I think Lewis is factually accurate. What he doesn’t address though is what else the banks could have done with the money.
In order for them to lend money out to consumers, you actually need consumers to want to borrow money.
So, as the world fell apart, and markets crashed was there suddenly a whole bunch of people who looked at as an opportunity to go on a spending spree, but cars houses? We’re small businesses suddenly looking to grow and expand?
Because, if they weren’t and there wasn’t any demand for borrowing, what were they supposed to do with it that would have been better than what they did?
So, the question Lewis and you need to answer is:
Was there sufficient demand for consumer loans to absorb that money as an alternative to what the banks did with it?
I don’t disagree, but mind you, I was discussing the public perception, which is still “they crashed our economy, are still making mad profits, and they want MORE of my money?”
Taking a step back and a step forward is a net zero steps.
I am willing to bet that there are a significant number in the OWS movement who think about banks etc. the way a significant minority of the Tea Party thinks about government–better to tie it in knots until it crashes, then build something better and leaner on the ashes.
Ain’t sayin’ it’s right, just that “burn it all down and start over right” isn’t that uncommon a belief anymore.
Is that a hypothetical? Are we about to embark on a merry cruise to survey the various alternative universes in search of a narrative you find comfortable and pleasing? This fellow Goldfarb seems to have a clear thesis, why not engage the question directly?
On the one hand, you are eager to suggest that I just fell off of the turnip truck, and then you turn around and solicit my expert opinon? If it were anybody else, I might be suspicious, might think you were being a tad disingenuous. But seeing as its you, I think its a trap, that you are not so interested in ferreting out the truth, but eager for another opportunity to condescend.
They went to desperate lengths to unjam a credit freeze, but there really wasn’t one? A pity you weren’t there. But wait, no, you haven’t actually offered that for fact, simply a wispy conjecture of maybeness.
Well, *are *you going to offer that for fact? And provide the appropriate substantiation? Or are you simply blowing smoke?
It’s very simple. If you wish to fault the banks for what they did, you need to show that they could have done something better., I.E. lend the money to consumers.
Could they? Was their sufficient demand?
I am not asking for your opinion, I am asking for the fact you need to support your argument.
It is fun though, watching how hard you seem to be working to not answer a question.
We should care about banks? The banks should only care about making money. Why do people have responsibility to banks, while bankers care about nothing but profits, not their customers, not any government in the world, not the USA, not their employees?
Our corporate structure does not include a way of judging them on ethical, moral or patriotic grounds. That is a fundamental flaw.
When corporations were beginning to grow in early America, the corporation charters were able to be removed for reasons far less damaging and corrupting than our modern corporations are routinely guilty of. Over time we have been eroded into a corporation that will fight any attempts at regulating in the public interest. They buy politicians and regulators to allow them to continue polluting, creating dangerous working conditions, and risking the financial security of the whole country.
Fuck bank of A. They have brought this hatred on themselves with their theft on a grand style. They are deeply involved in the fiscal damage that we all are fighting to correct. What is nuts, is we are fighting them in our attempt to clean up banking. They are doing everything in their considerable power to stop regulation that might save the system and provide a step by step process to make banking more responsible and safe.
Absent clear and convincing evidence otherwise, which you are welcome to provide, I accept the narrative of Mr Goldfarb and Mr Lewis, as referenced above (what we call a “cite”? You may have heard?..)
If you have an argument to make, make it, nobody is stopping you.
If you are a true righty, you believe another bank will step in and provide the same services. There have been huge bank failures since The bank made crash. List of largest bank failures in the United States - Wikipedia There have been lots of them, caused by internal mismanagement and malfeasance. It was certainly not over regulation.
You are suggesting the "too big to fail " argument. They are actually too big to exist. They should be dismantled one at a time until they no longer have power over the American people and government.
This is belated, apologies. Between work and other real life commitments I lost track of the thread over the last few days and when I came back, holy mother! 6 more pages. I haven’t had time to wade through all of it after your reply to me on page 31 (!), so if what follows has already been addressed, double apologies. On the other hand, given that you’ve written two long replies to me, it would be I think extremely impolite for me not to respond.
At this point I doubt we’re going to come to any sort of consensus regarding the issues we’ve been discussing. I don’t know if further discussion will be particularly worthwhile. I’ll leave that up to you to decide. I would like to see some indication from your side that you at least understand my views, even if you disagree with them. At this point I’m not sure you’ve even begun to understand what the OWS protest is really about – you seem more focused on trying to distort the occupation into what you want it to be about instead. But we’ll get to that in a minute.
I had written that the protestors had a constitutional right to occupy Zucotti (sp?) park, and you responded:
The point of the OWS is not that a very few 1% are hogging A resource. It is (in part) that a very few 1% are hogging A LOT OF RESOURCES. This is not the same thing. OWS has not occupied every available public space in New York City in order to promote an agenda that benefits only a select few. It has occupied one small park in Manhattan, in order to promote an agenda that benefits the overwhelming majority of Americans. You see the difference, yes?
In addition, your sudden concern regarding moral rectitude would be edifying were you to apply it equally. For example: it’s apparently okay, according to you, for the president of the US to lie to the public to start an unprovoked war of aggression. But LAWD LAWD, don’t set up a tent in a public park! THE IMMORALITY OF IT! To me, the former is much more immoral than the latter.
Regarding the right to assembly, you write:
At the risk of Godwinizing the thread, I think I can safely say that banning the right to free assembly is one of the first steps towards a totalitarian society. If you are proud to be an American, it is because you are proud of the rights guaranteed to our society by the Constitution, including the right to assemble peacefully. I find your reasoning here to be bizarre, frankly. It’s like you’ve already decide on the endpoint – OWS is bad! – and then working backwards, you try to support the conclusion with any kind of argument you can think of.
The above encapsulate precisely what I meant when I wrote earlier that you have not yet understood what these protests are about. So let’s break it down.
Let’s start by conceding that at least some portion of the OWS crowd is “blaming somebody else, camping out in a park, and smoking dope while running from their responsibilities.” That’s to demonstrate clearly to you that I understand what you mean, that I’m not missing the point. Honestly, it’s not too difficult to understand your view of the protestors, or the point being made by the “We are the 53%” tumblr. And obviously, if that’s the only thing OWS is about, then they have no standing. But please tell me, then, why I, or any of the many other people who’ve been debating you in this thread, support their efforts? Do you think I advocate blaming others, smoking dope, and running from responsibilities as a way of addressing serious social problems?
Now, not everybody at the OWS is a hippy. I’m sure you’ve seen pictures. There are many working class people, many older people. There are a number of labor unions. This movement is not JUST a bunch of art students, and by painting it as such, you’re actually completely avoiding the substance of what I and many others have been trying to say to you.
The OWS protests are not about “whining” or “blame.” They are about demanding a more equitable economic system, even for these poor deluded 53 percenters. You wrote earlier, yourself, that there is no justification for the current level of CEO compensation. So why should I, or anyone else, just sit on my fat ass and accept it? I think the girl and her father are admirable, but misguided, because they aren’t playing on a level field. Her father, with cancer, works 72 hours a week, and they pay more of their income in taxes than Warren Buffet. In what universe is this fair, or even morally acceptable?
In fact, by choosing to stay at home and continue working within this system, I think she and her father are actually abdicating responsibility. The people who are taking responsibility are the protestors, who’ve said, “No, this isn’t right. We have to do something about this.” Not just for themselves, but for her and her father as well. Protesting a dysfunctional, unjust system is not the same thing as whining.
We have a small occupation going on here in Gothenburg as well, you know. But it’s tiny. Why? Because in Sweden we members of the middle class already have what the OWS is campaigning for, for the most part. We don’t really have anything to protest against. I have good, affordable, health care, a good job with good benefits and decent pay, governmental child support payments, and – my favorite of all – 5 weeks paid vacation a year. These are benefits guaranteed to every working Swede. Do you think the bankers and capitalists here just decided to grant workers these things out of the kindness of their hearts? No – they were fought for, by unions and the working class, who rose up and said, “We work for the wealth of this country, we deserve a share of the profits.” It was a struggle that took decades of strikes and protests. Are you seriously saying these previous generations of workers advocated “blaming somebody else, camping out in a park, and smoking dope while running from their responsibilities”? Well, if so all I can say, is thank God they did – because otherwise I’d probably be working a back-breaking job, 72 hours a week, paying more of my income in taxes than the wealthiest 1% of the country, while watching my cancer grow and listening to my daughter tell me what a great life I’ve got.
If there’s anything you take away from our debate on these issues, take this. Until you are willing to see what I’m getting at, and meet this argument head on, you’ve done nothing but wave your hands and stick your head in the sand.
Finally, we come to the discussion of the car accident. This is hard to address without wandering deep into swamps I would prefer to avoid. You say you believe in something you know is not true, and concede that in real life, you would not even act as if you really believed in it. If I were to crash into your car at an intersection:
You go on to argue that your belief helps you prior to the accident. And that’s fine – more power to you if your false belief somehow helps you. But let us say the accident occurs anyway. In such a scenario, you would still blame me for my actions and the damage they caused you, and use every means at your disposal for a redress of the grievances. With all right, I might add.
So let us use this situation as an analogy. In this analogy, you, Scylla, are the OWS protestors. Having taken all reasonable precautions, you sit patiently at an intersection waiting for the light to change. I am the the bankers, the financial bigwigs, and their government lackeys. The alcohol in my system is the CDOs and other financial instruments that caused the meltdown.
It’s 2008. Having drunk myself into a near-stupor on these instruments, I stumble to my car, drive off, and plow into your car at the intersection.
It seems to me, following your own logic, that for you to sue me for an accident that is your own fault is nothing but a lot of *whining *on your part. And why is it okay for you to sue me down to my last penny, in the one case, but morally reprehensible for OWS to demand a redress of grievances, on the other?
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/08/bofa-pay-137-million-settle-claims-defrauded-schools-hospitals/\
I have posted this before. B of A paid enormous fines for defrauding public organizations, schools, hospitals and others. The fine was small as a ratio of their theft. It actually makes it a cost of doing business. Acts like this ,is why we need death penalties for corporate persons. This incident is one of many our bankers have perpetrated on the American people.
The narrative stands on its own merits, which you have described as “factual”. But you wish to add an addenda, a different conjecture not offered in the narrative, that perhaps they were simply unable to do what was expected. And then you insist that I prove otherwise. Huh? What?
You aren’t even stating it as fact, its nothing but a conjecture on your part, and a flimsy one at that. What would we have to believe? That there was no credit freeze crisis? Because there was no gap to be filled, there was no such absence?
And yet we have these highly paid, highly respected men running around like chickens with their asses on fire, trying to stave off a disaster that wasn’t there? I imagine someone would have commented upon that, at some point. Outside of yourself, has anyone put forward that theory?
Hell, you won’t even claim it as your own, you still haven’t said anything remotely like “This is what I think happened”, all you’ll say is “This could have happened, so you have to prove it didn’t.”
Read the book? Saw the movie? I did both. I call the widely admired and internationally published writer, Syclla, who describes them as “factual”. That ain’t maybe, or could be, its fact. Both Lewis and Goldfarb describe the same circumstances in much the same way, so we may, by extension, presume that you regard Goldfarb as factual, as well.
Clearly, then, at the time, they believed such a crisis existed. Were they wildly delusional, then? Seeking to stem the population explosion of unicorns? Trying to prevent the importation of meat from the Loch Ness Monster?
Were Mr. Paulson and Mr Bernanke deranged, or wildly misinformed about their area of expertise? Are you offering any reason for us to believe so? Do you believe it yourself, or only hoping to vex me by demanding a rebuttal for something you don’t even believe yourself?
They acted as they did in response to a crisis, and you describe the circumstances as “factual”. The only way your conjecture fits those circumstances is if the crisis did not really exist, and they were A) delusional or B) too stupid to make their own oatmeal.
According to your newest rulilng, is everybody required to refute an absurd conjecture, or just me? And what blithering idiot would put you in charge of making debate rules?
I have half a mind to modify that to make it more general and repost it on facebook.