profit on high speed data: $4.013 Billion"
"It cost TW 11% less money in 2008, to keep their network running, than in 2007."
what do you call France and Russia for refusing to get involved?
Smart.
They were selling weapons and buying oil under the table
Remind us who is the world's #1 supplier of arms again? Same country that backs military coups and brutal dictatorships as long as they support our "national interests"?
undermining the UN oil-for-food program the entire time.
Wow. Continuing to rag on the oil-for-food program after Haliburton, after KBR, after literally losing billions of dollars in Iraq - shows a serious disconnect with reality. Sort of like all the Republicans who said Clinton's lack of military service was a serious problem when he was running against H.W. Bush, only to have that standard fly out the window when W. Bush was running against McCain, Gore, and Kerry. Or Republicans ragging on Obama's supposed lack of experience, nevermind who was in office at the time.
or worse, kill the terrorists but a hostage panics and runs in the line of fire. (That's still one of my most memorable "Nooooo!" moments from a game.)
Should try the Star Trek: Elite Force AI. Dumb as a sack of hammers. You could try and coax your squad mates to get on a lift with you to descend, but they would just wander around like headless chickens. Then when you got off half a mile below, they'd try and follow you...by jumping off the ledge.
So they were made to be near-indestructible. Which was good for them when they'd walk in front of you while you were trying to fire your personal proton torpedo launcher at some Borg. Not so good for you.
Comcast recently announced a cap, but it's a relatively reasonable quarter terabyte.
You must be in marketing - just say 250 Gigabytes already. Saying "quarter terabyte" is lamer than saying "99 cents" instead of a dollar.
And it's quite easy to do that in a month, with a family that plays a lot of games online and likes to stream HD movies from Netflix.
But what absolutely proves that Time Warner is full of shit is the fact that some Asian and European ISP's supply many times the bandwidth for a fraction of the cost.
Uh, no. The problem isn't with caps. The problem is with caps and ludicrous prices. If it was $10 a month for 5 GB, $30 a month for 30 GB, and $60 a month for unlimited access, people wouldn't have a problem with it. But $150 per month for the executive greed package is nonsense.
It is when CEO's make 500 times as much as his average worker yet doesn't do 500 times as much work.
I'm far below the poverty level, making only a few thousand a year, and rent blah blah elitist bullshit blather blather take your bootstraps and like it blah blah
It seems that the short sample range would belie a certain bias. If one truly wants a graph of the party spending differences irrespective of circumstantial considerations either domestic or foreign, e.g. wars, natural disasters, financial cycles, etc., then one would start at the time when the two parties emerged -- right before the American Civil War.
Cuz the Civil War was a 140 frikkin years ago? Almost 50 years prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve and long before political/regional realignments?
But comparing apples to apples instead of ancient history would too much for a political partisan to handle.
No, ignoring the reasons why we have high deficits is what is wrong.
Bush started with a surplus and went on to blow up the deficit in giving away huge tax cuts for the rich and lying us into a war of choice.
Obama started with the highest deficits in history, and is continuing to blow up the deficit to try and stop the economy from loosing 600,000 a month in the Bush Depression, and keep our entire banking system from collapsing as a result of Republican deregulation.
There's a Democrat in the White House who's in the process of making his own blocks on this chart look like the freakin' Sears Tower in comparison to what's there now.
But why is that the case. Reagan & Bush blew up the budget on huge tax breaks to the rich. Obama is going to blow up the deficit trying to fix the mess left for him by Reagan and Bush.
Big difference.
While he searches for even more ways to increase the National debt by trillions of dollars (that's right -- his bars won't even *fit* on this chart), his Treasury Secretary can't even pay his fucking taxes.
Obama never should have picked Geithner, and the sooner he DTMFA's, the better. But I trust you were as proportionally outraged over the last 8 years of Republican lawbreaking that dwarf's Geithner's tax issues?
And Republicans changed how unemployment is calculated.
Dude! Have you forgotten Obama? We are up to what, $10 trillion more in debt with his plans in the next 5 or 10 years? He's going to at a minimum DOUBLE our national debt, and it might be far far more.
Dude! Have you forgotten who made the mess that Obama was handed? When your economy is steadily loosing 600,000 jobs a month, there is only one entity that can stimulate demand: government. And the only way do that is deficit spending. You have a problem with that, take it up with Republicans and Reaganomics.
The Democrats can no longer cry about the budget. Now that they're in control, it's three or four times as bad.
Except of course the Democrats are deficit spending to try and get us out of the hole Reaganomics has left us in. Obama and the Democratic Congress have to try and fix the financial system that Republican deregulation destroyed, and fix the economy left by Bush that's loosing 600,000 jobs a month.
And yes, they're doing a pretty crappy job so far. Because they are being far too conservative in their approach to fixing the economy.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes it is. It wouldn't be possible without the Fed, government intervention on the mortgage market, and fiat money.
Uh, no. Before the Fed and fiat money, we had boom/busts and financial collapses every 10-20 years.
The Fed isn't the problem. Greed, low taxes and lack of regulation are the problem.
The central bank was lending at such a low rate that it was only rational, until proven otherwise, to keep on taking as much debt as possible at massive profits.
But those "profits" were all based on the (massive) overvaluation of assets. Enron squared.
Thanks to the housing market, which was artifically propped up by the government enacting legislation which greatly reduced lending standards and increased the number of people who would qualify for the debt for a house
If you're referring to the conservative whipping boy, the CRA, that's not the case:
Yes, it is. Think Fannie Mae and politicians going "you gotsta lend money to my poor constituents, and I care not if they can repay or no"
I suppose you could say that, if you were a wingnut or a habitual liar, but then I repeat myself.
Yes, see the above.
No, you're lying. See above.
That is not the governments fault, but on the other hand, that had nothing to do with the current economic crisis.
Astronomical pay has everything to do with the crisis, because you give executives an enormous incentive to take enormous risk. What would you rather do: make a couple million a year with steady growth, or make $25 million a year by taking crazy risks? Even if your company goes up in 4 years, that's $100 million in your pocket.
Its something I dont understand. Blaming companies when you should be blaming the central bank and the government, for creating artifical credit bubbles and the resulting mania thereafter.
Yes, because it's the government's fault that investment firms took on 1:60 asset/liability ratios, inflated a few hundred billion in mortgages into a $45-$60 trillion bubble, and paid top executives vast sums of money even as they drove their companies into the ground.
Your argument doesn't quite add up. First you say we shouldn't be blaming the government because they aren't at fault, then you say how you'd fix it if you were the government.
Right, in the same way that expecting help from the government in dealing with an earthquake or a forest fire means blaming the government for the earthquake or forest fire.
Your argument is Not Scottish.
Except of course that your source is delusional Republican crap from stem to stern, a right wing fantasy and nothing more. If giving CEO's astronomical pay is such a great idea, where the hell is our astronomical economy? Why is worker productivity far higher than it was in the 50's, 60's and 70's, yet middle class wages are either stagnant or falling?
As is usually the case, take the conservative line, flip it 180 degrees, and you have a storyline that has some relationship to the facts.
Anyway, my point stands: If you're blaming Reagan (rightly or wrongly, it doesn't really matter for the basis of this point) for the present state of the country, I have little doubt you'll be able to find cause to continue blaming Bush for our problems well into and beyond the Obama administration.
Of course we will, it's called reality. Low taxes on the rich and high defense spending are blowing a hole in our treasury, same as they were in the 80's. Iraq will still be a mess after Obama leaves office. We'll still be paying off Bush's debt after Obama's successor's successor leaves office.
Stop drinking the Kool Aid, conservative has been proven to be a failure at every level on every issue.
If the budget they proposed and passed showed any sort of restraint in expenditures, you might have a point.
The only problem with the budget is that it doesn't have enough stimulus. You need a serious plug for an economy that's losing 600,000 jobs a month, and $800 billion just doesn't cut it. Economists say we need something more in the range of $2-3 trillion .
Yes, that's going to blow up the deficit, but the threat of Great Depression 2.0 is far worse. And yes, we'll need to pay for this, and there is a simple solution: bring back the 91% marginal tax rate, apply it to everything over $4 million a year, and leave it in place until our national debt is paid off.
Exactly how long is Obama planning to keep blaming everything on Bush
He hasn't even been in office for three months yet, Sherlock. So, yes, he can still blame Bush for a lot of things.
Absolutely.
Prove it. All you've done is try to turn around problems caused by Bush to whine about Obama some more, like that crazy bitch ex-girlfriend from high school where everything is someone else's fault.
If GP is still blaming the economic problems on REAGAN he sure as hell can keep blaming them on Bush for a while longer.
Because our current problems are Reaganomics coming home to roost. Reagan slashed the income tax rate on the rich while drastically increasing defense spending in peacetime, resulting in an explosion of the deficit and the national debt. And it was Reagan who ushered in deregulation for the sake of deregulation, famously declaring "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"
You seem to think 'income inequality' in and of itself is a problem. I disagree.
Because either you're ignorant, a tool, or an ignorant tool. Severe income inequality leads to food rights, revolutions, and destruction of societies. Just ask the French and the Russians. The last time we had income inequalities this bad in the United States was right before the Great Depression. How well did that work out for us again?
Would you also argue that an actor making 500 times as much as the carpenter who built the set for the latest summer blockbuster is wrong?
Yup. Bring back the 91% marginal tax rates baby, on anything over $4 million a year.
That's really how I see CEO's these days... they're the pretty face that attracts investors because the investors believe that something is extraordinary about them. Sometimes there is... Sometimes not.
The problem is that we haven't had an astronomical economy to match astronomical CEO pay. In fact, astronomical pay is a detriment to a company, because there's a high incentive to take risks. Who cares if the company you're running goes under in 3 years, if you're making $40 million a year in the process?
So you mean to tell me that things change? Holy I-Ching Batman!
Yes, Sherlock, and with technology, they're supposed to improve, not get worse.
The providers are becoming more greedy and looking for excuses to charge more money for equipment they aren't bothering to update
Fixed that for you.
Being asked to pay $150 a month for truly unlimited internet access isn't that bad of a deal.
Sure, if you think paying $1500 for a Pentium 3 desktop in 2009 "isn't that bad of a deal".
I'm only thirty, but I'm already having an old man moment here. I don't think a lot the people posting on Slashdot realize how far technology has come.
No, the problem is you don't realize how far technology has come. Time Warner is talking about overage charges while Japan is talking about Gigabit connections to the home. And before you dig up the "but Amerika is ruuural" argument, that might explain why you can't get good access in Jerkwater, Whyoming, but not in Manhattan or San Francisco. And even that argument is shot down by countries like Sweden, which has better access but has an even lower population density than the United States.
The term "entitlement generation" has reached my ears from time to time
Yes, from Libertarians and elitists who think American workers are being self-centered for wanting at least the same standard of living as their parents, when worker productivity is far higher than it was in the 50's, 60's or 70's.
Where the hell do you people think all of this capability comes from? Do you think that the cable company just plugs in a router, and all of a sudden "the Internet" just works? I wonder how many network engineers Time Warner employees. I wonder how much those guys make a year. How about field techs? Customer service operators? Sales reps? How much do they have to pay in property taxes and electricity to keep their CO's running?
What about the fact that Time Warner keeps making more money from their ISP business, yet is looking for an excuse to raise their rates higher without upgrading their equipment?
what do you call France and Russia for refusing to get involved?
Smart.
They were selling weapons and buying oil under the table
Remind us who is the world's #1 supplier of arms again? Same country that backs military coups and brutal dictatorships as long as they support our "national interests"?
undermining the UN oil-for-food program the entire time.
Wow. Continuing to rag on the oil-for-food program after Haliburton, after KBR, after literally losing billions of dollars in Iraq - shows a serious disconnect with reality. Sort of like all the Republicans who said Clinton's lack of military service was a serious problem when he was running against H.W. Bush, only to have that standard fly out the window when W. Bush was running against McCain, Gore, and Kerry. Or Republicans ragging on Obama's supposed lack of experience, nevermind who was in office at the time.
or worse, kill the terrorists but a hostage panics and runs in the line of fire. (That's still one of my most memorable "Nooooo!" moments from a game.)
Should try the Star Trek: Elite Force AI. Dumb as a sack of hammers. You could try and coax your squad mates to get on a lift with you to descend, but they would just wander around like headless chickens. Then when you got off half a mile below, they'd try and follow you...by jumping off the ledge.
So they were made to be near-indestructible. Which was good for them when they'd walk in front of you while you were trying to fire your personal proton torpedo launcher at some Borg. Not so good for you.
Do you usually ask stupid, petulant questions when you don't know much about a topic?
How do you know? Is it because this is what you want to believe?
How about the fact that Asians and Europeans have multiple times as much bandwidth as the U.S. consumer for a fraction of the cost?
Comcast recently announced a cap, but it's a relatively reasonable quarter terabyte.
You must be in marketing - just say 250 Gigabytes already. Saying "quarter terabyte" is lamer than saying "99 cents" instead of a dollar.
And it's quite easy to do that in a month, with a family that plays a lot of games online and likes to stream HD movies from Netflix.
But what absolutely proves that Time Warner is full of shit is the fact that some Asian and European ISP's supply many times the bandwidth for a fraction of the cost.
Uh, no. The problem isn't with caps. The problem is with caps and ludicrous prices. If it was $10 a month for 5 GB, $30 a month for 30 GB, and $60 a month for unlimited access, people wouldn't have a problem with it. But $150 per month for the executive greed package is nonsense.
Getting the obvious point, what a novel concept.
WHOOOSH.
Inequality is not an evil
It is when CEO's make 500 times as much as his average worker yet doesn't do 500 times as much work.
I'm far below the poverty level, making only a few thousand a year, and rent blah blah elitist bullshit blather blather take your bootstraps and like it blah blah
I'm sure the Old Soviet Union had a fantastic Gini Index. They only had to murder millions of their own people to get it.
Apples to batshit irrelevant oranges. But good job trying to deflect the point that income inequality goes way way up under Republicans.
It seems that the short sample range would belie a certain bias. If one truly wants a graph of the party spending differences irrespective of circumstantial considerations either domestic or foreign, e.g. wars, natural disasters, financial cycles, etc., then one would start at the time when the two parties emerged -- right before the American Civil War.
Cuz the Civil War was a 140 frikkin years ago? Almost 50 years prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve and long before political/regional realignments?
But comparing apples to apples instead of ancient history would too much for a political partisan to handle.
No, ignoring the reasons why we have high deficits is what is wrong.
Bush started with a surplus and went on to blow up the deficit in giving away huge tax cuts for the rich and lying us into a war of choice.
Obama started with the highest deficits in history, and is continuing to blow up the deficit to try and stop the economy from loosing 600,000 a month in the Bush Depression, and keep our entire banking system from collapsing as a result of Republican deregulation.
There's a Democrat in the White House who's in the process of making his own blocks on this chart look like the freakin' Sears Tower in comparison to what's there now.
But why is that the case. Reagan & Bush blew up the budget on huge tax breaks to the rich. Obama is going to blow up the deficit trying to fix the mess left for him by Reagan and Bush.
Big difference.
While he searches for even more ways to increase the National debt by trillions of dollars (that's right -- his bars won't even *fit* on this chart), his Treasury Secretary can't even pay his fucking taxes.
Obama never should have picked Geithner, and the sooner he DTMFA's, the better. But I trust you were as proportionally outraged over the last 8 years of Republican lawbreaking that dwarf's Geithner's tax issues?
Clinton changed how the deficit was calculated.
And Republicans changed how unemployment is calculated.
Dude! Have you forgotten Obama? We are up to what, $10 trillion more in debt with his plans in the next 5 or 10 years? He's going to at a minimum DOUBLE our national debt, and it might be far far more.
Dude! Have you forgotten who made the mess that Obama was handed? When your economy is steadily loosing 600,000 jobs a month, there is only one entity that can stimulate demand: government. And the only way do that is deficit spending. You have a problem with that, take it up with Republicans and Reaganomics.
The Democrats can no longer cry about the budget. Now that they're in control, it's three or four times as bad.
Except of course the Democrats are deficit spending to try and get us out of the hole Reaganomics has left us in. Obama and the Democratic Congress have to try and fix the financial system that Republican deregulation destroyed, and fix the economy left by Bush that's loosing 600,000 jobs a month.
And yes, they're doing a pretty crappy job so far. Because they are being far too conservative in their approach to fixing the economy.