Tag: financial crisis

economics

Leftwards with John Corzine

Urban Future tells us: When the Right attains power, it is by becoming something other than itself, betraying its partisans not only incidentally and peripherally, through timidity or incompetence, but centrally and fundamentally, by practically advancing an agenda that almost perfectly negates its supposed ideological commitments. It builds that which it had promised to destroy, and further enthralls that which it had promised to liberate. Its victories mean ever less, …

economics

The financial crisis inquiry report

“Best practices” required that the lender accept “non traditional” evidence of ability to pay – and the reason such evidence was non traditional is that it is not evidence. If a mortgage business followed HUD “best practices”, as in practice it had to do, it meant they were allowing borrowers or their loan officers to make $#!% up.

economics

Ambac argues fraud committed for profit caused the crisis

I of course, argue that government pressure to make mortgage loans caused the crisis.  After all, the specific examples bad loans that Ambac lists in its lawsuit against Bear Stearns, are all loans that were made to poor people, though Ambac provides no information that would identify the race of these poor people.  Ambac, however, argues that Bear Stearn made bad loans, lied that the loans were fine, and sold …

economics

Who called the financial crisis before it happened?

Among others, Ron Paul, in his speech to the house, proposing amendments to the laws that caused the crisis … the government’s policy of diverting capital into housing creates a short-term boom in housing. Like all artificially created bubbles, the boom in housing prices cannot last forever. When housing prices fall, homeowners will experience difficulty as their equity is wiped out. Furthermore, the holders of the mortgage debt will also …

economics

Hyperinflation

Officially, America has near zero inflation and a mere ten percent official unemployment.  Odd that it has a mere ten percent unemployment when the proportion of young adult males with jobs has dropped a lot more than ten percent. As with third world and Marxist countries, the government’s reaction to bad news is to declare a new era of prosperity.  The recession is officially over.  With an unprecedented proportion of …

economics

Falkenblog locates the guilty

Falkenblog has an interesting quote from Harvard, wherein in 2003, back before the financial crisis, Angello Mozilla gives politically correct bullshit justifying every bad thing the banks did to cause the financial crisis on the basis of race and affirmative action. That means there is currently a homeownership gap of over 25 points when comparing white households with African Americans and Hispanics. My friends, that gap is obviously far too …

culture

After mass democracy

A couple of hundred years ago, the conventional wisdom was that democracy with broad voter participation was unstable, violent, ruinous, and short lived. A hundred years or so ago the world moved to mass democracy, universal franchise.  Many people predicted that this would result in the masses trying to vote themselves rich, resulting in social and economic collapse Well guess what.  The masses have been trying to vote themselves rich, …

culture

How to fix the financial crisis

Proposed reforms, both left and right, are unlikely to have any effect on the continuing massive misappropriation from the financial system.  It is absurd that people are discussing obscure details of the credit swap market. To fix the financial crisis, we have to revoke, or at least denounce and denigrate, Marie Curie’s Nobel prize. When they gave a Nobel prize to Marie Curie for being female, that did not hurt …

economics

Yale Harvard and Basel style Free Enterprise

Basel II is tens of thousands of pages of regulations, no one knows how vast it is, because not all the regulations can be found in any one place, but it could all be replaced by two simple rules: Politically correct victim groups shall always find it easy to borrow money, regardless of their ability or intention to pay it back, and politically well connected businesses shall always make money, regardless of whether they are competently run or not.

economics

Where the money went

The government has been shuffling the money around to obfuscate who stole it.  It lends money, and then announces that there is no problem, the money has been paid back. But after much fiddling, the money has mostly come to rest, in that the government is now the proud owner of about one trillion dollars of mortgage backed securities guaranteed by Fannie, Freddie, and the FHA, plus some Fannie, Freddy, …