I remember reading Bill James back in 1982, when the first mass-marketed Baseball Abstract became available. One of the most interesting things it revealed was that the people who supposedly best knew how baseball games are won and lost, and which players were worth how much - managers and general managers - knew a ton of stuff that wasn’t true, and were oblivious to stuff that should have been the ABCs of their understanding of the game.
Quite often, it’s hard to see things well when you’re in the middle of them. You share values and knowledge with other persons in the same environment, whether or not the knowledge is true or the values are applicable.
I remember an instance on this board, about nine years back. A poster named Bluesman, who I still regard as a friend, worked for our military in an intelligence-related capacity. He took many of us to task a number of times: yes, Saddam had WMDs. He couldn’t tell us how he knew, but he knew; we were just speculating. We know how that worked out.
I don’t fault Bluesman for getting it wrong, and in fairness, it was clear in a later conversation where I asked him about it that he’d spent some time asking himself how he got that one wrong.
The problem at the time with my friend was his certainty. He was on the inside; he knew. Trouble is, while being on the inside shows you some things, it hides others, and you see a lot of shadows close up that appear to be something big, that nobody sees from half a mile off because there’s really nothing there.
Scylla may well be a successful player in the trenches of our financial system. But that doesn’t mean he can see any better than the rest of us just how and why things crashed a few years back, or what should be done now. Being on the inside just gives a person one more reason to know what they know, true or not, and one less reason to question themselves.
You not only decry the “simplistic” nature of the arguments while boiling them down to your own simplistic argument, but you continue to get it wrong.
The Occupy movement is NOT THE LEFT. You’ve been shown this repeatedly. The majority of participants are neither Left nor Right and hold both sides equally culpable.
The Occupy movement has never claimed that it is all big business’ fault. It’s the fault of the destructive relationship between big business and a government that has become beholden to the interests of the 1% who have bought their way out of any sensible regulation that would have prevented this kind of financial disaster from happening in the first place.
The Occupy movement thinks it’s out-fucking-rageous that billionaires like Leon Cooperman get free and massive media attention for their partisan, ugly (and deadass wrong) screeds against the president, outright admitting that “we’re just hoping to get him around a little bit more to our agenda,” and then get their balls licked on financial news networks for saying so.
Newsflash, bucko, the agenda of the Leon Coopermans of this nation is what fucked us up to suckville and we intend to see that agenda QUASHED.
But I’m sure you’ll go right on posting for another 60-odd pages proclaiming the rightness of your sanctimonious self while continuing to Get. It. Wrong.
When the article writer cites HIS sources, it’s to someone with a similar claimed pedigree as yours–that is, former trader for Goldman Sachs Nomi Prins.
In addition to a law professor.
In other words, a fair evaluation of the cite shows that it brings at least as much claimed expertise to the table as you do.
I skimmed the posts that were cited and it seems like you are laying the blame at the feet of the CRA, Fannie/Freddie, Dodd/Frank. If that’s inaccurate and you were actually just saying that these elements merely played a role in a collapse that could have been most effectively prevented by good regulation and enforcement then I missed it. I agree that blaming an underregulated wall street for excessive greed is like blaming your pet hyena for eating your kids.
Yes those mandates created a market back in the 1980’s and the fuse on that time bomb was so long that it wook 25 or 30 eyars for it to go off? That’s like blaming fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the crisis because without them we wouldn’t have such a large mortgage market or mortgage securities for that matter. And noone cut corners on Subprime mortgages until well after CRAs stopped being a constraining factor.
I disagree. I remember bneign involved in that flurry of bank mergers in the late 90s early 2000’s and CRA was a slowing down bank merger activity back then so they tweaked the CRA requirements so that they were easy to meet. You seem to be saying that the CRA is to blame because without the CRA, people would not have developed the techniques to securitize “marketable” subprime mortgages and it was this market that created the demand for the subprime mortgages that were mostly orginated by non-CRA lenders to make ninja loans. Isn’t that a bit like blaming Henry Ford for drunk driving.
The market was there but the crazy shit didn’t start appearing in the market until 2004 or 2005 and then it really took off.
Courage? Bush was a prime political ebneficiary of the housing bubble, it distracted us from the fact that there was no actual economic growth going on. I remember Alan Greenspan trying to present asset growth as econmic growth. It was surreal. Noone wanted to stop this but failed to do so out of a lack of courage.
Sure, but that dose of medicine youa re talking about is more government regualtion, you realize that don’t you?
Well, like I said, you can’t blame your pet hyena for eating your kids.
Well, I’ve never used that kind of leverage but I have bought and sold futures contracts and the leverage on those even worse
You are talking about illegal behaviour. I don’t think these folks routinely engage in illegal behaviour, they routinely engage in behaviour that does not fully account for externalities (like the chance that they would blow up teh global economy).
The behaviour surrounding the foreclosures is tough to defend but its not wall street doing that. It may be banks and and law firms but you are talking about a different group of people.
Like I said futures frequently involves higher leverage than that and people generally view the futures markets as running pretty well.
Well I meant the common law definition of insurance. Investment risks are not considered insurance risk. The fact that there is some investment risk baked into some insurance products doesn’t make that investment risk any more of an insurance risk. Insurance risk does not really have a flood plain element. CDSs are no more insurance than a put option would be insurance.
I agree that the CRA is not a precipitating factor but at the very peak of the bubble, it was the subprime stuff that was financing the outrageous pricing. What percentage of new mortgages do you think was subprime in the year preceding the collapse? I don’t remember the exact number but it was a metric fuckload and I contend that without the price inflation caused by folks using subprime mortgages to bid up the price of real estate, the collapse would not have been particularly severe. Then they talk about 140 trillion, I think the number may be misleading because it double, triple and quadruple counts stuff and it talks about 1.4 trillion in subprime stuff and then relates that to derivatives that are backed by the entire mortgage market. We certainly didn’t have 100 times as much in subprime derivatives as we did in underlying subprime mortgages.
He might be in some sort of echo chamber but I think it might be an ideological echo chamber rather than a professional echo chamber.
I know plenty of insiders who thinks its ridiculous to blame the CRA for the ninja loans. Didn’t those largely come from the unregulated mortgage originators. And isn’t pointing the finger at Frank and Dodd largely an indirect way of pointing the finger at Fannie and Freddie and it takes a very blindered perspective to think that Fannie and Freddie caused the collapse.
Quoted for truth. I remember someone in one of the DFH journals I read pointing that out, but I hadn’t noticed it. But then I did, and it seemed that any time someone even mentioned an issue with the economy, the Bushiviks were all smiles. “Hey, the housing market is going great guns, everybody is making a ton of free money, you should cash out your equity and shop till you drop!”
However, not everyone has the sophistication common to those of the trailer-trash ellite. So, on their behalf, would you fill in a bit on that “asset growth as economic growth”, and why that is so Ricky Retardo?
I have to take issue with the bolded part of this quote. If there were folks using subprime mortgages to bid up the price of real estate, they were extraordinarily few and far between. The predominance of subprime mortgages were hard-peddled to people who the banks and mortgage lenders knew damn good and well were likely to default, but didn’t give a rat’s ass because they reaped a seven-fold commission for selling them. Those people were overwhelmingly minorities, especially those whose grasp of English wasn’t even close to good enough to understand complex contract negotiations, let alone who could afford to hire an attorney to represent them at closing.
Here’s an entire town that was living in mostly paid-for homes they owned outright, that is now blighted because unscrupulous money-peddlers unrelentingly harassed homeowners to mortgage their homes unnecessarily. They were sold a bill of goods with lies and misrepresentations. They believed these wolves in sheep’s clothing because they’ve been taught to believe that bankers and brokers are educated and smarter than they are. They put their faith in a system that was designed to fail them and it did — spectacularly.
How about we pass some laws that require equal access to quality education in poor and minority neighborhoods so they aren’t systemically placed at a disadvantage when it comes to negotiating their way through the complex mess Rich Old White Men have imposed on our financial system, huh asshole?
Ah, the good ol’ “See! Liberals are the real racists!” shtick. Never get sick of that one. Well, I never get more sick of it. I maxed out on it about ten-twenty years ago.
Yes. If you would have read some of them more carefully you would see that i am not saying Freddie, Fannie, and Barney are responsible, but merely an element. I think the left wing view of absolving the government agencies of any wrongdoing is as stupid and partisan as the right wing view of blaming them for everything.
I think this article contains a fairly smart view:
“there’s immense pressure emerging from income inequality. Losing jobs is a very, very painful thing, so there’s immense pressure to stimulate the economy at that time to bring back jobs because safety net is inadequate, with unemployment benefits lasting only six months and health care that isn’t adequate.”
This isn’t a heinous capitalist conspiracy — or a socialist conspiracy either, for that matter. It’s the structure of the system, he says, a design flaw thrown up by the conflict between the rules of capitalism and the limits of democracy. “Politicians are there to do something about the pain and suffering people have, and my sense is that home ownership and housing credit was in some ways a path of least resistance — it seemed to be working, and if you pushed it there were lots of positive consequences. It gives people a stake in society, it increases as society does well to give them a share in the growth and helps them borrow to enhance their lifestyles.”
This isn’t an attempt to absolve the greedy bankers, he says. “But we have to ask why did the financial sector suddenly want to lend to low-income housing?”
Ditto Fanny and Freddie, the quasi-government housing lenders right-wing ideologues like to blame for the crash. And the low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve. “I think we should recognize that this is a systemic crisis. This is not one bank gone crazy. This is many banks.”
The government itself, according to its report also places a similar share of the blame on Government regulatory agencies.
“The prime example is the Federal Reserve’s pivotal failure to stem the flow of toxic
mortgages, which it could have done by setting prudent mortgage-lending standards.
The Federal Reserve was the one entity empowered to do so and it did not.”
"Policy makers
and regulators could have stopped the runaway mortgage securitization train. They
did not. In case after case after case, regulators continued to rate the institutions they
oversaw as safe and sound even in the face of mounting troubles, often downgrading
them just before their collapse. "
"And the leverage was often hidden—in derivatives positions, in off-balance-sheet
entities, and through “window dressing” of financial reports available to the investing
public.
The kings of leverage were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two behemoth gov-
ernment-sponsored enterprises (GSEs). For example, by the end of 2007, Fannie’s
and Freddie’s combined leverage ratio, including loans they owned and guaranteed,
stood at 75 to 1. "
"Days before the collapse of Bear Stearns in March , SEC
Chairman Christopher Cox expressed “comfort about the capital cushions” at the big
investment banks. It was not until August , just weeks before the government
takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that the Treasury Department understood
the full measure of the dire financial conditions of those two institutions. And just a
month before Lehman’s collapse, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was still
seeking information on the exposures created by Lehman’s more than , deriv-
atives contracts.
In addition, the government’s inconsistent handling of major financial institutions
during the crisis—the decision to rescue Bear Stearns and then to place Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac into conservatorship, followed by its decision not to save Lehman
Brothers and then to save AIG—increased uncertainty and panic in the market. "
“THESECONCLUSIONSmust be viewed in the context of human nature and individual
and societal responsibility. First, to pin this crisis on mortal flaws like greed and hubris would be simplistic. It was the failure to account for human weakness that is
relevant to this crisis”
“Second, we examined the role of the GSEs, with Fannie Mae serving as the Com-
mission’s case study in this area. These government-sponsored enterprises had a
deeply flawed business model as publicly traded corporations with the implicit back-
ing of and subsidies from the federal government and with a public mission. Their
trillion mortgage exposure and market position were significant. In and
, they decided to ramp up their purchase and guarantee of risky mortgages, just
as the housing market was peaking. They used their political power for decades to
ward off effective regulation and oversight—spending million on lobbying from
to . They suffered from many of the same failures of corporate governance
and risk management as the Commission discovered in other financial firms.
Through the third quarter of , the Treasury Department had provided bil-
lion in financial support to keep them afloat.
We conclude that these two entities contributed to the crisis, but were not a pri-
mary cause”
I don’t know why the numbers are coming through in boxes, but you get the gist.
The report names all the other stuff, lobbying, corporate greed, the whole tamale. I completely absolves the CRA, but I don’t agree with that. I think that had something to do with it as well.
Yes. The market grew and turned into a bubble, and it took that long. You write as if you think 25 years is too long. Why would that be?
If Tom Cruise steers a car straight at a target and accelerates for a couple of miles and then jumps off right before it crashes, I don’t think you can really say Tom Cruise didn’t have some responsibility in crashing the car.
Yes, I see your point. You understand, I am not saying CRA is THE cause, but I think it’s a contributing factor. A drunk driver is responsible for his crash, but that doesn’t mean a car manufacturer is absolved from building a crashworthy car (to stretch your analagy.)
Shit. There was crazy stuff back in the early nineties when this thing got started. Tranching CMOs and using whatever PSA assumptions made the security work. Silly things like the VADIM tranches which didn’t work at all, and crazy insane Z tranches that might be 8% for 30 years, or might just all come due tomorrow. No. It was stupid long before 2004.
It just wasn’t huge.
My view seems to be more mainstream and less idealistically founded than yours or anybody else, who , if I am reading correctly completely absolve Fannie and Freddie (though their corruption and extreme leverage pushed them into conservatorship,) and government and regulators.
My main and only difference really, with the governments’ report is that I think it was wrong to absolve the CRA though I think I understand why they did so. It had done a lot of good, for a very long time.
Yeahhhhh, ok. and the Tea Party is not the right, right?
But not people who bought houses or took out loans they could not pay for? Corporate leverage is bad and the fault of corporations, but leverage by private citizens is also the fault of corporations?
Who is Leon Cooperman?
Who is Leon Cooperman? Is he on my side? Did he leave the toilet seat up or something?
I read the occupied Wall Street Journal and I never saw anything about him, or at least nothing that caught my eye.
We already have laws that require full disclosure of all the terms of a mortgage. According to you, this didn’t work because minorities are stupid. So passing more laws isn’t going to help.
You shouldn’t have lied when you said you weren’t going to debate. You obviously aren’t capable of it, so you should stick to screaming. Maybe you won’t get suspended this time.
Listen up you worthless vile cuss; the number of individuals who knowingly took out loans they couldn’t pay for is infinitesimally minute. The individuals who ENDED UP WITH loans they couldn’t pay for were TALKED INTO THOSE LOANS BY UNSCRUPULOUS LENDERS out to make a seven-fold commission. OR, they were people who could have (and did) easily afford those mortgages until they were fired or laid off when the entire economy crashed because of the machinations of the financial industry.
It was the LENDERS who knew good and goddamn well that those individuals were likely candidates to default. It was the LENDERS who “worked the numbers” to show people how they could afford more house than they thought they could. It was the LENDERS who misrepresented the terms of the mortgages so that people didn’t understand the impact of those terms. It was Wall Street investment firms who created the bundling and the “securitization” schemes that blew the whole thing up and destroyed the value of those homes so that people who did find themselves in over their heads couldn’t even sell their houses to get out from under their mortgage, which is something they could have done in normal economic times.
But just go on IGNORING every element of this colossal fuckup that doesn’t lay blame entirely at the feet of those homeowners who apparently should’ve known better than to believe their fucking bankers and mortgage lenders.
Did I say Democrat? No. I said Left. You can be a left wing wingnut and not be a Democrat. Occupiers are left wing wingnuts. Earlier I cited a whole bunch of neo bolshevishm direct from their own publication.
Vile Cuss? That sounds like something Scarlett would say to Rhett when she is angry but really wants him, but doesn’t want him to know.
Do you have a cite for this that shows the distribution between those three categories, or did you just make that up?
And we would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids!
Never mind. I remember. He’s that guy from the Hangover that People just voted Sexiest man alive.