#OccupyWallStreet

[RTFirefly]

@Scylla

Ok. Go take your nine volt intellect, hang Barney Frank in effigy, and feel free that you’ve safely destroyed the evil overlord things will magically be happy.

If that’s the level of this discussion, why don’t you twist your penis off and stick it in your nostril. It should fit with plenty of room to spare.

You know, I get it. You’re not rich. Maybe you don’t want to be rich and you have other priorities to chasing dollars. Maybe you want to be, but your not good at it, or your lazy or whatever. Anyway, somebody else is richer than you and they have it better than you, and that pisses you off, so generally you just fucking blame them for everything.

Actually, that other people are much richer than me doesn’t bother me in the least. I just don’t want their opinion to count for more than anyone else’s in our politics.

It’s called being a small-d democrat.

But I’ve given up on technical fixes to the problem. Power flows to money like water flows to the sea. Things worked pretty damned well for the first generation or so after WWII because the gap between average and rich wasn’t huge; the rich weren’t rich enough to bend the system to their will at the drop of a hat. But over the past three decades, that’s changed pretty drastically.

But this problem does not have its genesis in reach people fucking over people, no matter how much you like the meme, no matter how much it assuages your bitterness and jealousy.

The idea here was to put poor people into houses and give them mortgages at the same low rates as rich people. And, it was a fucking good idea, and it worked for a long time. The main reason why it stopped working is that the government set an artificial market in the rates at which they were guaranteeing those mortgages that everybody else had to follow to compete in the sector. In spite of signs that things were overheating they continued to set the market low for another five years despite repeated warning from more responsible minds, and the person that reacted most strenuously against those objections was Barney Frank. He defended intolerable practices by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and insisted on the solvency and responsibility of those firms and their actions. He insisted that anybody that thought differently didn’t care about poor people keeping their houses.

In the Foxiverse, maybe, but not in reality.

In this world, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were late to the party. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1978 didn’t have shit to do with anything, because mortgage lenders were out there humping the streets for people to lend money to, to fill the ravenous market for repackaging these things into bundles that were then divided into funky tranches, where the top tranche of these garbage loans were magically transmuted into AAA securities.

IOW, the big money was looking for an investment that was both safe and had a higher rate of return than safe investments normally were. Once these investments could be created, they wanted more and more and more. That drove the whole process, not Barney Frank or Fannie or Freddie or the CRA, much as your Foxified mind would like to believe otherwise.

So, you want to blame a rich white guy, blame Barney Frank. The fact is that your usual scapegoats for all evil in the world happen to be on record years in advance claiming these were bad practices.

Then why did they buy tons of these shitty derivatives with ‘AAA’ labels hastily slapped on them?

Guess they didn’t believe themselves.

So, in the words of one who knows fucking idiocy from the inside, “stop being a fucking idiot.”

We’re in a world where bubbles will follow bubbles, because there’s too much money simultaneously looking for safety and high rates of return, and not enough consumer demand to generate a market for enough good investments to absorb all that capital, because the ratio of capital to consumer income is whacked.

You just don’t have enough consumer spending, or even the possibility of it, to absorb all that capital. And yet the rich people that control the GOP have ensured that there will continue to be a shortage of consumer spending for a long period of time to come. (Nobody said becoming rich, either by making your own fortune in a productive enterprise, or by inheritance, gave you a clue about macro.) So their money will be looking for safe but lucrative investments, and finding no real ones, fake ones will continue to spring up, just as they did in the past decade.

That isn’t particularly good for rich people over time, but unfortunately, it’s far worse for millions of people who will never be anywhere near rich.

[China_Guy]

@Scylla

I started with Lehman as a trader’s assistant in Mortgage backed securities in '89, and have been around every since. I hear what you are saying, but I disagree with your thesis that he recognized the extent of what was to come. Then too, is the argument about the role of the Fed and the fed chairman. What Greenspan did, the extent of his interference, was unprecedented at that time in terms of its verbal activism. I think that might have been a mistake as it kind of conferred this belief that the Fed had this responsibility to manage and oversea the entire economy, which exists to this day.

Picking nits, but my thesis is NOT that Greeny knew what to come. Greenspan saw a problem, called it out and made the decision that he could safely not deal with it in 1997. Then 1997 turned into the Russian crisis, so he had to be accomodating for that. Rinse rather repeat. By the time he finally saw the light, the horse had long left the stable.

Greenspan tried to use his verbal activism to coerce the markets to doing tightening for the Fed, thus saving direct interaction. It didn’t work. Thus setting the stage for a bigger crisis, and a bigger required intervention. And he kept putting off the day of reckoning and we ended up with the great reset. It was a comedy of errors or the perfect storm or being asleep at the wheel. Not a great conspiracy that in 1986 Greenspan foresaw either the internet bubble or the reset. It is simply Greeny allowed himself to be painted in a corner.

[gonzomax]

Fanny and Freddie guaranteed mortgages. They did not originate them. they did not dictate the terms. They did not create the zero down 100 percent mortgages. They did not create the phony book work . they did not create the variable rate mortgages that mortgage companies pushed because they were paid more for writing them. They did not create the faking yearly salaries of mortgagees. They did not tell the ratings companies to rate every fucking mortgage AAA no matter how bad it was. They did not tell them to AAA rate the CDOs.
That was all done by the fucking banks. If you don’t know that SCYLLA, you are living in a vacuum.
The banks pushed bad mortgages because they were not keeping them. They were immediately selling them off to investment house who were stupid enough to trust them. This mess lies at the feet of B of A, Goldman and the other banks.
It also lies at in the lap of congress and the senate who gutted regulation and oversight. It is the child of bank lobbyists and front men like Greenspan, Summers, and Rubin. it is Graham and Leach who repealed Glass /Steagal.
But Fanny and Freddie? get real.

[Snowboarder_Bo]

@Scylla

Blocking traffic. This reinforces my point. Protesting today isn’t about reaching the government, its about reaching people by being an pain in the ass.

The government is the people, dumbass. And the people are the government. What kind of a fucking fool doesn’t know that?

[elucidator]

So the takeaway is, regarding public protest. Holler. Jump and down and yell. Make up bad songs in the key of C. Try to shame a generation of gluttonous jackals who rob old folks.

Just don’t disrupt traffic. There are limits, by God! Limits, I say!

[Mr.Svinlesha]

Scylla:

No. That is why I said it was not a problem for protests. You left the whole part out where I talked about the right tool for the job, and protests by their nature really need to stand for something pretty straightforward. This being a complex problem aren’t the right tool. That’s what I said.

I’m just saying you can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you fault the occupiers because they’re protesting a very complicated problem, you can’t at the same time fault them because they don’t provide a simple solution to it, in the form of a motto.

I don’t think either one of us knows what the right tool is anymore. You may say you can fix things with your little screwdriver, but I doubt it. In particular, you have the problem that there’s this other guy over there with his screwdriver, screwing in the opposite direction because he prefers a different outcome.

In the US government I see a completely fucked-up system that is no longer capable of solving simple problems – like funding itself past next week – let alone tackling the real challenges we’re facing. I also see a government that has been bought and is run by corporate interests. Government officials are picked to serve from this corporate world, and there isn’t an official out there who doesn’t have a cushy corporate job waiting for him when he finishes his tenure.

Things only get worse (and more complicated) when you move to the global perspective.

One of the points I wanted to make with the interview I posted earlier (for those who missed it you can view it here) is that the system is now rife with moral hazard. Listen to this guy: “traders don’t care if the governments solve this problem, traders are only interested in making money;” “I go to bed at night praying for a recession;” “governments don’t rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world;” and so on. Admittedly anecdotal evidence, but I’ll bet he’s honestly reflecting the mindset of many, maybe most, traders and players. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me, it jives with what I know about how the corporate world works from news reports, and it explains (in part) the mess we’re in.

So…I’m not a finance specialist, I spent my life studying my own little patch over here and applying my own little screwdriver to it. And I see these things going on, and I think, damn! So, I vote. And Bush beats Gore. Or Obama wins, but is so thoroughly hamstrung by people who claim hes a secret nazi communist muslim that he can’t get anything done. So voting doesn’t help so much. And then I write my congressman. He responds with a polite letter of thanks. Nothing happens. And so I sign some petitions, and maybe go to a protest or two. Nothing happens, the rape of the Earth proceeds merrily along in the face of common sense and human decency, the gap between rich and poor continues to widen, corporations continue write legislation and shove it down Congress’s throat. I spent hours and hours here prior to the invasion of Iraq, arguing against it, and I don’t think I managed to change so much as one single person’s opinion. Obviously, these tools at my disposal – voting, organizing, letting my voice be heard, protesting – have no effect. So what the hell tool do we need?

I look at this system now and think it’s too utterly fucked to fix. We’re done as a species now. I wash my hands of the human race.

But I do not begrudge others who at least want to try to change things, even if I think their attempt is a bit naive, a bit unprofessional, and pretty much hopeless. Dorkness says, “for a protest to be defensible, it has to be media-savvy”, and I think, “Oh my God, have we come to that?” I for one am glad they aren’t so fuckin media-savvy. And you might be right, Scylla, they might be using the wrong tool-set, but at least they’re trying, and I for one find that admirable, and well – goddammit, I admit it – a little inspiring. Although I dare not hope really, because I fear they’re going to be squashed like a bug by a hammer, sooner or later.

*Ok. Sure. That’s pretty good in fact. Except they didn’t say that, or come up with it, you did.

You have just proven yourself to be smarter than the totality of all those dipshits and all their efforts spanning several weeks.

In five minutes you come up with something better.

Not to take anything away from your propaganda generating powers but that’s a sad statement on these morons, isn’t it? *

?

I though you asked me to come up with a succinct explanation for what they wanted. I just took their Declaration and distilled it into a single sentence. Do you really not understand that this is one of the core motivations underlying these protests?

Don’t you think you should at least try talking to some of these people before you dismiss them as morons?

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@elucidator

So the takeaway is, regarding public protest. Holler. Jump and down and yell. Make up bad songs in the key of C. Try to shame a generation of gluttonous jackals who rob old folks.

Just don’t disrupt traffic. There are limits, by God! Limits, I say!

Whereas I think just the opposite. The hollering, jumping up and down and yelling, and making up bad songs does nothing to shame the gluttonous jackals who rob children of their economic future. They’re perfectly accustomed to it.

But disrupting events as usual, as long as you have a clear method and strategy, is perfectly valid. It’s part of a long tradition of successful protest, especially if you do it in a way that gets you deliberately arrested and that has a very clear relationship to your strategic aim.

This protest doesn’t have those traits. When people are arrested for blocking traffic, they complain that they were tricked into the act. That’s pitiful.

[elucidator]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

…This protest doesn’t have those traits. When people are arrested for blocking traffic, they complain that they were tricked into the act. That’s pitiful.

And you know, for a fact, that they were not tricked? Because servants of the public order, as represented by the estimable Inspector Bologna, wouid not stoop to such?

[Scylla]

@RTFirefly

But I’ve given up on technical fixes to the problem. Power flows to money like water flows to the sea. Things worked pretty damned well for the first generation or so after WWII because the gap between average and rich wasn’t huge; the rich weren’t rich enough to bend the system to their will at the drop of a hat. But over the past three decades, that’s changed pretty drastically.

Could you possibly be more trite and general?

In this world, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were late to the party. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1978 didn’t have shit to do with anything, because mortgage lenders were out there humping the streets for people to lend money to, to fill the ravenous market for repackaging these things into bundles that were then divided into funky tranches, where the top tranche of these garbage loans were magically transmuted into AAA securities.

Oyyy, Ok. No. You just don’t know what you are talking about. It’s like if you are watching baseball and you shouted “goal.” The above doesn’t actually make any sense, and I don’t really care to write another mega post to correct your cluelessness. I don’t know anything about computer programming, and I don’t argue about it and pretend I do. I suggest you pursue a similar ethic.

I can safely ignore the rest of your post.

[Scylla]

@China_Guy

Picking nits, but my thesis is NOT that Greeny knew what to come. Greenspan saw a problem, called it out and made the decision that he could safely not deal with it in 1997. Then 1997 turned into the Russian crisis, so he had to be accomodating for that. Rinse rather repeat. By the time he finally saw the light, the horse had long left the stable.

I understand your point. My argument is that the problem was referring to didn’t really exist. When he was talking about PE ratios being too high, I don’t think he had any idea that the Nobel prize winners at Long Term Capitol were busy committing mathematical suicide, not that the ruble was going to collapse. I don’t even think he was talking about the tech bubble.

I think he was thinking more about the soft landing he got credit for engineering and was thinking about this new role the Fed seemed to have assumed as being responsible for taking the sharp edges off of market cycles, and that “making statements” had become an instrument of monetary policy, and that was all he was doing. I think you are wrong to credit him with having any inkling of the severity of issues that were to occur in the future. And, unless you really could predict the tech meltdown that occured 4? years later and also knew that 911 would occur shortly thereafter then, really, there wasn’t anything to do.

Anyhow, I believe the Fed’s job is to manage inflation. Anything else is a bonus. So, at the very worst, Greenspan simply doesn’t get his bonus points.

Your scenario is somehow that he knew but was afraid to act, and the problem I have with this is that credits him both with too much foresight and too little courage of his convictions, neither of which I find accurate.

[elucidator]

Pity the poor, downtrodden bankers, in the ruthless grip of Ernst Stavro Barneyfrank, seated upon his modernistical Ikea chair, feeding live goldfish to an obnoxious Angora cat. If only they had some political power to protect themselves! But no. Alas.

[elucidator]

@Scylla

Could you possibly be more trite and general?

Oyyy, Ok. No. You just don’t know what you are talking about. It’s like if you are watching baseball and you shouted “goal.” The above doesn’t actually make any sense, and I don’t really care to write another mega post to correct your cluelessness. I don’t know anything about computer programming, and I don’t argue about it and pretend I do. I suggest you pursue a similar ethic.

I can safely ignore the rest of your post.

This is remarkably efficient! Rather than appeal of authority, you set yourself up as the authority, and simply appeal to yourself!

[Scylla]

@gonzomax

Fanny and Freddie guaranteed mortgages. They did not originate them. they did not dictate the terms.

Actually they kind of do dictate the terms. They don’t guarranty all mortgages. Just certain conforming ones. And, ahem, they may have been a little lax in regard to their diligence here.

They did not create the zero down 100 percent mortgages.

No. There is also nothing inherently wrong with such a thing, not that it has anything to do anything else.

They did not create the phony book work.

Yes they did. What planet are you from?

http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/16/news/companies/fannie_follow.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2007111617

That’s one. There’s like thousands of articles in 2007 and 2008 dealing with the bookkeeping improprieties at these institutions. The crisis of confidence this led to in the security of the underlying assets they were guaranteeing was probably the tipping point that brought the whole crisis to a head.

they did not create the variable rate mortgages that mortgage companies pushed because they were paid more for writing them.

What’s wrong with variable rate mortgages. I had one. It was great. It’s been great.

They did not create the faking yearly salaries of mortgagees.

No. I guess the people that signed their name to the disclosure statement, lying about what they earned did that.

They did not tell the ratings companies to rate every fucking mortgage AAA no matter how bad it was.

I don’t think anybody did that. I think the ratings companies failed to do their due diligence under the assumption that anything that was backed by a gov’t guarranteed asset, was itself a government guarranteed asset by extension.

Essentially the ratings companies are paid to give an accurate assessment of the risk involved. They failed to do so, and frankly it’s on them.

They did not tell them to AAA rate the CDOs.
That was all done by the fucking banks.

The banks don’t tell the ratings companies what rating to put on a security. So no.

If you don’t know that SCYLLA, you are living in a vacuum.

I know that I know what I’m talking about as far as these financial instruments go, because I was and am involved in them professionally. I would say that it looks to me like you get your information from Jon Stewart, but that would be insulting Jon, as he does better research and is more accurate than you when he is just making a joke.

The banks pushed bad mortgages because they were not keeping them.

Umm, yeah. Kinda. There was a lot of demand for mortgages so that they could be bundled and securitized and then broken up into little parts that did specific and esoteric things. But there is nothing wrong with this inherently. Fisherman fish because there is a demand for fish. A demand for mortgages means that rates can be low, and mortgages can be easier to get than they would be otherwise.

There’s nothing wrong with banks selling mortgages.

They were immediately selling them off to investment house who were stupid enough to trust them.

? I’m not really thinking that the banks misrepresented the mortgages to “investment houses.”

[/QUOTE]

Anyway, I’m sitting here getting frustrated that you and RTF and others are spouting off authoritatively on things that you clearly have no fucking clue about, and I’m wondering why you do this, but I guess that’s the internet for you.

[Scylla]

@elucidator

This is remarkably efficient! Rather than appeal of authority, you set yourself up as the authority, and simply appeal to yourself!

Yeah. seriously. I can’t fight all the stupidity.

[RTFirefly]

@Scylla

Could you possibly be more trite and general?

I am devastated by the clarity and precision of this devastating rebuttal.

Oyyy, Ok. No. You just don’t know what you are talking about. It’s like if you are watching baseball and you shouted “goal.” The above doesn’t actually make any sense, and I don’t really care to write another mega post to correct your cluelessness. I don’t know anything about computer programming, and I don’t argue about it and pretend I do. I suggest you pursue a similar ethic.

Ditto. Just because you say something doesn’t make sense doesn’t mean anything. For instance, the fact that Fannie and Freddie only got into subprime in a meaningful way after the banksters were up to their armpits in it has been verified repeatedly. The connection between the Community Reinvestment Act of 1978 and the crash has been debunked just about infinitely often. This is old territory, and only a ridiculous bunch of people who believe each other’s lies are still saying this sorta shit back and forth between each other.

I can safely ignore the rest of your post.

Seeya, Brave Sir Robin.

[RTFirefly]

@Scylla

Yeah. seriously. I can’t fight all the stupidity.

Sure you can - just hit yourself over the head over and over again!

[Scylla]

@Mr.Svinlesha

Scylla:
One of the points I wanted to make with the interview I posted earlier (for those who missed it you can view it here) is that the system is now rife with moral hazard. Listen to this guy: “traders don’t care if the governments solve this problem, traders are only interested in making money;” “I go to bed at night praying for a recession;” “governments don’t rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world;” and so on. Admittedly anecdotal evidence, but I’ll bet he’s honestly reflecting the mindset of many, maybe most, traders and players. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me, it jives with what I know about how the corporate world works from news reports, and it explains (in part) the mess we’re in.

I doubt it. The dude is an “independant” trader which means he is not associated with any wirehouse and speaks for himself. Looks like a guy who is willing to say something salacious to get on tv. There’s no shortage of people like this in the US. Usually there is one or two of them on every day. They push some extreme position that the talking heads can react to, and it makes tv. They get free advertising.

I don’t read much into that stuff.

So…I’m not a finance specialist, I spent my life studying my own little patch over here and applying my own little screwdriver to it. And I see these things going on, and I think, damn! So, I vote. And Bush beats Gore. Or Obama wins, but is so thoroughly hamstrung by people who claim hes a secret nazi communist muslim that he can’t get anything done. So voting doesn’t help so much. And then I write my congressman. He responds with a polite letter of thanks. Nothing happens. And so I sign some petitions, and maybe go to a protest or two. Nothing happens, the rape of the Earth proceeds merrily along in the face of common sense and human decency, the gap between rich and poor continues to widen, corporations continue write legislation and shove it down Congress’s throat. I spent hours and hours here prior to the invasion of Iraq, arguing against it, and I don’t think I managed to change so much as one single person’s opinion. Obviously, these tools at my disposal – voting, organizing, letting my voice be heard, protesting – have no effect. So what the hell tool do we need?

I look at this system now and think it’s too utterly fucked to fix. We’re done as a species now. I wash my hands of the human race.

That ethic worked for George Carlin who was about to die, but I think if you expect change by casting a vote or writing a letter I think you are setting yourself up for disillusionment. I don’t think it a wise or admirable philosophy.

I think the world is a wonderful place, and I am so happy to be in it.

But I do not begrudge others who at least want to try to change things, even if I think their attempt is a bit naive, a bit unprofessional, and pretty much hopeless. Dorkness says, “for a protest to be defensible, it has to be media-savvy”, and I think, “Oh my God, have we come to that?” I for one am glad they aren’t so fuckin media-savvy. And you might be right, Scylla, they might be using the wrong tool-set, but at least they’re trying, and I for one find that admirable, and well – goddammit, I admit it – a little inspiring. Although I dare not hope really, because I fear they’re going to be squashed like a bug by a hammer, sooner or later.

I’m confused as to whether this is nihilism, despair, or hope. You’re sounding a little schizophrenic, my friend.

Don’t you think you should at least try talking to some of these people before you dismiss them as morons?

No. I can identify a fish by smell. I don’t need to have a conversation with it.

[Scylla]

@RTFirefly

Ditto. Just because you say something doesn’t make sense doesn’t mean anything.

That’s true. But it’s not my job to untangle and correct the mess of factual errors you wrote. The thing is, what you wrote looks like somebody who has no idea what they are talking about, stringing shit together.

My guess is that somebody else, reading what you wrote, will probably be able to see that once I say it doesn’t make sense.

And, I actually made an effort to correct some of Gonzo’s stuff, which wasn’t quite as generalized and obfuscated as your bullshit.

[elucidator]

@Scylla

I…I think the world is a wonderful place, and I am so happy to be in it…

Ah! So this must be the wellspring of your genial good nature and warm generosity.

[Scylla]

@elucidator

Ah! So this must be the wellspring of your genial good nature and warm generosity.

I am a pretty sweet guy, aren’t I?