It’s funny how when their schemes are going well, CEOs and other top management are captains of industry, all knowing, all seeing, with wisdom mere mortals can only marvel at. Then when things go bad, they’re idiots who don’t know what their company is doing. I personally do not buy into either narrative.
It’s a gigantic strawman. No one believes it, including CEOs.
Exactly. So the notion that no one knew what they were doing caused the whole mortgage mess is not particularly believable, is it? As is the notion that all those CEOS and so forth who are getting huge amounts of compensation … unbelievable. But I have read posts from many believers on this board.
Good god, man. You’re suggesting redistributing 21% of the top’s income?! For what purpose? By what right? Sometimes I wonder if the left has any sense of fairness whatsoever. Do you also suggest cutting off a fourth of the Lombardi trophy and giving it to the Rams so that they don’t feel bad?
When you hear the word “redistribution”, doesn’t that must make you recoil in horror at the unfairness of it all?
Aww, the poor baby only has one job, one house, one car, and barely has anything left over to buy candy with. The horror! Here’s “how you fix it”- you tell the guy to STFU, quit being such a pussy, get on with his life, and that the heavens that he was born in a country where it’s impossible to starve to death.
Indeed, the more venal and caricatured it gets, the stronger its appeal grows.
RickJay clarified the first point, I was talking about everything that happened after the mortgages were sold to IBs. I forgot about Goldman, I’ll have look back at it to see who was responsible for buying credit default swaps (not CDOs, which are another realm of financial insanity) and if it was the same desk that sold bonds. But the notion thatthe IBs knew all along that the bonds were worthless is wrong, IMHO. Based on their models they sincerley believed that in order for the bonds to lose value/go to zero there would need to be a country wide depression of the housing market, something they thought to be impossible. They fundentally misjudged how correlated the default risks of the underlying mortgages were.
The Big Short talks about the handful of people who realized the risks were highly correlated and that not only would the bonds bottom out if housing prices dropped, they’d bottom out simply if the prices stopped increasing as fast. These are the kind of people Magyver talked about demanding tougher regulations. The problem is that for every one of them there were 100 CEOs, financial analysts, IBankers, etc who yell just as loudly that that 1 guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
That in my mind is a stronger argument for regulation than fraud. Its relatively easy to catch fraud, punish it, and make restitution. But narcicism and stupidity are a lethal combination, leavepeople with little recourse, and needs to be weeded out at every level. For starters we could have a public exchange for securities and their derivatives. Given that it’s, what a $30 trillion market, it’d be nice if it were more transparent.
You claim that you aren’t talking about CRA here, but I don’t understand why Fannie Mae supporting relatively safe mortgages counts as social engineering then. BTW, I do include them in the blame. When Congress semi-privatized them they became susceptible to the same temptations and drives that the banks did. But they were not the originators of the problem, they got driven into buying bad loans by market pressures.
Wow. Oh, my. I’m a pretty liberal guy, but this logic really pisses me off.
A man who works to support his family is not the bar we should be setting for men who wish to have children. Nor is it the bar we should set for women who wish to have children. The bar should be set at those who CAN SUPPORT their children. Financially. Be they married, single, hetero, homo, bi, trans-gender or trans-sexual, or any other label they choose for themselves. This should be the bar. Combined with an emotionally safe and nurturing environment, of course, but the bar should start at financial ability to raise a child.
Bringing the question of raising children into this discussion does a whole lot of disservice to your side of the argument. Reproduction is not a given right. Because you CAN do something or WANT to do someting does not mean that you SHOULD do something.
Things change, often in a negative manner. I won’t fault adults who decide to bring children into a seemingly stable environment and have the rug pulled out from under them. However, those that willingly and knowingly bring a child into poverty are nowhere near noble and nowhere near the kind of people I want to support.
If you’re broke-ass poor, I don’t even think you should be able to own a dog, much less raise children. Frankly? If you want a family, but don’t have the means to support a family and have one anyway? You are, ipso facto, an idiot.
I’m sure it wasn’t the same desk. However, they were betting against these bonds (which does not mean they thought they were worthless) while selling them to their customers as good investments. Somebody should have recognized that this was a problem. Hell, when I’m setting up a trust account at ML I go through all sorts of compliance and legal checks - compliance never caught this?
What.
I will recant. It is a given right, by default. I wish it wasn’t, but it is. It is impossible and impractical to prevent.
Do you care to defend your position that all people should be able to reproduce, regardless of their ability to to support their children?
Working full-time should be enough to support children - not a huge family, but this dude only has one kid. And he’s earning above minimum wage. It certainly used to be enough. Reproduction should not be a privilege only the rich can afford.
I strongly disagree. Being able to hold a shitty job should not and does not qualify an adult to be a parent. Reproduction should not be the strict right of the rich, but reproduction by the poor is selfish.
Your mileage may vary, and I guess it does, but I wonder how you can support people raising children that they can’t afford to raise. Federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour in this country. That equals $15.08k per year. At $8 per hour, that brings you up to a whopping $16.64k.
I am not sorry to opine that any person in the US making less than $17k annual salary (absent a partner or spouse contibuting significantly to the household budget) should not be responsible for a pet animal, much less a dependant child.
If full time work should be enough to support a family, I’m sorry. It’s simply not. That’s the reality and that was my point. That was my argument against erislover and I stand by it. If you can barely support yourself, having children does make you an idiot.
I have good news for you, assuming you don’t like to be pissed off: You’ve failed to understand the logic.
No one’s saying that anyone should be encouraged to have children who cannot afford to support children. Rather, people are saying that people will have children, and for the sake of those children, people ought to be made able to support them.
Amazingly enough, plenty of single mothers can support their kids on minimum wage jobs and do. They often find co-op living arrangements or move home with Mom and Dad. Is it a struggle - ABSOLUTELY. But it shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone that “stay in school, become established in a career, have a stable marriage, then have kids” is a better path to financial security.
In Nashville, on $16k a year without daycare expenses (which it sounds like his daughter is beyond), this guy should be able to make ends meet. He won’t be living high on the hog, and he may not have health insurance, but he shouldn’t be making the gas/groceries decision. The thing is, this guy sort of sounds like an entitled ass who is prone to poor decisions - like buying a car with crummy gas mileage when he works 45 minutes from home.
They are born able to reproduce. What should we do, sterilize the poor? Forced abortions? I cannot imagine what your position on this topic is.
Anyway, the point was covered well by Frylock.
If that’s so, then by the logic of the claim I related, such a person should be owed no support from society at large. Yes.
What was your point?
Just one thing to note: In my own view, he shouldn’t be permitted not to have health insurance. If he needs help with that, support should be offered. For his sake in part, for his kid’s sake in part, and for society’s sake for the most part.
And apparently it is. The girl got pulled from basketball practice. She’s not starving. She’s not unshod and threadbare. Sounds like they’re making it, to me. This guy’s just jealous of the people that made better decisions than he did.
After I admit that I’ve only skimmed the article, I now ask, what evidence is there in the article that this person made worse decisions than the other people you refer to?
He ended up an “unskilled worker,” by his own admission. That’s a poor decision. The salaried employees are presumably not unskilled workers, so they must have done something right. Unless you’re going to come up with something ridiculous and allege that every single one of them is the child of the CEO and it’s not all those unskilled floor workers ’ faults they all got cancer in their ADHD.
Please don’t repeat the oft-stated myth of the SDMB that we all end up where we are in life by accident. It’s intellectually embarrassing.