Of course the same code signing chain technology Secure Boot employs can be used to sign the salt & hash to ensure the dump's integrity.
I think you are on to something there. Just a few minor glitches and you can be a millionaire! Like, how are you going to send your hashed memory dump over to verisign so they can sign your memory dump and send it back to you after reviewing it. And how do you get verisign to do that in less than 3 months? Hibernation is kind of pointless when it takes 8 hours to send the image over the internet, wait 3 months for it to get signed and another 2-3 hours for you to redownload it. That's got to be the slowest hibernation ever.
I can't send free iMessages to my friends with iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches with a droid. There aren't any droids that can airplay to my AppleTV (or my girlfriends) . Droids can't sync to iTunes and use the same metadata (Have I played it? Thumbnails, actors, rating, description, etc.etc.). Droids don't support FindMyFriends (Sure, they have another app for it, but it's not compatible, and I'm not buying all my friends droids).
I do the first three every single day, and the last about once a week. I've never seen a droid that is rock solid stable (Sure, I've heard plenty of people claim it, but then something happens), or has as nearly refined UI. I use my phone to watch movies, send texts (iMessages mainly), and play games with friends and family (Word with Friends, Hanging with Friends, SongPop, etc.) I'm sure some of those have compatible versions, but why would I want to hope the NEXT game my friends jump on has a version too? Too many headaches, no thanks. My iPhone does it all in spades, why would anyone want to switch other than to save a few bucks, maybe.
It's only been hacked to support larger disks and longer file names, and still it does that poorly (high internal fragmentation, small maximum file size, no support for extended attributes, poor performance on optical storage and flash, and let's not talk about missing features).
Hacked -- Improved. Those words are pretty much interchangeable depending on your own view and biases. Also, systems using FAT can use extended attributes if they wish. OS/2 does just fine with extended attributes on FAT, and so does cygwin. Just because FAT doesn't explicitly say this is where you stick them doesn't mean you can't write a file system driver on top of it that puts them wherever you want. Yes, FAT has poor performance on optical storage, but why would you use FAT on it in the first place? There doesn't need to be one file system that works great in every case. I'm not sure why you think FAT has poor performance on flash. It's performance is pretty good on flash hardware made today, especially if you do any kind of caching, in the case of flash, a small write cache even for sub-seconds will virtually eliminate any performance issue flash has. Not really rocket science.
The algorithm is part of the standard, You must implement it as it is.
Bull. The algorithm isn't part of the FAT/FAT32 standard, it's part of what is known as the VFAT standard, which you don't have to implement.
And even if you could omit that part of the standard while still claiming that you're implementing it, you would have to tell your customers that they need to only write 8.3 ASCII filenames, and that they won't be able to see files written by others if their names exceed 8 characters OR contain, say, an accented letter. Are you in all honesty convinced that a company could do this and be competitive in 2012?
No, they don't have to only write 8.3 ASCII file names, they can implement any alternative they choose. Some vendors have, like IBM with OS/2. You can read and write them all day, but yes, if you want to maintain full interoperability between Windows and whatever, then you must either do it the way Microsoft implemented it, or install a Virtual File System driver in windows that understands your new layout.
FAT/FAT32 isn't a poor technology, it's a simple technology. It's not very complicated, but the implementation has evolved over nearly 40 years.
Secondly, you don't have to pay royalties to Microsoft for using FAT/FAT32 itself. You have to pay Microsoft if you use the same exact algorithm for storing larger than 8.3 filenames on FAT. You are free to use a different algorithm, and not pay any royalties, or stick to 8.3 filenames as the original FAT/FAT32 did.
That's a popular opinion, but it's not part of the ITU charter. The ITU (and ISO) make official standards that aren't free. The ITU/ISO don't have an open source/free only perspective. Nor do they disallow competing standards.
I dunno about that here. Ever since they rolled out Sophos Full Disk Encryption on every desktop and server here, it's contributed more to downtime than any virus/malware ever has. I think literally every person in this office has had to have their machine completely rebuilt after it got corrupted somehow, and that includes our testing servers as well.
All I can say is, thank god our production servers are out of our company's control. They haven't had any issues, but then again, they also don't have Sophos malware on them either.
Is the stuff you buy with your credit card not fully yours until you pay your card off?
Different type of transaction. The credit card pays for it on your behalf and you agree to repay them. If you don't pay, then you are sticking the credit card company. With a phone, if you decide to stop paying your phone bills (which in part carries the phone subsidy itself), you've screwed the phone company. If that is what you want, go ahead and buy an unlocked phone on your credit card and pay the credit card back when you want.
True. By extension, my house isn't truly mine until I pay off the mortgage. Does this mean I can't make any changes to it?
Some, but not all, no. There are restrictions on what you can do with a mortgaged house. For example, you can't just tear it down because you feel like it if it's mortgaged. Nor can you make any changes that would intentionally depreciate the value of the house. You also can't sell it without paying off the mortgage. You also have to insure the house. I'm sure there are other restrictions, but yes, it's not the same as owning the house outright.
Well the breakup happened in 1987. There were plenty of answering machines back then. Some of us even had voice modems capable of turning your PC into a digital answering machine by then. But yes, I remember when the FCC finally stepped in and told the bells that they HAD to allow third party products to be able to connect to the phone system. Also, not having to rent/buy phones directly from them was a huge change.
Although, yes, I remember the "Call Packs" for cheap local calls. I also remember when they got rid of them, and they sent out nice little pamphlets telling you how much you would "save". Mine went something like... You paid $12, under our great new program, you would only have paid $998. Yes, each month was just shy of $1000, a savings of nearly $-988.00! Whee. And that was for LOCAL calls. Years later, I was still paying $400-$600 per month in LOCAL calls.
Because slashdot is owned by Dice Holdings, and Dice Holdings does business in the EU? If they fail to comply they can be fined, assets seized, etc etc.?
The ability to use differing codecs is how you allow a standard set in stone to remain relevant for longer than 30 seconds. As for HTML5 video, I'm not sure what you issue is with it, but our websites use it just fine.
Do you think it was stupid of the HTML spec to allow the img tag to use more than just.bmp? I for one am glad it allows.gif,.jpg, and.png as well. Each of those have their own strengths, and we use different formats depending on which format gives us the best experience. I don't see how this is different than HTML5 video.
You are correct. It isn't the king that is the problem in this case (I'm not sure of any cases actually where the King was the problem). His people love him dearly, much more so than we in the United States care for our current (or any president).
In fact, the King has used what powers he has to pardon those who have been arrested for bad mouthing him. It seems his majesty is actually a quite reasonable person, and I'm sure there was good intentions on the part of the government when they made the law, however, the law enforcement on the other hand....
So what you're saying is that the evil government forced the bankers to do stupid and unethical things at gunpoint
First, no, the government isn't evil. They just have a different set of priorities from my own (and different from most people). The government should be protecting law and order in the union, and make sure the laws balance between protecting my/own rights as individuals and doing what is best for society as a whole. However, in many cases what they do is neither one of those, and simply doing what will please the majority of the people in the next few years regardless of whether it is best for them. But as to forcing bankers to do stupid things? YES!
Fannie and Freddie acquired large amounts of subprime PLS because, in the words of their regulator, these securities were “goals rich” (Lockhart, 2009). Fannie and Freddie were required to meet affordable housing goals, set annually by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in accordance with The Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992. The purchase of PLS backed by subprime mortgages counted toward meeting these goals because the underlying mortgages tended to be made to less-than-median-income borrowers or were collateralized by properties in “underserved areas” (HUD, 2010).
In testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (2010) argued that it was the supportive bid provided by the GSEs for subprime PLS during 2003-2004 that caused mortgage yields to fall relative to 10-year Treasury notes, “exacerbating the house price rise which, in those years, was driven by interest rates on long-term mortgages.” Because these purchases were made in pursuit of affordable housing goals, Greenspan argues “a significant proportion of the increased demand for subprime mortgage backed securities during the years 2003-2004 was effectively politically mandated, and hence driven by highly inelastic demand.” By acquiring 40% of all PLS collateralized by subprime mortgages, Fannie and Freddie stoked demand for risky mortgages that contributed directly, in Greenspan’s telling, to the housing bubble and subsequent financial crisis. Similar points were made in Rajan (2009).
Does that mean that if we permit bankers to bash their own skulls with a brick, we;'ll have an epidemic of skull fractures?
No, but if the government steps in and says that any banker who fractures their skull will be able to retire and get disability equal to 100% of their pay with guaranteed raises of 6% per year (Just to insure against rising costs and inflation) for the rest of their life no matter how it happens, you will indeed find a sudden outbreak of bankers with minimally fractured skulls. And quite honestly, you'll also find a bunch of dead bankers as well because most of them aren't doctors and will mess it up.
I would say all of the blather about how you'll be able to re-finance when the time comes, no risk! might have had something to do with the problems.
I don't know of any banker that came out and said everyone would be able to re-finance no risk. They may have played down the potential risks, but I've never heard of any that said "no risk" outright. That said, many "bankers" (loan officers/brokers) aren't really any smarter than your average person and probably didn't know any better than the average person of all the risks involved. Some may be able to follow a trend, and yes, given the trend at the time, it was very little risk. Assuming the applicants standing remained the same (employed for longer, continued to pay all their bills on time) except now they have a history of being able to responsibly handle a mortgage as well.
That said, yes, lenders sold loans to people who simply couldn't afford them, or if things turned to the worse,
Absolutely nothing in the law suggested that they should even grant first timers loans for a McMansion, much less talk them into one but that's exactly what they did. The time bombs they built in were also not mandated in the law.
No, it was the relaxing of the loan regulations that allowed them to start offering loans that they previously would not have. It was politics that started the heavy push of trying to get more people into homes that previously couldn't afford one, let it be damned that there might have been a good reason why they couldn't previously afford it.
As for the time bombs? What time bombs? You mean things like ARMs, balloon mortgages, and the like? Are you trying to say that it's the fault of the salesmen? That the people who were actually applying for the loans, signed, and agreed to the terms of the loan have absolutely no responsibility? Was I the only person who when they bought their house actually sat down and understood what it was I was agreeing to before I'd sign it? You sound like the guy who wants to sue McDonalds because eating big macs 3 times a day for years has made you fat. People have absolutely no personal responsibility these days, and everything that happens to them is someone else's fault because they were too lazy/too ignorant to try and understand their own actions. Sorry, but I don't buy that.
You are right, I only indirectly addressed it because there is no defending the actions of those who made fraudulent loans. I just said that most of those fraudulent loans were even possible to be made because of the relaxing of the regulations. Many of those "fraudulent" loans would not have been even possible in prior years. I say "fraudulent", because in many cases the loans weren't really fraudulent in the strictest sense. Many were borderline, where the loan applicants were coached on what to put down on the applications where technically they were correct, but they misrepresented the applicant. A real lender would/could/should have called shenanigans on them but weren't because the originators simply didn't care because they had very little risk involved. They just shoved it on down the line and collected their upfront fees.
With that said, the mortgagee signed the loan application. Are you claiming they (the mortgagee) had no knowledge that what they signed to be true wasn't in fact true, or at the very least misleading? Yes, simple things like employment being rounded up from 1 year 6 months to 2 years is fraud. Shouldn't the mortgagee know that was wrong or are you just trying to blame just one party when there was two involved? There are too many people in this world with very little morals or ethics willing to lie, cheat, or steal if it means they get what they want (or think they want).
Of the actual real fraudulent loans that were made (not all the hyped up numbers that the media likes to portray), and even including those would not have caused the housing catastrophe. Your argument while correct, at least partially, is similar to blaming the guy who picked up the $10 bill the thieves dropped as they were running out of the bank they robbed and then trying to make him the cause. Yes, it was wrong, but hardly the most important factor in the big picture.
No, they didn't get a bail out. They didn't need one. We didn't partake in any of the fraudulent stuff that went on, and we actively steered away from it, sometimes losing business because of it, but my hands are clean and I sleep well at night and I wouldn't change that for anything.
Also, a substantial amount of stocks I own are tied up in some of the companies that DID receive a bailout, but I did not own it prior to the meltdown. I had no prior knowledge of it coming other than what was known to the general public. I had no insider knowledge, but post meltdown, I can see a bargain when they present themselves, and I've profited from those stocks. I am not rich, and I took a severe hit from it just like everyone else, probably (highly likely) even more so.
Sorry, I should include the disclaimer. One of the companies I own is one of the largest in their specific area within the mortgage industry. I don't run it, but I still do a significant amount of technical work there. As such, my views are not indicative of any of my companies and are my own and my own alone. My views have no effect on sales, procurement, resells, rates, or anything of the sort but I am definitely more knowledgeable than the average Joe on the subject, and there are very few loan "experts"/brokers/originators that I would consider more knowledgeable, but they do exist.
Are you kidding? There have been numerous changes to law that (allowed/forced) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the two largest holders of mortgages) to accept lower qualified loans than they previously were prior to 1980. If you didn't know, a large majority of mortgage loans that are sold by 3rd parties mirror their requirements of F&F (Fannie and Freddie) because they will often turn around and resell the mortgages to them to free up capital to sell more loans. That has been the case for as long as I can remember. So when they start playing around with the rules that F&F have to play by, every 2-bit mortgage company follow the same ill conceived rules. Of course, the 2-bit mortgage companies flip these mortgages over so fast they rarely really care if the mortgagee can pay for the loan beyond a few months because they know they'll get sold to F&F.
FHA & CRA loans were bad, but so were the sub prime loans (remember, there were no such thing as sub-prime loans pre-1980). And the "toxic" loans that got bundled into those batches that were getting resold? How do you think they were approved in the first place? Through sub-prime lending. For those that don't know, sub-prime lending is those craptastic loans given out to people that had bad credit. Couple that with silly things like not actually requiring proof of income or employment and you've got a major recipe for disaster. Sure, bad mortgage companies were figuring out new ways to get these loans approved because they wanted their quick origination fees and other misc closing costs and then shuffling the risk (the risk they knew was higher than what could/would be shown on the loan application), but it was the crazy lax requirements forced on F&F that allowed it all to happen.
Don't believe it? Go do your own research. Remember the presidential calls for "a house for every American" or "Universal Home Ownership"? You see, that included even Americans that couldn't afford the damn house in the first place, but you get a bunch of damn asses making silly laws to try and get more people into houses (that they shouldn't have been in), and what happens? You get a bubble as now a huge amount of people who couldn't (and still shouldn't) be able to buy houses creating a demand for houses that outstrips the supply. Housing prices go up as a result, and more and more people start buying houses they can't afford unless they continue to go up. Of course then reality sets in, the high risk loans all start to default and you get foreclosures everywhere. Housing prices start to drop, and now those to depended on house prices going up to stay afloat now are defaulting on their loans as well. Then you have those that are now badly upside down in their mortgages, have no other assets (or less than the amount they are upside down), and they decide to walk away from the house rather than continue to pay. One very big avalanche of shit.
I'm sorry, but I remember when I bought my house some nearly 20 years ago what it was like. You pretty much HAD to have 15% down payment, and it was a lot better if you had 20%. If the mortgage+other fixed bills exceeded more than 25% of your income it was difficult to get a loan, and nearly impossible if it was over 30%. You always had to have proof of income, employment, and if you weren't employed for at least 5 years, you had to have a reason (Just graduated college, just got out of the armed forces, etc). They wouldn't even consider it if you weren't employed at least for 2 years in your most recent job. Oh, and you credit score had to be at a minimum of 720.
Then comes the crazies, and all of a sudden you can get loans with no job, no income, a credit score in the low 600's and no down payment. Of course, there were a lot of people who felt they were entitled to a house even like that, and the mortgage brokers were more than happy to give them one. Yet, you seem to think the few fraudsters were the issue? Just WOW.
The key word there is disproportionately. They are claiming that the results are flawed because the sampling they used for the US was biased because the make up of the sample does not truly represent the make up of the US population. It is well known that underprivileged students perform worse, and the sample uses a higher percentage of underprivileged students than a (pseudo) random sample would have. Therefore, the sample is tainted, and if you tested ALL students, the numbers would be different.
It's similar to taking a survey of whether you think {a} is true, but then you use samples from an area where you already know that most of them think {a} is true. Like taking a survey on whether you think pot should be legalized, then having the police conduct the survey when they arrest people who are in possession of pot, and then claim that 99.5% of Americans think it should be legalized -- based on your sample. Of course 99.5% of Americans don't think that (at least I don't believe the percentage is that high), and if you asked all 315 million Americans, the number would be significantly lower.
I know, I know, this is slashdot. You can't be tasked to read the articles, and simple statistics is incomprehensible magic -- unless it agrees with your preconceived ideas, and then it's MATH.
but when laws are changed in the name of equality, forcing bankers (through competition) into giving loans to people who really can't afford them, then some people get to live way above their means for a while until they come to their senses (or more likely broke) and then get to declare bankruptcy and shift the burden of their overspending to the rest of us who didn't
If you want to compare how our schools are doing, then you need to minimize the effect of outside forces (race,wealth). {sarcasm}However, if you want to improve your expectation of the average student that then the clear way to do that is to limit the number of students who have outside factors against them and increase the number of students who have factors favoring them. Obviously, limiting the number of children that the races that perform poorly and making everyone richer is obviously the easiest way to achieve this.{/sarcasm}
Well, partially sarcasm anyhow. While technically this would work, it isn't fair and won't be a popular answer. The US wasn't known as the land of the rich. It was (is?) known as the land of opportunity. Not everyone strives for success, but for those that do, you have a better chance here than (almost?) anywhere else.
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Of course the same code signing chain technology Secure Boot employs can be used to sign the salt & hash to ensure the dump's integrity.
I think you are on to something there. Just a few minor glitches and you can be a millionaire! Like, how are you going to send your hashed memory dump over to verisign so they can sign your memory dump and send it back to you after reviewing it. And how do you get verisign to do that in less than 3 months? Hibernation is kind of pointless when it takes 8 hours to send the image over the internet, wait 3 months for it to get signed and another 2-3 hours for you to redownload it. That's got to be the slowest hibernation ever.
Other than that, awesome idea.
I can't send free iMessages to my friends with iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches with a droid.
There aren't any droids that can airplay to my AppleTV (or my girlfriends) .
Droids can't sync to iTunes and use the same metadata (Have I played it? Thumbnails, actors, rating, description, etc.etc.).
Droids don't support FindMyFriends (Sure, they have another app for it, but it's not compatible, and I'm not buying all my friends droids).
I do the first three every single day, and the last about once a week. I've never seen a droid that is rock solid stable (Sure, I've heard plenty of people claim it, but then something happens), or has as nearly refined UI. I use my phone to watch movies, send texts (iMessages mainly), and play games with friends and family (Word with Friends, Hanging with Friends, SongPop, etc.) I'm sure some of those have compatible versions, but why would I want to hope the NEXT game my friends jump on has a version too? Too many headaches, no thanks. My iPhone does it all in spades, why would anyone want to switch other than to save a few bucks, maybe.
It's only been hacked to support larger disks and longer file names, and still it does that poorly (high internal fragmentation, small maximum file size, no support for extended attributes, poor performance on optical storage and flash, and let's not talk about missing features).
Hacked -- Improved. Those words are pretty much interchangeable depending on your own view and biases. Also, systems using FAT can use extended attributes if they wish. OS/2 does just fine with extended attributes on FAT, and so does cygwin. Just because FAT doesn't explicitly say this is where you stick them doesn't mean you can't write a file system driver on top of it that puts them wherever you want. Yes, FAT has poor performance on optical storage, but why would you use FAT on it in the first place? There doesn't need to be one file system that works great in every case. I'm not sure why you think FAT has poor performance on flash. It's performance is pretty good on flash hardware made today, especially if you do any kind of caching, in the case of flash, a small write cache even for sub-seconds will virtually eliminate any performance issue flash has. Not really rocket science.
The algorithm is part of the standard, You must implement it as it is.
Bull. The algorithm isn't part of the FAT/FAT32 standard, it's part of what is known as the VFAT standard, which you don't have to implement.
And even if you could omit that part of the standard while still claiming that you're implementing it, you would have to tell your customers that they need to only write 8.3 ASCII filenames, and that they won't be able to see files written by others if their names exceed 8 characters OR contain, say, an accented letter. Are you in all honesty convinced that a company could do this and be competitive in 2012?
No, they don't have to only write 8.3 ASCII file names, they can implement any alternative they choose. Some vendors have, like IBM with OS/2. You can read and write them all day, but yes, if you want to maintain full interoperability between Windows and whatever, then you must either do it the way Microsoft implemented it, or install a Virtual File System driver in windows that understands your new layout.
I can't wait until lossless video encoding becomes practical.
Are you waiting for JPEG images to die as well? I bet you love them 100MB download per page websites too.
Standards _need_ to be free else society literally pays the price of "progress ransom"
In other words, unless it's free, then people who want to use it have to help pay for the cost of developing better stuff. Just, WOW. What a concept.
FAT/FAT32 isn't a poor technology, it's a simple technology. It's not very complicated, but the implementation has evolved over nearly 40 years.
Secondly, you don't have to pay royalties to Microsoft for using FAT/FAT32 itself. You have to pay Microsoft if you use the same exact algorithm for storing larger than 8.3 filenames on FAT. You are free to use a different algorithm, and not pay any royalties, or stick to 8.3 filenames as the original FAT/FAT32 did.
That's a popular opinion, but it's not part of the ITU charter. The ITU (and ISO) make official standards that aren't free. The ITU/ISO don't have an open source/free only perspective. Nor do they disallow competing standards.
I dunno about that here. Ever since they rolled out Sophos Full Disk Encryption on every desktop and server here, it's contributed more to downtime than any virus/malware ever has. I think literally every person in this office has had to have their machine completely rebuilt after it got corrupted somehow, and that includes our testing servers as well.
All I can say is, thank god our production servers are out of our company's control. They haven't had any issues, but then again, they also don't have Sophos malware on them either.
Is the stuff you buy with your credit card not fully yours until you pay your card off?
Different type of transaction. The credit card pays for it on your behalf and you agree to repay them. If you don't pay, then you are sticking the credit card company. With a phone, if you decide to stop paying your phone bills (which in part carries the phone subsidy itself), you've screwed the phone company. If that is what you want, go ahead and buy an unlocked phone on your credit card and pay the credit card back when you want.
True. By extension, my house isn't truly mine until I pay off the mortgage. Does this mean I can't make any changes to it?
Some, but not all, no. There are restrictions on what you can do with a mortgaged house. For example, you can't just tear it down because you feel like it if it's mortgaged. Nor can you make any changes that would intentionally depreciate the value of the house. You also can't sell it without paying off the mortgage. You also have to insure the house. I'm sure there are other restrictions, but yes, it's not the same as owning the house outright.
Not saying it's fair, but...
Why should they? There are many reasons to unlock your phone that don't amount to exiting your contract early.
ie. I travel overseas and like to purchase a local SIM to avoid enormous roaming charges.
I think you answered your own question.
Well the breakup happened in 1987. There were plenty of answering machines back then. Some of us even had voice modems capable of turning your PC into a digital answering machine by then. But yes, I remember when the FCC finally stepped in and told the bells that they HAD to allow third party products to be able to connect to the phone system. Also, not having to rent/buy phones directly from them was a huge change.
Although, yes, I remember the "Call Packs" for cheap local calls. I also remember when they got rid of them, and they sent out nice little pamphlets telling you how much you would "save". Mine went something like... You paid $12, under our great new program, you would only have paid $998. Yes, each month was just shy of $1000, a savings of nearly $-988.00! Whee. And that was for LOCAL calls. Years later, I was still paying $400-$600 per month in LOCAL calls.
Because slashdot is owned by Dice Holdings, and Dice Holdings does business in the EU? If they fail to comply they can be fined, assets seized, etc etc.?
The ability to use differing codecs is how you allow a standard set in stone to remain relevant for longer than 30 seconds. As for HTML5 video, I'm not sure what you issue is with it, but our websites use it just fine.
Do you think it was stupid of the HTML spec to allow the img tag to use more than just .bmp? I for one am glad it allows .gif, .jpg, and .png as well. Each of those have their own strengths, and we use different formats depending on which format gives us the best experience. I don't see how this is different than HTML5 video.
Ours. We only support IE 9+, any older and we'll send you Chrome Frame so we don't have have to worry about the stupidness that is IE 7/8.
You are correct. It isn't the king that is the problem in this case (I'm not sure of any cases actually where the King was the problem). His people love him dearly, much more so than we in the United States care for our current (or any president).
In fact, the King has used what powers he has to pardon those who have been arrested for bad mouthing him. It seems his majesty is actually a quite reasonable person, and I'm sure there was good intentions on the part of the government when they made the law, however, the law enforcement on the other hand....
So what you're saying is that the evil government forced the bankers to do stupid and unethical things at gunpoint
First, no, the government isn't evil. They just have a different set of priorities from my own (and different from most people). The government should be protecting law and order in the union, and make sure the laws balance between protecting my/own rights as individuals and doing what is best for society as a whole. However, in many cases what they do is neither one of those, and simply doing what will please the majority of the people in the next few years regardless of whether it is best for them. But as to forcing bankers to do stupid things? YES!
Fannie and Freddie acquired large amounts of subprime PLS because, in the words of their regulator, these securities were “goals rich” (Lockhart, 2009). Fannie and Freddie were required to meet affordable housing goals, set annually by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in accordance with The Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992. The purchase of PLS backed by subprime mortgages counted toward meeting these goals because the underlying mortgages tended to be made to less-than-median-income borrowers or were collateralized by properties in “underserved areas” (HUD, 2010).
In testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (2010) argued that it was the supportive bid provided by the GSEs for subprime PLS during 2003-2004 that caused mortgage yields to fall relative to 10-year Treasury notes, “exacerbating the house price rise which, in those years, was driven by interest rates on long-term mortgages.” Because these purchases were made in pursuit of affordable housing goals, Greenspan argues “a significant proportion of the increased demand for subprime mortgage backed securities during the years 2003-2004 was effectively politically mandated, and hence driven by highly inelastic demand.” By acquiring 40% of all PLS collateralized by subprime mortgages, Fannie and Freddie stoked demand for risky mortgages that contributed directly, in Greenspan’s telling, to the housing bubble and subsequent financial crisis. Similar points were made in Rajan (2009).
Does that mean that if we permit bankers to bash their own skulls with a brick, we;'ll have an epidemic of skull fractures?
No, but if the government steps in and says that any banker who fractures their skull will be able to retire and get disability equal to 100% of their pay with guaranteed raises of 6% per year (Just to insure against rising costs and inflation) for the rest of their life no matter how it happens, you will indeed find a sudden outbreak of bankers with minimally fractured skulls. And quite honestly, you'll also find a bunch of dead bankers as well because most of them aren't doctors and will mess it up.
I would say all of the blather about how you'll be able to re-finance when the time comes, no risk! might have had something to do with the problems.
I don't know of any banker that came out and said everyone would be able to re-finance no risk. They may have played down the potential risks, but I've never heard of any that said "no risk" outright. That said, many "bankers" (loan officers/brokers) aren't really any smarter than your average person and probably didn't know any better than the average person of all the risks involved. Some may be able to follow a trend, and yes, given the trend at the time, it was very little risk. Assuming the applicants standing remained the same (employed for longer, continued to pay all their bills on time) except now they have a history of being able to responsibly handle a mortgage as well.
That said, yes, lenders sold loans to people who simply couldn't afford them, or if things turned to the worse,
Absolutely nothing in the law suggested that they should even grant first timers loans for a McMansion, much less talk them into one but that's exactly what they did. The time bombs they built in were also not mandated in the law.
No, it was the relaxing of the loan regulations that allowed them to start offering loans that they previously would not have. It was politics that started the heavy push of trying to get more people into homes that previously couldn't afford one, let it be damned that there might have been a good reason why they couldn't previously afford it.
As for the time bombs? What time bombs? You mean things like ARMs, balloon mortgages, and the like? Are you trying to say that it's the fault of the salesmen? That the people who were actually applying for the loans, signed, and agreed to the terms of the loan have absolutely no responsibility? Was I the only person who when they bought their house actually sat down and understood what it was I was agreeing to before I'd sign it? You sound like the guy who wants to sue McDonalds because eating big macs 3 times a day for years has made you fat. People have absolutely no personal responsibility these days, and everything that happens to them is someone else's fault because they were too lazy/too ignorant to try and understand their own actions. Sorry, but I don't buy that.
You are right, I only indirectly addressed it because there is no defending the actions of those who made fraudulent loans. I just said that most of those fraudulent loans were even possible to be made because of the relaxing of the regulations. Many of those "fraudulent" loans would not have been even possible in prior years. I say "fraudulent", because in many cases the loans weren't really fraudulent in the strictest sense. Many were borderline, where the loan applicants were coached on what to put down on the applications where technically they were correct, but they misrepresented the applicant. A real lender would/could/should have called shenanigans on them but weren't because the originators simply didn't care because they had very little risk involved. They just shoved it on down the line and collected their upfront fees.
With that said, the mortgagee signed the loan application. Are you claiming they (the mortgagee) had no knowledge that what they signed to be true wasn't in fact true, or at the very least misleading? Yes, simple things like employment being rounded up from 1 year 6 months to 2 years is fraud. Shouldn't the mortgagee know that was wrong or are you just trying to blame just one party when there was two involved? There are too many people in this world with very little morals or ethics willing to lie, cheat, or steal if it means they get what they want (or think they want).
Of the actual real fraudulent loans that were made (not all the hyped up numbers that the media likes to portray), and even including those would not have caused the housing catastrophe. Your argument while correct, at least partially, is similar to blaming the guy who picked up the $10 bill the thieves dropped as they were running out of the bank they robbed and then trying to make him the cause. Yes, it was wrong, but hardly the most important factor in the big picture.
Sorry, that should have said partially own.
No, they didn't get a bail out. They didn't need one. We didn't partake in any of the fraudulent stuff that went on, and we actively steered away from it, sometimes losing business because of it, but my hands are clean and I sleep well at night and I wouldn't change that for anything.
Also, a substantial amount of stocks I own are tied up in some of the companies that DID receive a bailout, but I did not own it prior to the meltdown. I had no prior knowledge of it coming other than what was known to the general public. I had no insider knowledge, but post meltdown, I can see a bargain when they present themselves, and I've profited from those stocks. I am not rich, and I took a severe hit from it just like everyone else, probably (highly likely) even more so.
Sorry, I should include the disclaimer. One of the companies I own is one of the largest in their specific area within the mortgage industry. I don't run it, but I still do a significant amount of technical work there. As such, my views are not indicative of any of my companies and are my own and my own alone. My views have no effect on sales, procurement, resells, rates, or anything of the sort but I am definitely more knowledgeable than the average Joe on the subject, and there are very few loan "experts"/brokers/originators that I would consider more knowledgeable, but they do exist.
Are you kidding? There have been numerous changes to law that (allowed/forced) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the two largest holders of mortgages) to accept lower qualified loans than they previously were prior to 1980. If you didn't know, a large majority of mortgage loans that are sold by 3rd parties mirror their requirements of F&F (Fannie and Freddie) because they will often turn around and resell the mortgages to them to free up capital to sell more loans. That has been the case for as long as I can remember. So when they start playing around with the rules that F&F have to play by, every 2-bit mortgage company follow the same ill conceived rules. Of course, the 2-bit mortgage companies flip these mortgages over so fast they rarely really care if the mortgagee can pay for the loan beyond a few months because they know they'll get sold to F&F.
FHA & CRA loans were bad, but so were the sub prime loans (remember, there were no such thing as sub-prime loans pre-1980). And the "toxic" loans that got bundled into those batches that were getting resold? How do you think they were approved in the first place? Through sub-prime lending. For those that don't know, sub-prime lending is those craptastic loans given out to people that had bad credit. Couple that with silly things like not actually requiring proof of income or employment and you've got a major recipe for disaster. Sure, bad mortgage companies were figuring out new ways to get these loans approved because they wanted their quick origination fees and other misc closing costs and then shuffling the risk (the risk they knew was higher than what could/would be shown on the loan application), but it was the crazy lax requirements forced on F&F that allowed it all to happen.
Don't believe it? Go do your own research. Remember the presidential calls for "a house for every American" or "Universal Home Ownership"? You see, that included even Americans that couldn't afford the damn house in the first place, but you get a bunch of damn asses making silly laws to try and get more people into houses (that they shouldn't have been in), and what happens? You get a bubble as now a huge amount of people who couldn't (and still shouldn't) be able to buy houses creating a demand for houses that outstrips the supply. Housing prices go up as a result, and more and more people start buying houses they can't afford unless they continue to go up. Of course then reality sets in, the high risk loans all start to default and you get foreclosures everywhere. Housing prices start to drop, and now those to depended on house prices going up to stay afloat now are defaulting on their loans as well. Then you have those that are now badly upside down in their mortgages, have no other assets (or less than the amount they are upside down), and they decide to walk away from the house rather than continue to pay. One very big avalanche of shit.
I'm sorry, but I remember when I bought my house some nearly 20 years ago what it was like. You pretty much HAD to have 15% down payment, and it was a lot better if you had 20%. If the mortgage+other fixed bills exceeded more than 25% of your income it was difficult to get a loan, and nearly impossible if it was over 30%. You always had to have proof of income, employment, and if you weren't employed for at least 5 years, you had to have a reason (Just graduated college, just got out of the armed forces, etc). They wouldn't even consider it if you weren't employed at least for 2 years in your most recent job. Oh, and you credit score had to be at a minimum of 720.
Then comes the crazies, and all of a sudden you can get loans with no job, no income, a credit score in the low 600's and no down payment. Of course, there were a lot of people who felt they were entitled to a house even like that, and the mortgage brokers were more than happy to give them one. Yet, you seem to think the few fraudsters were the issue? Just WOW.
The key word there is disproportionately. They are claiming that the results are flawed because the sampling they used for the US was biased because the make up of the sample does not truly represent the make up of the US population. It is well known that underprivileged students perform worse, and the sample uses a higher percentage of underprivileged students than a (pseudo) random sample would have. Therefore, the sample is tainted, and if you tested ALL students, the numbers would be different.
It's similar to taking a survey of whether you think {a} is true, but then you use samples from an area where you already know that most of them think {a} is true. Like taking a survey on whether you think pot should be legalized, then having the police conduct the survey when they arrest people who are in possession of pot, and then claim that 99.5% of Americans think it should be legalized -- based on your sample. Of course 99.5% of Americans don't think that (at least I don't believe the percentage is that high), and if you asked all 315 million Americans, the number would be significantly lower.
I know, I know, this is slashdot. You can't be tasked to read the articles, and simple statistics is incomprehensible magic -- unless it agrees with your preconceived ideas, and then it's MATH.
but when laws are changed in the name of equality, forcing bankers (through competition) into giving loans to people who really can't afford them, then some people get to live way above their means for a while until they come to their senses (or more likely broke) and then get to declare bankruptcy and shift the burden of their overspending to the rest of us who didn't
There, fixed that for you.
That isn't quite right either.
If you want to compare how our schools are doing, then you need to minimize the effect of outside forces (race,wealth). {sarcasm}However, if you want to improve your expectation of the average student that then the clear way to do that is to limit the number of students who have outside factors against them and increase the number of students who have factors favoring them. Obviously, limiting the number of children that the races that perform poorly and making everyone richer is obviously the easiest way to achieve this.{/sarcasm}
Well, partially sarcasm anyhow. While technically this would work, it isn't fair and won't be a popular answer. The US wasn't known as the land of the rich. It was (is?) known as the land of opportunity. Not everyone strives for success, but for those that do, you have a better chance here than (almost?) anywhere else.