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Automatic Jack
VeteranX
Old
101 - 09-23-2008, 13:47
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TonyElTigre View Post
You take the 2 largest pieces of our budget and claim poverty for those systems, its laughable
I think he's actually claiming incompetence. Armoring soldiers wasn't a priority, protecting oil fields was.

Like having a volunteer army occupy a hostile nation for going on 6 years, the kind of thing that takes a real douchebag idiot to conceive, and soulless sycophants to achieve.
 
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Zlex
VeteranXX
Old
102 - 09-23-2008, 13:50
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cogzinofa View Post
it has nothing to do with "liberals" wanting to increase home ownership among minorities and poor people. it has everything to do with a poorly regulated environment in which financial institution no longer had to assume the risk of making stupid loans and investment houses thinking they had math that indicated they were investing in sure things (securitized mortgages).
Don't Blame the Markets - April 18, 2008 - The New York Sun
Quote:
The government compels banks to make loans in poor neighborhoods even if the applicants are not considered prime borrowers. You may not know about that because the Community Reinvestment Act is not exactly a household (excuse the pun) name.

But the commercial banks do know about it. They have a CRA department. They get a CRA rating. They know that the way to get a high CRA rating is to make loans to poor applicants or in poor urban neighborhoods regardless of the financial prudence of the loans.

They know that if they don't do this, they will be punished severely by the regulators when they try to make any major change which is dependent on regulatory approval. And they know that pretty much every major change a traditional bank makes is, in fact, subject to regulatory approval. So, they grit their teeth and stamp a big inky "yes" on an application which they know, according to traditional financial standards, deserves a "no."

Up until 1995 the Community Reinvestment Act was largely a requirement to support "community groups" in poor neighborhoods. Of course, this often meant left wing groups like ACORN, etc. But after 1995 the scope of the law was dramatically increased.

Over the strenuous objections of the banks themselves and some Republicans in Congress, CRA was renewed and modified in such a way that it gave far more power to the federal government to punish banks for not lending more widely in poor neighborhoods.

The classic "fair housing" laws from the Martin Luther King Jr. era of civil rights were deemed insufficient. Under CRA, not only were realtors required to sell to qualified buyers regardless of race, which they should have been, but banks were accused of a new kind of "financial redlining" if they didn't provide the funds Income, credit history, assets, debts were out. Urban neighborhoods were in. The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act pushed things along too by requiring banks to ask about and disclose the race of its mortgage applicants. In effect, banks were forced to provide the evidence of their own alleged discrimination.

Subprime loans to minority applicants exploded ten fold in the mid-1990s as a result. In fact the Clinton administration found a rapid increase in subprime loans in minority neighborhoods. Their principle worry was that, even then, not enough lending was going on in these communities. More was needed. And they got what they asked for.

Under New Deal-era regulatory rules of Glass-Steagall, commercial banks and investment banks were separated. When that act was repealed as part of banking deregulation in 1999, commercial banks and investment banks were able to merge, subject to approval by regulators.

However, the banks' CRA rating was taken into account in the decision. This meant that a high CRA rating became an important prerequisite for mergers, which increased the pressure on the banks to make these risky loans. The banks also were given permission to put these loans into packages of securities that could then be sold into investment markets.

Last week, a front page Wall Street Journal article set off a national debate about the legacy of Alan Greenspan. Critics have been taking the former chief of the Federal Reserve to task for failing to see the alleged excesses of the marketplace and neglecting to issue new diktats to punish those excesses accordingly.

But it is not Mr. Greenspan's fault that Congress substituted identity politics for financial prudence, although his easy money in 2003 didn't help much. If anything, Mr. Greenspan regulated too much.

The fault lies with the small army of hard left political hustlers who spent the early 1990s pushing risky mortgages on home lenders. And the fault lies especially with the legislators that gave them the power to do it.
Gee, not a single mention of the word 'blowjob' in all of that.

They do call these bailouts 'loans', not 'grants.'

I sincerely hope they turn out to be performing loans, because nobody wants to understand what it means if they aren't.

If you are a competitor of AIG, I wonder what is going throught your mind today. As in, what gets rewarded, and what gets punished, in our Brave New Economy?
 
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Dr_Mesmo
VeteranX
Old
103 - 09-23-2008, 13:56
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Wendel View Post
thought this was interesting...

How the Democrats Created the Financial Crisis: Kevin Hassett
That's hilarious! Republicans ran Congress from 1995-2007 and the WH from 2001-present.

Kevin Hasset, as your article mentioned, works for the American Enterprise Institue. The AEC is a conservative think tank and is rife with neocon goons.


Quote:
Project for the New American Century
From SourceWatch
This article is part of the Nuclear spin analysis project of SpinWatch (UK) and the Center for Media and Democracy.

The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) is a neo-conservative think tank with strong ties to the American Enterprise Institute. PNAC's web site says it was "established in the spring of 1997" as "a non-profit, educational organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership."

PNAC's policy document, "Rebuilding America's Defences," openly advocates for total global military domination. Many PNAC members hold highest-level positions in the George W. Bush administration.
Project for the New American Century - SourceWatch
 
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Dr_Mesmo
VeteranX
Old
104 - 09-23-2008, 21:07
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I thought this was interesting regarding the proposed bailout.

Quote:
Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
The whole text is located here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/bu...1draftcnd.html
 
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Corossus
VeteranX
Old
105 - 09-23-2008, 21:50
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[QUOTE=Zlex;13728278]Don't Blame the Markets - April 18, 2008 - The New York Sun

The latest conservative spin, and now the latest liberal answer:

Did Liberals Cause the Sub-Prime Crisis? | The American Prospect

Quote:

Did Liberals Cause the Sub-Prime Crisis?

Conservatives blame the housing crisis on a 1977 law that helps-low income people get mortgages. It's a useful story for them, but it isn't true.


Robert Gordon | April 7, 2008 | web only



The idea started on the outer precincts of the right. Thomas DiLorenzo, an economist who calls Ron Paul "the Jefferson of our time," wrote in September that the housing crisis is "the direct result of thirty years of government policy that has forced banks to make bad loans to un-creditworthy borrowers." The policy DiLorenzo decries is the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to lend throughout the communities they serve.

The Blame-CRA theme bounced around the right-wing Freerepublic.com. In January it figured in a Washington Times column. In February, a Cato Institute affiliate named Stan Liebowitz picked up the critique in a New York Post op-ed headlined "The Real Scandal: How the Feds Invented the Mortgage Mess." On The National Review's blog, The Corner, John Derbyshire channeled Liebowitz: "The folk losing their homes? are victims not of 'predatory lenders,' but of government-sponsored -- in fact government-mandated -- political correctness."

Last week, a more careful expression of the idea hit The Washington Post, in an article on former Sen. Phil Gramm's influence over John McCain. While two progressive economists were quoted criticizing Gramm's insistent opposition to government regulation, the Brookings Institution's Robert Litan offered an opposing perspective. Litan suggested that the 1990s enhancement of CRA, which was achieved over Gramm's fierce opposition, may have contributed to the current crisis. "If the CRA had not been so aggressively pushed," Litan said, "it is conceivable things would not be quite as bad. People have to be honest about that."

This is classic rhetoric of conservative reaction. (For fans of welfare policy, it is Charles Murray meets the mortgage mess.) Most analysts see the sub-prime crisis as a market failure. Believing the bubble would never pop, lenders approved risky adjustable-rate mortgages, often without considering whether borrowers could afford them; families took on those loans; investors bought them in securitized form; and, all the while, regulators sat on their hands.

The revisionists say the problem wasn't too little regulation; but too much, via CRA. The law was enacted in response to both intentional redlining and structural barriers to credit for low-income communities. CRA applies only to banks and thrifts that are federally insured; it's conceived as a quid pro quo for that privilege, among others. This means the law doesn't apply to independent mortgage companies (or payday lenders, check-cashers, etc.)

The law imposes on the covered depositories an affirmative duty to lend throughout the areas from which they take deposits, including poor neighborhoods. The law has teeth because regulators' ratings of banks' CRA performance become public and inform important decisions, notably merger approvals. Studies by the Federal Reserve and Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, among others, have shown that CRA increased lending and homeownership in poor communities without undermining banks' profitability.

But CRA has always had critics, and they now suggest that the law went too far in encouraging banks to lend in struggling communities. Rhetoric aside, the argument turns on a simple question: In the current mortgage meltdown, did lenders approve bad loans to comply with CRA, or to make money?

The evidence strongly suggests the latter. First, consider timing. CRA was enacted in 1977. The sub-prime lending at the heart of the current crisis exploded a full quarter century later. In the mid-1990s, new CRA regulations and a wave of mergers led to a flurry of CRA activity, but, as noted by the New America Foundation's Ellen Seidman (and by Harvard's Joint Center), that activity "largely came to an end by 2001." In late 2004, the Bush administration announced plans to sharply weaken CRA regulations, pulling small and mid-sized banks out from under the law's toughest standards. Yet sub-prime lending continued, and even intensified -- at the very time when activity under CRA had slowed and the law had weakened.

Second, it is hard to blame CRA for the mortgage meltdown when CRA doesn't even apply to most of the loans that are behind it. As the University of Michigan's Michael Barr points out, half of sub-prime loans came from those mortgage companies beyond the reach of CRA. A further 25 to 30 percent came from bank subsidiaries and affiliates, which come under CRA to varying degrees but not as fully as banks themselves. (With affiliates, banks can choose whether to count the loans.) Perhaps one in four sub-prime loans were made by the institutions fully governed by CRA.

Most important, the lenders subject to CRA have engaged in less, not more, of the most dangerous lending.
Janet Yellen, president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve, offers the killer statistic: Independent mortgage companies, which are not covered by CRA, made high-priced loans at more than twice the rate of the banks and thrifts. With this in mind, Yellen specifically rejects the "tendency to conflate the current problems in the sub-prime market with CRA-motivated lending.? CRA, Yellen says, "has increased the volume of responsible lending to low- and moderate-income households."

Yellen is hardly alone in concluding that the real problems came from the institutions beyond the reach of CRA. One of the only regulators who long ago saw the current crisis coming was the late Ned Gramlich, a former Fed governor. While Alan Greenspan was cheering the sub-prime boom, Gramlich warned of its risks and unsuccessfully pushed for greater supervision of bank affiliates. But Gramlich praised CRA, saying last year, "banks have made many low- and moderate-income mortgages to fulfill their CRA obligations, they have found default rates pleasantly low, and they generally charge low mortgages rates. Thirty years later, CRA has become very good business."

It's telling that, amid all the recent recriminations, even lenders have not fingered CRA. That's because CRA didn't bring about the reckless lending at the heart of the crisis. Just as sub-prime lending was exploding, CRA was losing force and relevance. And the worst offenders, the independent mortgage companies, were never subject to CRA -- or any federal regulator. Law didn't make them lend. The profit motive did.

And that is not political correctness. It is correctness.

So...even non-CRA regulated organization got into the sub-prime business. In fact they made up the majority. And when the Bush administration weakened its regulations(rightly or wrongly...probably rightly given the current situation, but for the wrong reasons), trading intensified. So....sorry this crisis ISN'T a product over liberal regulation.
 
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Last edited by Corossus; 09-23-2008 at 21:56..
jerry
VeteranXX
Old
106 - 09-23-2008, 22:22
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Automatic Jack View Post
I never did that! I bought $1750 worth of stocks and options on a credit card, turned it into $100 in only two years, then defaulted on the card.
whoa
 
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cogzinofa
VeteranXV
Old
107 - 09-23-2008, 22:53
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it's very simple. banks aren't going to make loans they know are bad unless two conditions exist:
1) it makes them money.
2) someone else accepts the risk

no entity, not even the government, can force banks to make bad loans to poor people. only thing that can make banks do that is their own greed.
 
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Zlex
VeteranXX
Old
108 - 09-23-2008, 22:53
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[QUOTE=Corossus;13730775]
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zlex View Post
Don't Blame the Markets - April 18, 2008 - The New York Sun

The latest conservative spin, and now the latest liberal answer:

Did Liberals Cause the Sub-Prime Crisis? | The American Prospect




So...even non-CRA regulated organization got into the sub-prime business. In fact they made up the majority. And when the Bush administration weakened its regulations(rightly or wrongly...probably rightly given the current situation, but for the wrong reasons), trading intensified. So....sorry this crisis ISN'T a product over liberal regulation.
GOP/Dem makes no difference.

The goals were well intentioned. Who can argue that? FDR,...Johnson....Nixon.. ..Carter...Reagan...Clint on...Bush... all the folks involved in the 'running of the mixed Economy'... were well intentioned. A chicken in every pot, and why not? A 400,000 mortgage as a birthright.

Plenty of sharks in the water, folks who said, "If this is the mission from on high -- and it was, written in stone proudly for decades as Fannie Mae's raison d'etre -- then by golly, full speed ahead, doing The People's Bidness and Gods Will, all at the same time."

The assembly line from the armed services program offices into large defense contracting firms pales in comparison to the assembly line between Wall Street and the Mixed Economy Regulators in DC-- though, both are unsightly as Hell. A 'soft landing' arranged by your crony friends aiming real guns at OPM is one definition of 'capitalism' in America.

Ours is and has been a carcass carving capitalism, ever since we embraced 'mixed' economies and brought to earth Rand's fictional 'Aristocracy of Pull.'

Today headlines could have been pulled out of books she wrote over 5 decades ago. Her villians were far less cartoonish than the real things.

More totalitarianism, please. We don't quite yet have the right 'mixture' of freedom and cluelessness.

Congress should be enacting laws and rules, not directions--and the POTUS should be enforcing those laws.

And yet, it is clear from our political debate that this nation is already lost-- a helpless, hapless electorate wants to know which one of these lightweights at the head of a busted entity is going to 'fix the economy.'
 
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