Maybe I’m imagining it, but I think this is a change brought on over the past few decades by the emphasis on the stock market. It’s not enough now for companies to make money - they have to make MORE money. And the year after that, MORE money than the year before.
And why? Well, the stockholders “demand” it.
Just consistently turning a profit year after year doesn’t seem to do it for public companies anymore.
Just my two cents…
Everybody knows that the limit on interchange fees does not apply to credit unions or to banks under 10 billion, right?
We all know that the government is specifically targeting only the largest US banks with this rule, right?
Which class of banks butt fucked the economy with a cactus, and then were “too big to fail” again?
That would be your Mom. I’d heard she was into the whole cactus butt fuck thing, but just because afterwards she’ll make change for a dollar doesn’t make her a bank.
Man, you really are tapped out, aren’t you…
Mood swing. He does that a lot. One minute its “Look what a nice, calm, and reasonable fellow I am!” Next minute, its the three-minute hate boiled down to ten seconds.
I’m being perfectly nice. There’s no hate. I am simply adapting my lingo in order to communicate in kind with the person I’m debating.
When someone phrases their argument in terms of cactus buttfucking, than I know i need to respond a certain way, so that they can understand.
You could translate my post as “your argument is gratuitous and besides the point. Please say “hello” to your mother for me.”
I prefer to translate it as “My name is Scylla, and I got nothin’” when you play the “I’m too good to engage your actual point, because I’m taking mock offense to your tone” card.
I can almost hear you harumphing.
Honestly, is there a point in the cactus butt fuck post to engage?
What is it?
And Im not offended, it just looks ridiculously stupid. However, if there is some sort of poignant analysis hiding within the butt fucking cactus that eluded me, I will be happy to engage it if you would be do knd as to point it out.
It’s a simple question–“which banks made poor financial decisions that caused the financial meltdown, and how many of that set were bailed out due to being too big to fail?”
There’s an unstated assumption in there, granted, but anyone who was paying attention to the CDS and CDO markets is going to have a decent chance of accepting said assumption.
The answer is that it’s a stupid question. It was not a handful of banks that caused the meltdown.
Pretending otherwise for a moment, why on earth would that justify a punitive action, that removes the banks’ ability to compete in the marketplace? Bail them out to punish them? If they are too big to fail, than break them up, fine?
And is he saying it’s ok to fuck over the banks as revenge for their part in the mortgage crisis?
Really? Isn’t that taking corporate personhood a little too far. It seems stupid to get emotionally pissed at a company.
It seems to me that rules that give unfair advantages, to one group versus another are discriminatory, and besides, not all big banks are equally culpable or culpable at all for the debacle yet they are all being punished. How is that fair?
I could go on and on, but as you see, it’s inherently stupid… Which really shouldn’t surprise you since it was written in terms of cactus butt fucking.
That should have been a clue.
Potential disagreement starts right there, depending on how you define “cause”. Frankly I’m willing to revoke any any all corporate charters of any company issuing or trading in CDS instruments or synthetic CDOs. (regular CDOs are at least coherent, from a risk/reward standpoint).
It’s my opinion that spending large amounts of money to lobby for the repeal of laws, and then using financial products that became legal due to the repeal of those laws in a irresponsible way that led directly to the crisis point, removes a company from the typical rules.
Nope. If they’re going to have personhood, and we can’t punish their board of directors for influence-peddling and general stupidity (not to mention endemic fraud on the part of the ratings houses), then let’s just metaphorically execute 'em as traitorous and go about our days.
I concur, which is why I think the large financial players deserve extra punishment for using their vast pool of resources to lobby for the repeal of regulations that leveled the playing field with ordinary voters and smaller institutions, giving themselves even MORE unfair advantages attached to their capital.
It is not merely the (idiotic, so idiotic that I can see it from over here in middle-management small businessland) financial chicanery that makes the Wall Street players culpable, it’s the deliberate lobbying and influence-peddling to eliminate the (long-standing and generally fair) rules that prevented their greater excesses and stupidity and then immediately being stupid in a catastrophic way.
No one thought to think that maybe 65 trillion in CDS instruments was a bubble, or that SOMEONE had to cover the extant risk? Really? If they did, then why did the market evaporate?
I thought it was funny.
I don’t know why I was expecting a rational response from someone defending the cactus buttfucking thesis as meriting engagement… But I did.
I guess that’s on me.
Anyway, you’ve started off with utter stupidity, as what you are suggesting is basically revoking the charter of pretty much each and every financial institution in the world, and probably the majority of really big companies. There is intrinsically nothing wrong with CDS’ as financial instruments. They can be very simple straightforward and reasonable. If you want to find the real culprit, you’ll need to go back to 167? or around there to Lloyds Tavern or Coffee Shop, or wherever, or, the Dutch might have been using them even early. And, I guess you’ll need to include the Federal Government and pretty much every government in your general indictment.
And, there’s nothing wrong with synthetic CDOs either. They are just tools. It’ how you use them that matters, right?
Let me give you an example, the safest investment in the world is a zero coupon treasury, right (or let’s avoid the argument and agree that in terms of return of principle upon maturity, it’s pretty fucking safe?)
So, let’s say your kid is born today and you want to send him to college. So, you buy a 17 year zero coupon treasury that will mature on his freshman year, and 18 year one for sophomore, etc. etc.
You have just made a very safe investment. You know that they will mature at face value when you need the money no matter what happens (we’re ignoring inflation and currency risk,)
Now let’s say fast Eddie gives you 100k and wants you to try to make some fast money in the markets with it. You decide that interest rates have been going down for a while, they’ve recently moved up slightly but are ready for a dive. So, you take all that money and you buy some 17-20 year zero coupon investments.
You have now made a very aggressive and risky investment.
Same investment, two different scenarios, the risk is totally different.
CDS’, CDOs’, and other derivatives are like this. They are nothing more or nothing less than bricks. Being angry at a company for originating or trading a CDS is like being angry at a company for making a brick because somebody once picked one up and hit somebody else in the head with it.
Some of these could be bought at the retail level, too.
Let me understand your thesis here: Because some people undid some rules , and it was disastrous you want to undo more rules to get even with them?
Yeah, that’s umm fucking brilliant.
The rules are the rules. If they don’t apply, they aren’t rules, are they?
Ah yes, the empty gesture. I thought that was the province of Occupy Wall St. Realize though that your little symbolic empty gesture is going to destroy almost every investor and pension plan in the world and set off a global financial catastrophe… But hey, I understand that a metaphorical gesture is important to you. So, you just go ahead.
I think anybody that broke the law should be fully prosecuted. Was lobbying against the law?
Again, I think your assumption is simplistic and ignorant. You seem to have this theme that corporations lobbied to repeal laws and that directly led directly to the mortgage crisis.
Similarly, ancient man used to think that drought meant God was angry with them for something one of their kind had done. So, they would hold a trial, and punish somebody to make the drought go away.
The need to assign a reason, the need to assign blame is pretty basic to small minds.
This really isn’t so much a debatable proposition as a religious statement of belief. Placing the blame for the drought . Grow up and get real. The causes are a bit more complex than you are indicating.
It’s an interesting and fair question (fucking finally.) I’m not sure I can answer you satisfactorily. I undersand it, but I’m not sure I can relate it. The same thing happened here as happened to Long Term Capital in 1998.
The value of all publically traded bonds in the world is on the order of 100 trillion dollars or so. If we add in non public we are probably up to 300 trillion or so.
Insurance on a large portion of that isn’t a good or a bad thing in and of itself. What is bad is that a lot of those CDS were not backed up with any reasonable means to pay.
Oddly, the same sort of thing is going on with variable annuities right now, where the guarantees are kind of meaningless (IMHO). Whether or not it will prove to have been an irresponsible bubble is yet to be seen. It’s arguable. What is sure, is that if it does prove to be one, it will look obvious in retrospect.
These things always seem obvious in retrospect.
Remember, even Warren Buffet didn’t think this whole thing was a big deal when it got started, and he is one if not the most sophisticated manager of reinsurrace on the planet.
So, How does that cactus feel?
I’ll address the parts of your post worth talking about–the rest, as you said, is basically opinion.
And I’m making no bones about the fact I outright hate financiers and everything they stand for. I bank with a credit union, I don’t get loans, I invest on my own using my brain instead of mathematical models. All my buddies who were physics majors are working doing models for Bloomberg and such–that’s so completely fucked up I can’t even begin to explain how much it enrages me.
I took several courses in finance in college, mind you, so I’m admittedly at an entry level. They made me hate it, they and my ex-Goldman-Sachs advisor, who was the goddamn prissiest weeping sore of a sad little man I’ve met–when you have to tell your 300-level class how much money you’re making, as a way of explaining how important you are, well…
Obviously. I completely concur. Shouldn’t even need to be said.
Obviously. I completely concur.
Anyone who did this should be in jail for fraud for the rest of their life. Any company that did this as policy should be disbanded and their board fed to live sharks.
See, we keep having this lesson–don’t say you’ll back a security without being able to back it. But nooo, we have to play fucking retarded games with it and make eleventy billion dollars insted of ninety or so.
No, it IS irresponsible. What remains to be proven is whether the industry lucks out of it or causes ANOTHER needless collapse.
So what? He’s not omniscient. The fact he couldn’t see this coming proves it.
As for the cactus? It’s got some nice heft. I can’t wait to find a nice financier to shove it into.
That was a funny post. What I got out of it that is that because of some past experience in college you are irrationally prejudiced and hateful against any and all who are in finance.
That admission sort odd does invalidate your arguments don
't you know?
Should read for content next time, halfwit. Unless you want all your posts boiled down to “please don’t criticize my bosses and my industry, they might throw me an extra crumb tomorrow!”
You said, upthread: “It seems to me that rules that give unfair advantages, to one group versus another are discriminatory”
I agree. So how come when I want to get a mortgage worth 200k, I gotta put up hell of deposit and collateral, but if I’m a financial institution I can just create CDSs out of thin air, backed by bullshit?
That’s where the hate comes from. Every significant recession in my lifetime has come from financiers. The tech bubble, CDOs, CDSs, Long-Term Cap, the S&L crisis. But since said financier fuckholes already HAVE the money, they can just get their nice little bailouts out of MY tax pocket, and keep making the same money now that they were BEFORE they wrecked the fucking economy I have to live with.
Is eleventy more than 90?
Pardon me, but you said: “I’m making no bones about the fact I outright hate financiers and everything they stand for.”
And, this is based off of something that happened in college, or one of your friends at Bloomberg.
So, like I’ve said, you’ve confessed to an irrational prejudice. It’s funny you’d call me a half-wit, considering the fact that my paraphrase was pretty much what you said.
Ok. That’s easy. You have to put deposit and collateral because the people that are giving you the loan are doing their due diligence to make sure that you can pay them back before they give you the money.
The CDS’ are in fact backed by something, the question is exactly the same as it is with your mortgage: Based on a given set of assumptions is the backing good enough to merit the risk in purchasing them? The market had been saying “yes,” to this question for a long time, and then it changed its mind, and the CDS’ lost their value.
Really? That’s fucking nuts. You’re over the rainbow. You didn’t notice this thing called 9/11? You think that might have hurt the economy? You think the tech bubble was created by financiers? It wasn’t? It was created by people that wanted a lot of tech stocks. Even that didn’t start the recession. We have this thing called the business cycle where the economy heats up and cools down. Financiers don’t do it. It happens. Long term capital didn’t cause a recession, so that’s wrong, too but even if it did, the bigger issue then was the Russian Ruble.
And, it seems like your life is pretty short if your first “recession” was in 98. I’m not like arguing with a 13 year old, am I?
I am aren’t I?
I’m in a fucking debate with a precocious ignorant snot-nosed brat.
Shit.
But since said financier fuckholes already HAVE the money, they can just get their nice little bailouts out of MY tax pocket, and keep making the same money now that they were BEFORE they wrecked the fucking economy I have to live with.
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