Shorthand for “RTFirefly made lots of good arguments, and I had nothing, so the only thing left was to call him a troll.”
Funny how you seem to be the only one on this message board (excepting Shodan, who really doesn’t count) who thinks I’m a troll. If a poster with over 20,000 posts to his name was a troll, you’d think his trolling would have been more widely noticed.
Well, OK, not you. Someone else might think that. Someone with a clue.
Since I never claimed to be pleasant or sane, you were at least able to say something true.
But as soon as you feel you lack decent rebuttals to Shayna’s posts, your opinion of her will go downhill. As it does with everyone who is able to poke holes in your bullshit.
Let’s see: I said I wasn’t going to debate Scylla anymore, but didn’t say anything about leaving the thread.
A day or so later, I pointed out for the benefit of others continuing to go that route that Scylla had cited for support a source generally regarded as worthless and bogus. Didn’t debate anything he was saying, just took issue with the source.
And in response to that, we get posts 1776, 1784, 1788, 1793 (where you jump in), and a whole bunch more. You guys, for reasons unclear to me (other than nothing better to throw at me, I must assume), made my questioning of Scylla’s cite into a Big Honkin’ Issue, and of course pretended that I’d said what I hadn’t - that I was outta here.
Which of course was the only way your bullshit could pretend to make sense.
But when Scylla said he was outta here - in those exact words - somehow his reneging on that promise is no big deal to you.
Frankly, it’s no big deal to me. If he wants to be a DQ and leave in a minute and a huff, and turn around and come back practically before he’s gone, then who gives a flying fuck?
Well, you. And Scylla.
Selectively, of course.
So which side of your ass you’re speaking out of, depends on who you’re speaking about. Thanks for clarifying.
Yeah, I figured you didn’t have the guts to try to justify your rather blatant double standard.
That’s OK, you’ve been a good little pawn for Scylla here. I’m sure he’ll give you a nice pat on the head on the way out, and some free stock picks if you’re unlucky.
Yeah, that’s what I thought: a slam without substance.
But I’ve got one more challenge for you that you will undoubtedly fail: point to anything I’ve posted in this thread that, IYHO, constitutes trolling.
I won’t even ask for a justification on your part, just a quote and a post number. I’m just looking forward to seeing what you come up with (assuming you have the fortitude to come up with anything), and am anticipating much amusement.
I expect that ‘troll’ has just degenerated into another generic derogatory term, like ‘dipshit,’ for you dipshits.
Perhaps an economist can explain it better than me but the example that was given to me was that if you lived on an island with nothing but coconuts and bananas. If one day people started valuing bananas more, you still have the exact same amount of bananas and coconuts.
In our case people also could also inctrease their borrowing capacity because of the asset growth but then you have temporary stimulative growth from people borrowing against the increased values in their homes but all that bhorrowing must be repaid at some time either by the borrower or by higher default rates for the lenders. There may be some acceleration of economic activity but it bears and interest rate and must be repaid at some time.
I’m not disputing that there was abusive predatory lending going on across the country. I agree that banks and mortgage brokers were engaging in fraud, both on lenderas and borrowers.
I was not impugning the moral character of someone who bought a home with a subprime mortgage but people seem to agree on a few things.
The easy ability to do cash out refinancing allowed people to stay in homes they should have sold (even if they didn’t understand the mortgages) which would have increased the supply of homes available for sale which bids up the price of homes.
The ability for unqualified buyers to buy homes beyond their means created more demand and increased the price of homes. I remember looking at homes alongside taxidrivers and school teachers.
And there was rampant speculation being done through subprime mortgages. In 2007 in the areas with the most severe bubbles, a very high percentage of subprime mortgages never made their first payment. People were gambling using their credit report as collateral and walking away from the table when the bet turned sour. At the same time other s were stuck with a much higher real estate price point.
ROFLMAO. Yeah because that’s the ONLY way you can prevent abusive predatory lending practices.
I think the left wing is a LOT closer to the truth than the right wing. Like I said, its kind of like blaming the Ocean fora tsunami created by an earthquake.
It sounded like you agreed with me that Fannie and Freddie were largely culpable of chasing market chare not because of their government subsidy but because of their exposure to market forces.
I think the implicit guarantee to Fannie and Freddie might have made them aprticularly political animals but it was not their politic al behaviour that contributed to the collapse. Still, I am now convinced that our country would be better off without Fannie and Freddie as long as Ginnie is there to take up the slack.
So you think that we shouldn’t blame wall street because of something an economist (who is famous for saying in 2005 that Wall Street is out of control) says? I don’t lay the same sort of moral blame on Wall Street that folks like Zeriel might but I think that the problem came from Wall Street and as you point out just below, the lack of oversight and regulation of wall street.
Like I said lack of regulation. the type of regulation that Wall Street semms to be bucking at every turn.
Once again we can’t eliminate the selfish isntinct in the sort of folks who would dedicate their lives to a life in finance but we should regulate tham and ignore their pleas when they claim that it is cramping their style.
I agree, we should get ridf of them and let Ginnie mae step into their shoes. They have proven themselves to be much ebtter stewards of our treasure and better executors of the public mission they are supposed to serve.
So you only agree with the parts you agree with and disagree with the parts you disagree with and you think we should similarly agree and disagtree withy it the same way you do?
Because we have had real estate booms and busts since then. It takes a very strained view of the world to believe that this bubble was building for 25 years.
But noone steered the car straight towards a cliff and accelerated for miles 25 years ago. They merely turned on the ignition. We weren’t heading towards a cliff in 2001 or 1991, the bubble was not inevitable at any point before we started seeing private label mortgage securities. If congress had passed a law saying that mortgage securities could only be issued by Fannie Freddie and Ginnie, we wold never have had a bubble. I’m not advocating for that but I am saying that the precipitating factor was the development of the private label market.
The CRA is about as contributory to collapse as Pacioli is to the Enron accounting scandals.
Yeah sure, this sort of stuff had been going on since before that but it was always fringe activity. The size of the market matters.
What ideological echo chamber do you think I am in? I have agreed that Fannie and Freddie probably should be dissolved because the combination of an implicit federal guarantee and private sector profitability goals and bonuses are a recipe for eventual disaster once they are faced with real market competition. I don’t think the mistake was in creating Fannie and Freddie. I think the mistake was in privatizing them. Once again, I point to Ginnie Mae and how they behaved during this episode and I would suggest that if Fannie and Freddie didn’t chase market share and let their market share wither like Ginnie did in the face of a robust private market for mortgages, they wouldn’t have the problems they have right now.
Wtf? So there was enough political will to condemn Fannie and Freddie (who almost single handedly made 30 year mortgages possible and put literally millions of people into homes) but they couldn’t muster the political will to blame CRA because they thought it had done a lot of good? I think you are searching for blame where none iexists.
The gatekeeper of consumer credit has ALWAYS been the lender not the borrower. This is a lesson I learned early on when Whimpy offered to gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. Banks are not in the business of lending money to everyone that fills out an application.
It makes about as much sense to blame consumers generally for borrowing as it does to blame wall street generally for being greedy. You can only regulate it, you can’t get rid of it.
I agree and disagree. There was rampant fraud among mortgage brokers. They would present 1% reverse amortization mortgages as having a 1% rate during the teaser period when their mortgages were accreting at 6%/year. They would doctor loan documents so that the borrower would appear to have more resources and higher income than hey actually had so that they could get larger commission for getting someone who should have gotten a 5% interest rate to sign on to a 7% interest rate. Its not that these minorities were too stupid, its that they were lied to and they were told that they could afford larger mortgages than they actually could. These guys were a few steps below used car salesmen.
But if the anti-fraud laws on the books doesn’t dissuade that sort of behaviour now, I’m not sure how even more severe penlaties would do so. A lot of these mortgage brokers are in jail.
Yeah but in the end, a lot of them are going to vote for Obama and precious few of them are going to vote for the Republican candidate.
It depends on what youa re including in your sample. There were definitely a large number of speculators who in cahoots with real estate agents and mortgage brokers submitted fraudulent loan applications to buy homes they intended to flip, like I said eaerlier, there was a massive percentage of subprime mortgages made in 2007 or 2008 that never made the first mortgage payment. There was massive fraud in the market but when it comes to actual primary residences, the incidence of this sort of activity was much much lower. Nobody WANTS to go through a foreclosure and eviction.
With that said, a lot of people were buying more house than they had any reasonable right to expect they could afford. Like I said, I was attending open houses with folks that drove a taxi for a living. Not saying that there’s anything wrong with driving a taxi but you can’t reasonably expect to afford a 5 bedroom in a new development in McLean, I don’t care how much you really really want your kids to attend good schools.
On the other hand my first mortgage broker tried to convince me that a 1% reverse amortization mortgage was actually a 1% mortgage during the initial period before the interest rate reset. He was looking at a 7% commission (over $50,000) if he could get me to sign onto that mortgage. It was fucking crazy.
Scylla, what you fail to understand, or more likely, refuse to understand, is that this is not really about you. I accept, in a general sort of way, your expertise. I don’t accept your absurd pretense that your expertise makes you the one-eyed man in a board of the blind, no, but generally speaking, sure, why not?
Across the board, a whole culture of financial “experts” are singing very much the same song: gosh, we had no idea! None of us were involved in such bad doings, and we had not the slightest inkling that such bad doings were afoot. We know all about financial stuff, but none of us knew about this stuff.
Which, even you would be forced to agree, is a very highly selective form of ignorance. Or amnesia.
So, we are left with two possible explanations: either they knew, but kept quiet so as not to rock the boat, which makes them to some degree complicit. Or they honestly had not the slightest clue, which makes them more or less incompetent at the work they are so lavishly paid to perform.
Either way, they are not to be trusted.
(Anecdotal aside: Got a little old lady living down the way, works at Wal-Mart. Too old to work anywhere, by my estimation, being ninety-something. But half her pension money is gone. To somebody else’s pocket. Her pension fund was one of those rock-solids, the kind where the fiduciary was obliged to invest in nothing but triple-A rated securities. Triple A being “rock solid”. You can guess the rest.
Now, the kind of investor who dabbles with his extra money is probably a fool, but who cares, really. Its still wrong, but not tragic. Her story is different.)
Now, I am forming a suspicion, given my vast expertise and my membership in the trailer-trash elite. I suspect that the stock market and its attendant entities is too fast, too complex, and too chaotic for anyone, no matter how well educated and experienced, to really know. From the great tulip madness to the credit-swap madness, its not one damned thing after another, its the same damned thing over and over.
Rather than “you” think “you guys”. And either you guys knew, or suspected, or had some inkling but quietly cashed your paychecks anyway, or you didn’t have the slightest clue, and your claims of competence are wildly exaggerated.
Either way, you guys are not to be trusted.
If you have a third alternative, you are welcome to provide it. Thus far, you seem interested only in protecting your, ah, dignity.
There is a temptation among people who make a good money pushing around paper to delude ourselves into thinking that at least part of the reason we earn so much money is because we understand things that that others are simply incapable of understanding.
NONE of this stuff is rocket surgery. You might never be hired at Goldman Sachs but they have to be able to explain their products to some really wealthy but not necessarily brilliant people. If anyone makes it sound like this stuff is too complicated for you to understand they are trying to fool you. If it takes more than half an hour or so to give someone a 50,000 foot view of a product it is probably not a particularly viable (and certainly not wisespread) product.
Sort of aside: why is it that smart people are so easy to fool? Its because they are smart people.
Years ago, there was a book by a sociology professor who studied con men and con jobs. You know, the “pigeon drop”, the “big store”, etc. He asked them who they looked for and they answered, well, doctors, lawyers, engineers. But, he protested, those are smart professional people, why would they fall for your scams? Because they are smart,was the answer. A really dumb person learns not to have confidence in his own opinions, he is wary. A smart doctor, a smart engineer is used to thinking of himself as smart, he is confident in his own competence.
Even better, is when the doctor/lawyer/whatever thinks he knows something you don’t know, that he is putting one over on you! Its a misnomer, they said, the the confidence man works by you trusting him, he works by getting you to believe that he trusts you.
Now, I am not saying that this directly applies to the matter at hand. But it helps to explain why so many smart people get screwed. Nobody explains it fully because it is presented as a complex matter, it is presented as something only a smart person would understand and appreciate. Here is a complicated investment, which you can appreciate, but the other guy won’t, you get an advantage. Because you are smart.
I know more than one person who, having decided that working for a living is for chumps and investment income is where it’s at, have spent more than a decade looking for that complex investment that guaranteed a profit for minimal money down.
They are, one and all, convinced they’re smart enough to get in on whatever it is that lets rich people become rich. Because it’s certainly not hard work, familial connections, or plain ol’ luck in combination with the former.
I’m lucky that I find investing fundamentally uninteresting, because otherwise I would be one of those people you describe. I would get sucked into that quest so easily.
It’s kind of sad. One of them is a crazy arch-neocon, and he is perpetually broke and living in his parent’s basement while hunting this mythical perfect investment.
So he says to me, “I want to go to such and such anime convention, but I don’t have any money. I’m going to go sign up for welfare, why should all those lazy losers get all of it.”
I says “Man, you haven’t worked in three years, and you have no kids. I predict you’re going to come back with $0 and a scowl.”
He says “No way, you always hear about these asshole poor people (note: he’s not one of them, see, because he’s living with his double-Doctor parents) living high on the hog and it’s high time I got a piece of the action.”
Three hours later, he returns, with a scowl.
The only difference I perceive between his mindset (not his knowledge or training, his mindset) and that of a Maurice Greenberg or Jon Corzine is starting capital.
