Can’t happen. If they are unable to make full payment they have to cut it. In 30 years if we do nothing, they will pay 80 percent. They can not hit the treasury.
Fair Issac and the mortgage companies would beg to differ with you.
I was reacting, perhaps too much, to this
I found this perhaps a bit of axe-grinding ish (given your deep idelogical hostility to the intiative), but on the other hand I must confess that I did not give the reaction full thought.
Oh yes, my “antics.” Doubtless more fun to play argument clinic and construct analyses of Japan w/o bothering to read anything.
yes, agreed. Past history goes a long-way to suggesting Willingness is there. Ability is great, but if there is not Willingness, not meaningful. My firm has been stiffed by firms that had plenty of Ability, but no Willingness (and low morals to boot of course, but emerging markets, Africa… part of the cost of doing business).
On the national level, one reason Spain is squeaking by, like Ireland, but Greece is in deep doodoo is the Willingness factor. Spain and Ireland are seen as far more serious in Willingness.
Uhm, that doesn’t address what I was talking about. What I said was, if you have a surviving productive farm over there right now, you’ve got what people want, which is more important than any currency.
Now, about your link. Obviously you wanted to make an off-topic statement so let’s go there, eh?
The first pictures in that group look like white farmers who were beaten or killed during Mugabe’s poorly-managed land redistribution program. These were descendants of the European invaders who raped and murdered Zimbabweans, took over the country and ruled over the native black population and treated them like dogs.
If so then, forum ban or no ban, I cannot be arsed to give a flying rat’s ass about what happened to these people as they got kicked out of Zimbabwe. White invaders in Zimbabwe constituted 1% of the population and owned over half of their prime farmland. I’m sure you remember the guy who said “I do not believe in black majority rule—not in a thousand years.”
“..the native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise. We must adopt a system of despotism in our relations with the barbarians of Southern Africa.” Remember that? Those pictures you posted were karma.
Now Mugabe was a real d-bag who screwed his people over epically by handing farms over to his incompetent buddies. The forced removal of those invaders could have been managed far better, by giving control to the experienced black Africans who worked on those farms. Mugabe deserves punishments that should be illegal to enumerate on any forum. But those pictures you showed me, especially the first ones? Zero sympathy. So sue me and call me names in The Pit for all I care. It won’t get those white farmers back in power in Zimbabwe; sadly it also won’t bring karma down on Mugabe for his screw-ups.
Yeah fair enough, I’m just trying to make a point. Here’s a better attempt. Since the meltdown and US bond yields falling to incredibly low levels, they’ve only shown increases over three stretches of time, and those strtches of time were when we had good economic news and sentiment that the economy would start improving, but then fell again due to reality intruding. And government debt is only in the situation it’s in due to the fact that the government has assumed so much private sector debt due to the failure of the private sector.
Finally:
Ahhh, collective blood guilt.
All the black Zimbabweans suffered under collective blood guilt: they were guilty of being black.
That, and the people who got kicked out of Zimbabwe directly benefitted from ongoing racism against the native populace.
It’s like this - if I steal your car and keep it hidden for 20 years and my family makes a billion dollars using it as a vehicle for deliveries or whatever, your argument is we don’t owe you jack monkey squat. It’s been ours for 20 years so it’s ours for good. Conquerors keepers, losers weepers, all that stuff.
So when you get kicked out of the country - guess what? Conquerors keepers.
What goes around, comes around.
And how’s that working out for them?
I was going to use those exact same words.
Not is seems they’ve downgraded Japan as well. Maybe if everyone gets downgraded they’ll simply adjust the curve, you know, like with the bell curve in university. AA- will be the new AAA.
That’s not the way it works. A lower rating means increased risk. That means people will want more return on their investment. If every government got rated AA, that would just mean that they’d have to offer more interest to attract investors away from non-government investments.
How that would play out, I don’t know. A collapse in overall investment? A world interest rate increase, leading to another recession? Nothing good, certainly.
Or people simply become afraid to invest anywhere, once they have the feeling that no place is safe. Makes me think of this article:
The article opens by noting that the University of Texas Permanent University Fund (2nd largest such fund in the nation) recently insisted on taking physical delivery of a billion dollars’ worth of gold. That’s a billion dollars not going into the economy, folks.
S&P and the other rating agencies don’t set risk or the required ROI. The market does that. The rating agencies are usually a lagging indicator, and *some *funds are slaves to the ratings. Eg, can only hold bonds rated A and higher, so if the rating drops to BBB, then the fund is forced to sell by the funds internal by laws.
And Sam, remember that no company can have a rating that exceeds the sovereign (country) rating. So, there is direct correlation that a government would have to offer more interest to attract investors away from non government investments.
Frankly, I’d like you to show some significant examples of where plain vanilla corporate debt pays less interest than treasuries.
Did you not read what I said above about Mugabe being a douchebag? The cause was just, but the guy totally blew it where execution was concerned.
Or is your argument that white people should retain the land and people they conquered, or else bad things inherently happen?
Gah, typo that got it backwards. It should read:
remember that no company can have a rating that exceeds the sovereign (country) rating. So, there is direct correlation that a *non-government *would have to offer *more *interest to attract investors away from government investments.
Dude, you were the one nattering on about Zimbabwe. Since you appear to be too thick to grasp my original point, speaking plainly it’s this: when society breaks down, rule of law goes out the window and aggrieved groups start looting in the name of “righting historical wrongs,” you’ll have only a day or two to jack yourself off on your now so valuable farm – until someone else with more guns comes and takes it from you, grabbing the only valuable thing left in society under the cover of whatever rationale they feel like coming up with. Resist, and you’ll end up like one of the people in the pictures. In the words of Mao, “Revolution ain’t a dinner party, asshole.” And “you wanna talk origins of political power? Say hello to my leetle frien’!”
You had no point. What you had was a frantic call to the whaaaaambulance for those poor put upon white invaders who subjugated the hell out of the natives of Zimbabwe.
Funny how this misguided reasoning was not applied to the white invaders when they seized African property for whatever reasons they did so.
Your “argument”, if you can call it that, is that when you take back what rightfully belongs to your people, you inherently must then have chaos and rule-by-the-gun. Your argument is that a rebellion must end in total chaos.
Your argument is flatly insane. The re-taking of African land from white invaders could have been carried out in a much more orderly way, with ownership transferred to the black farmers who worked for these former white masters and who knew how to maintain the farms.
“Revolution ain’t a dinner party, asshole.”? That was Charman Mao. That was not every rebellion. Not all rebellions end in lawlessness. If it did, the U.S. would probably not even be here now.
The rebellion in Zimbabwe was simply mismanaged. Horribly so.
Many if not all of the white farmers in Zimbabwe bought and paid for the land. For more information on the subject consider watching Mugabe and the White African.
http://www.mugabeandthewhiteafrican.com/
I just had to point out that S&P’s downgrade has forced long-term Treasury bond rates right through the roof, hasn’t it?
And thus we have the Republican/Democrat divide,