If you stand around in a park in Africa beating a drum in protest of Maleria then yes, you can blame them.
This was never a legitimate protest. That was obvious from day one with a complete lack of direction in any of the activities besides a general complaint about the state of the economy.
And while it sounds nice on the surface to say they can’t be expected to feed the homeless that argument evaporates when they usurp local food kitchens to fuel their protest.
Beyond that, the obvious fallout of feeding gourmet food to a bunch of drum beating narcissistic whiners is a tent city full of drum beating narcissistic whiners.
Except the real culprit is not the banking system. They’re just one business category among many. Congress approved the banking structure of derivatives without the due diligence or oversight they are charged with creating and maintaining. They were warned that the derivatives market was underfunded. They were also warned that their own mortgage program was in serious trouble. It was the perfect storm of poorly administered mortgages being propped up by underfunded derivatives.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see the housing market was increasing value faster than the inflation rate while at the same time the physical market was expanding faster than occupancy rates dictated. We had a housing glut fueled by government backed mortgages which encouraged low down payments. Just like on overvalued stock market, the prices of houses were destined to collapse back at some point. Had Congress done it’s job we would have had a minor housing devaluation that didn’t take the banking system down with it.
Exactly the point. If Congress had done its job there would have been (wanna guess?) MORE regulation. BUT…If the bankers (and/or the corporations i.e. people) had a fucking conscience they wouldn’t have needed the regulation in the first place.
I am not nearly as eloquent as George Kaplin, he has expressed the truth as I see it better than any pundit or commentator I have seen to date. I stand by my BRAVO.
The banks were bailed out with mega amounts of tax money. It was their damn fault. It was not some woman in Newark who took a mortgage she could not afford that took the banking system down. It was corporate banking greed . It was creating and selling CDOs and SWAPS. How did the people who took out a mortgage cause that?
All peaceful protest in this country is legitimate. I don’t care how crazy it is, everyone has the right to protest for whatever he wants. You don’t have to agree with them to acknowledge that. There has been some violence, but most have been peaceful.
This post is extremely similar to this Matt Taibbi blog entry. Since you didn’t mention or link to the Taibbi piece, it looks like you’re trying to pass off his ideas and arguments as your own. We expect better than that here. Either make your own arguments or attribute them properly. I’m giving you a formal warning - don’t do this again.
The bankers sold stocks to customers that private emails that surfaced later, proved they had no belief in, and they actually were betting their own money would fail. When the bankers, especially Goldman were presented with the emails in front of a congressional committee ,they seemed unable to speak at all. These crappy stocks were foisted off on people across the country.
The bankers are simply thieves. They were thieves on such a scale that the government was afraid to prosecute them.
So you would agree, then, that the businesses the protesters are mad at are running a business, not a charity? So all this whining about “greed” and “unfairness” is nonsense. Glad we agree. Nobody “deserves” a handout.
Do you honestly believe politicians can make bankers do anything they don’t want to do? The bankers have refused to start lending to small businesses. There has been lots of pressure on the banks to generate loans. They don’t do it.
There has been pressure from pols to stop using tax money to reward the failed bankers with huge bonuses . They flat out ignored that pressure and the horror many people felt when they did it. Now you suddenly suggest the politicians made the bankers offer bad loans. that is total BS. The bankers needed mortgages to fill out their CDOs. Since the banks were not keeping the mortgages, but packaging and immediately selling them, they did not care how bad they were. That is how rules qualifications got degraded.
One of the points made in George Kaplin’s excellent (if potentially plagiarised) lengthy post is that one of the things they’re angry about is that the **businesses **are getting handouts, particularly because they’re getting them as a reward for overt irresponsibility and malfeasance.
The banks got enormous tax handouts to save the businesses that the bankers ran into the ground. Now we are again supposed to trust them? Fuck it, put them on trial. Let them prove they were acting honestly in a court of law.
I was no fan of TARP, but they didn’t get “tax handouts”, whatever the hell that is anyway. They got loans that were mostly paid back. It was a risky move in desperate times. I don’t think anyone really wanted to do it, but lots of people thought we had to.
And, as has been noted over an over again so this is nothing new to you, it makes a great soundbite to say they should be arrested, but you have to find a law they broke first.
There are lots of them. Rumor is the justice dept. is actually going to go after a bunch of bankers.
If you listened to the congressional hearings, you would not have that question.
Well it does matter how they got the money to pay back the loans. Specifically, how much of that came from investments in Treasury Securities?
BofA is going to go under, so the government loans BofA money, running up a huge deficit. BofA then takes the money that the government loaned them and loans it to the government. Then BofA sells the loan to investors who are desperate to buy the safest instrument available, because someone (okay, it was BofA) destroyed the economy with bad investments. BofA takes the money from the spread and uses it to pay back the money the government loaned them.
I’m not surprised these guys got million-dollar bonuses. That’s pretty fancy.
The funny thing about this, is seeing a bunch of self-righteous idealists who are angrily demanding that the global financial system must be run better (like, how hard could it be?) failing miserably to run a kitchen. Sometimes, reality is more complicated than our young friends might think. No doubt they’ll be less confident in their ability to solve the world’s problems with a catchy slogan and an overwhelming sense of entitlement in future. Or not.
(Okay, for all I know they’re all great people who have been misrepresented in the media, but hey, sarcastically criticising others is my right, isn’t it?)
How hard? It was pretty easy in the mid-90s to early 2000’s, if you’re a legislator. It literally couldn’t have been any easier: Do Nothing. Easy peasy.