No it doesn't. And you don't have any clue what you're talking about, like basso, as the accounting scandal has pretty much zero to do with the current crisis. You would be best served to stay silent here.
Shhhh... stop making sense. Everyone has the "right" to not get foreclosed on, regardless of whether or not they should have got the loan in the first place. The bonus paid on fixed numbers, once certain quotas were achieved in sales of new mortgages, has EVERYTHING to do with the current bubble burst. You know, when my wife and I got our loan, we got it ready before we found a house. The mortgage company said, "You qualify for a mortgage of $450,000!" We said, "No thanks. We know we want a home in the $125,000-$170,000 range. We can't be irresponsible on something so important to our future." I grow so tired of hearing people claim they did nothing to spur this collapse along, when most of the foreclosures are just plain due to irresponsibility. When our lender offered irresponsibility, we turned them down. We did not eat the cheese. Now that the market got fat on the cheese, over and over taking on the irresponsibility of loaning out to people higher amounts than they had collateral for, and the trap has sprung closed around their beady-eyed little heads... I am in no way inclined to bail them out for poor management skills. No. A thousand times no. This is not simply a matter of a bad case of judgment, this is a result of hiding behind cooked numbers, selling and purchasing of fictional paper, approval of shaky-at-best loans and outright willful blindness. Willful blindness will put a common bank teller, the person who takes your deposits and cashes your checks, in prison. This is no time to play "gracious government" to basic crooks and thieves. It is time to let the market fend for itself, take the criminals to court and jail, and any government money invested should be returned to the taxpayers and homeowners that showed good judgment and responsibility by way of stimulus, much the same way any market share would kick profits back to the investor. Anyone who cannot clearly see that the first signs of corruption in the greater system was whistled back in 2004 by these panel members, echoed in 2005 and 2006 by McCain, and rumored for those same years to be the start of a greater collapse is just refusing to understand Economics 101. We learned this in high school. Well, some of us did. And then we learned it in more detail in college. Well, some of us did. Then some think they know better because they read a partisan rant by a foolish politician, or heard their candidate say something that has purely speculative findings... Whatever happened to sticking to proven trends, known economic basics of supply and demand, and the principles of collateral and debt-to-income ratio? It's absurd to think somehow years of willful blindness is going to be magically erased, much less forgiven, by a reality that is Wall Street... But now Wall Street will have to face the music, just as any common, middle America, small business man would have to if he/she made a bad investment. I'd just like my government (with enough outstanding debt on it's own) to not be a part of another on-paper bail out... at the expense of you and me. Sorry if I care not to truly saddle the next two generations with the consequences of mistakes, or better yet choices, that this failed system has made since the Bill Clinton presidency. He even said they resisted, Democrats resisted regulation and oversight of F&F when he was POTUS. Well we can't go back in history and change what has happened, but we don't have to "fix" it by putting a chewing gum fix on a flat tire either. If fat cats screwed this up, let them pay out the nose.
By 2005 you mean 2006 right? Because I distinctly remember catching you lying about it a few weeks ago. And you do know that the accounting scandal is something different right? You and Faos are in a race to see who can seem more ignorant. You're winning.
700b is nothing compared to what we are in for in our medical entitlements. Also I bet we lose much less money when investing it in these securites than we do dishing it out in welfare and unemployment over the next few months.
You were owned in your own "catch" in that thread. You're winning the ostrich in the sand award. Thanks for not addressing anything as usual, but instead trying to come of as "in the know" or "intimidating." Per your norm...
Research would require not hitting the Forward to Mailing List button and do some thinking. 4 trillion worth in government sponsored MBS (not all exclusive to Fanny and Freddy) pales in comparison to the 40-60 trillion dollar CDS market the big banks minted.
And thank you for coming off as "not in the know" and "intellectualy pimpslapped" Per your norm......
Nice to see so many known Democrats on this bbs, and real life politicians of your ilk slam your own views. 97 combined in Congress... Dennis Kucinich throwing fits on camera, etc... Care to attack them for no real reasons as well? You're outnumbered again, and you resort to bully-mode. Thought so. Go play a video game, "Sam Fisher."
So much distortion, so much smearing, and yet still the principle question Major asked remains unanswered. I'll bold it, for those who weren't listening: If the Republicans truly did see this as an impending problem, as the poster of the original video has intimated, and they controlled both Houses of Congress and the Presidency (as was the case in 2004), then why was nothing done to remedy the problem sooner? It's a simple questions, and yet the GOP apologists have yet to answer it. I still await a non-argumentative answer.
Wow. Just wow. Every democrat just needs to go sit in the corner and truly understand their massive fail after watching this video
stick to posting about which candidate is more of a celebrity. this has nothing to do with the current situation. absolutely nothing. and by nothing, I mean zilch.
Because there were obviously Republicans as well as Democrats that benefited $$$$$ via contributions from the Fannie and Freddie lobbyists.
And because the Dems in those subcommittees kept the issue in the committee room and off the floors of congress.
I don't know if otto typo-ed but he implies that several "Million" in bonuses brought down this house of cards...
Can you comment on this article? http://www.daveramsey.com/etc/fed_bailout/economic_cleanup_10887.htmlc How We Can Clean Up A Lot of the Economic Problems Remember Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, and other companies had artificially put assets on the books? They'd say something was worth $10M when they bought it, but eventually it decreased in value, and they never updated the value in the books. That was part of the fraud. Under current laws at that time, they were all convicted and put in jail for fraud. Then we got all mad and made all these new laws that are coming out the wazoo called Sarbanes-Oxley. It's a huge, massive law but the idea is that we were going to mandate ethics to corporate America because apparently they didn't have any, according to the Enron failure. It's now a total pain in the butt to execute it in a publicly traded company. It didn't work because you can't cause ethics to happen. However, it does make each company each day restate what their assets are worth if sold on the market. This accounting procedure is mark to market accounting--you need to remember that. It's a good concept and keeps companies from having loaded balance sheets. How This Affects Us Today However, it's part of what's caused this in the news now. Merrill Lynch was sitting with $30 billion tied up in sub-prime loans with houses. Stupid! They get what they deserve for doing that, and I'm with you on that. Those houses didn't become worthless all of a sudden because those people couldn't sell their bonds. Since they couldn't sell them, they basically gave them away for 22 cents on the dollar. Now do you think all those houses lost 80% of their value underneath that deal? No, they didn't, so they gave them away for 22 cents on the dollar (about $6 billion total) because there was no market for them. Nobody wants to buy sub-prime bonds because they suck. They're junk bonds. But at 22 cents on the dollar, it's a bargain because even if you foreclosed on every one of the houses in there, you'd probably get $20 billion back out of $30 billion, and so the company that bought those for $6 billion got a deal! But there's no market for them. That's where these companies are stuck. They can't sell this stuff, but accounting-wise, they've had to mark it down to market and it's frozen the marketplace. Economist Wesbury is saying that if we change that one rule and don't force them to mark down to market value and just let them hold on to all the stuff, and say just on sub-primes for this period of time you can change that rule -- a temporary change -- that'll free the market up. It's seized right now; it's frozen. This will thaw it out and get it going again. He says that'll solve 60% of the problem ... and I think he's right. That one accounting rule is what made Merrill Lynch sell out. That one accounting rule is what's driving other ones into the dirt. Would you rather let them change their accounting rule or loan them $700 billion for us to buyout their bad paper? I'd rather them work their own crap out than have us bail them out with $700 billion of our tax dollars. I don't like giving them any money or any help with my tax dollars. But I'd rather see that than see the whole thing turn completely upside down in a fruit basket turnover than have a whole meltdown or something and freak out here in the middle of the election season. Why don't we just take the FHA insurance program and extend it across these sub-primes? What that means is that you and I are guaranteeing the lender that they're not going to lose as much or any money on those mortgages. Now I don't like guaranteeing them, but I like it better than buying them. In other words, instead of $700 billion in tax-payer debt going out there to bail out these companies, just extend the insurance out. You could probably do that for less than $40 billion. It's like a 95% savings! If the government insured those mortgages, they would then be marketable. And could sell them. And the companies would stay afloat. And we, the people, don't have to get into the mortgage business. Now we're going to get in there a little bit because of the insurance on those getting foreclosed on. But foreclosures aren't causing this. This is being caused because these companies are frozen and seized up. We've got to let some of the steam come off and put some oil in there to get this thing moving again. We can do that without going into debt $700 billion. Here's Your Plan Call your Congressman. Call your Senator. Tell them to change the mark-to-market accounting law and to extend insurance but extend no loans. If they extend loans - if they borrow the money on the national debt in order for us to all go into the mortgage business a trillion dollars - you're going to fire their butts and send them home. I've talked with several people today, and it's on the tables in Washington, but it's not something you're going to see on TV. If you'll let your Congressmen know you know about this and that you'll vote against them if they don't vote to change the mark-to-market law and you'll contribute your money to make sure they never serve in office again. That's what you need to tell them early and often. If you're pissed, this is the time to step up and do something about it, America! You can stop this! It's being railroaded down your throat, but you can stop them if you call them in mass starting now. READY ... SET ... GO!
it's probably racist and homophobic to note this, but i thought this piece was right on. [rquoter]Frank's fingerprints are all over the financial fiasco By Jeff Jacoby Globe Columnist / September 28, 2008 "THE PRIVATE SECTOR got us into this mess. The government has to get us out of it." That's Barney Frank's story, and he's sticking to it. As the Massachusetts Democrat has explained it in recent days, the current financial crisis is the spawn of the free market run amok, with the political class guilty only of failing to rein the capitalists in. The Wall Street meltdown was caused by "bad decisions that were made by people in the private sector," Frank said; the country is in dire straits today "thanks to a conservative philosophy that says the market knows best." And that philosophy goes "back to Ronald Reagan, when at his inauguration he said, 'Government is not the answer to our problems; government is the problem.' " In fact, that isn't what Reagan said. His actual words were: "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Were he president today, he would be saying much the same thing. Because while the mortgage crisis convulsing Wall Street has its share of private-sector culprits -- many of whom have been learning lately just how pitiless the private sector’s discipline can be -- they weren't the ones who "got us into this mess." Barney Frank's talking points notwithstanding, mortgage lenders didn't wake up one fine day deciding to junk long-held standards of creditworthiness in order to make ill-advised loans to unqualified borrowers. It would be closer to the truth to say they woke up to find the government twisting their arms and demanding that they do so - or else. The roots of this crisis go back to the Carter administration. That was when government officials, egged on by left-wing activists, began accusing mortgage lenders of racism and "redlining" because urban blacks were being denied mortgages at a higher rate than suburban whites. The pressure to make more loans to minorities (read: to borrowers with weak credit histories) became relentless. Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act, empowering regulators to punish banks that failed to "meet the credit needs" of "low-income, minority, and distressed neighborhoods." Lenders responded by loosening their underwriting standards and making increasingly shoddy loans. The two government-chartered mortgage finance firms, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, encouraged this "subprime" lending by authorizing ever more "flexible" criteria by which high-risk borrowers could be qualified for home loans, and then buying up the questionable mortgages that ensued. All this was justified as a means of increasing homeownership among minorities and the poor. Affirmative-action policies trumped sound business practices. A manual issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston advised mortgage lenders to disregard financial common sense. "Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor," the Fed's guidelines instructed. Lenders were directed to accept welfare payments and unemployment benefits as "valid income sources" to qualify for a mortgage. Failure to comply could mean a lawsuit. As long as housing prices kept rising, the illusion that all this was good public policy could be sustained. But it didn't take a financial whiz to recognize that a day of reckoning would come. "What does it mean when Boston banks start making many more loans to minorities?" I asked in this space in 1995. "Most likely, that they are knowingly approving risky loans in order to get the feds and the activists off their backs . . . When the coming wave of foreclosures rolls through the inner city, which of today's self-congratulating bankers, politicians, and regulators plans to take the credit?" Frank doesn't. But his fingerprints are all over this fiasco. Time and time again, Frank insisted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were in good shape. Five years ago, for example, when the Bush administration proposed much tighter regulation of the two companies, Frank was adamant that "these two entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not facing any kind of financial crisis." When the White House warned of "systemic risk for our financial system" unless the mortgage giants were curbed, Frank complained that the administration was more concerned about financial safety than about housing. Now that the bubble has burst and the "systemic risk" is apparent to all, Frank blithely declares: "The private sector got us into this mess." Well, give the congressman points for gall. Wall Street and private lenders have plenty to answer for, but it was Washington and the political class that derailed this train. If Frank is looking for a culprit to blame, he can find one suspect in the nearest mirror.[/rquoter]
no its really just stupid. its stupid to buy into this rightwing rhetoric, time after time, in the history of this country, they've blamed disasters on minorities. you know how hitler rose to power, germany was an economic wreck after wwi, do you know who he blamed it on. gets what, he ended up killing millions of them. you may think you're a freedom internet fighter, but you would've been one of th germans caught up in nazi propaganda. do us a favor, next time you buy into this right wing rhetoric, post an artilce that backs it up with numbers. this is all blaming, there is no evidence. there is no evidence that these low income mortgages are defaulting. in fact do you know where the highest rates of default are, in las vegas, in retirement and suburb communities in florida. not exactly where the evil no bill paying darkies live. this is a red herring, and you are proving your dumbassness once again buying into it.
nobody is blaming minorities themselves, we're blaming those who forced banks to lower their standards to extend loans to people who weren't credit worthy. that's democrats in congress.
It's not racist it just shows - again - how you don't comprehend the underlying issues behind the collapse of the financial markets. Until you get a handle on credit derivatives you really should just shut up and stop embarrassing yourself. This is why the bailout failed yesterday - precisely this brand of ignorance. And President Bush, and the Republican-controlled congress. You are piling it on to yourself.
It's not just about that particular accounting scandal. It goes deeper than that. If you'd get your head out of the sand (or elsewhere) you might see that.
