The economy - oops - Page 2

Ah. The Bush Dichotomy. Is McCain ignorant, or lying?

Oxy + moron = oxymoron

Come on dude, give me a break. Really? McCain calls the fundamentals of our economy strong on our worst economic day in years and you expect the Obama campaign to play nice after weeks of being charged with teaching kindergarten kids about sex, sexism, and someone who's going to raise taxes for all Americans (which are all lies, I might add). I bet you wouldn't be pissed at Hoover either. We're headed towards a great depression, but the important thing is that he just say that everything's fine and do nothing. Nice thinking...

I expect a leader to not take down the economy in an attempt to win an office. Obama and McCain are perceived as leaders at this point until one of them wins in November and for either one of them to say our economy is faltering when we're in the midst of a crisis is catastrophic and would only lend to panic selling and exacerbating the situation. There is a time and a place for partisan politics and when our economy is faltering, it is not the time.

Look what happened wtih Chuck Schumer and IndyMac.

Yeah, but Snaieke, they've tried that lame shit before.


Stank then. Stinks now. Nobody buys it, so why bother even pretending.

If I know that's dogshit on the sidewalk. And Obama knows it's dogshit. And McCain knows it's dogshit. And Obama says "It sucks but that there is dog fuckin shit." And McCain says "I will establish closer relations with our friends and I will stand up to those who want to do harm to the United States of America. What about dogshit what?" Whom should I respect more?

Almost every bad thing that has happened in our history can be traced to "that's not something we can talk about now!"

I fail to see the connection between observing the severe problems with the economy and partisan politics. If anything, presidents that have been successful during economics downturns HAVE recognized it (See FDR and Reagan). It would be dishonest to say anything other than our economy is faltering and it is certainly not an attempt to "take down the economy". What's needed is a President who is strong enough to recognize the problems, address them, and present the populace with reasonable solutions that provide confidence that the economy can be repaired. (Again, see FDR and Reagan)

You expect our leading politicians to be ignorant while the nation watches the walls come down? I'm serious, what kind of thinking is that? What happened to the John McCain that was full of "straight talk," telling people in Michigan that their jobs weren't coming back? This is a tremendously serious problem and everybody with two working eyes and a working brain knows it. They're not getting this information straight from Obama...it's in the news, it's in their bank accounts, it's effecting their lives every moment. Simply staying positive is not the solution. Being honest and coming up with a game plan is. And I'm not talking about playing the blame game either (which is the only thing McCain has been able to do since trying to amend his "strong" stance...fire the head of the SEC, come up with a 9/11 type commission report, and blame the democrats). So don't give me that "rise above" bullshit.

You're making this out to be political, when it is all about economics and how they work. You're also talking about sitting Presidents who had the ability to address the situation vs. someone who is running for President who had no control over the situation aside from his words and what were his words? The economy is not fundamentally sound. He jumped in early in the morning before anyone who had direct control had actually addressed the situation, including the sitting President and the Fed Chairman etc.. . He didn't offer suggestions, other then vote for me.

I honestly don't care what you think we need. The election isn't until November 4th and whomever wins this isn't in charge until January 29th and it's a long long time between now and then for our economy and we don't need partisan politics to be destroying it. If Obama or McCain want to make suggestions, that's fine but to sit on the sidelines and erode away the American confidence isn't helpful and it certainly isn't called leadership.

Are you here suggesting that neither Reagan nor Roosevelt campaigned on the poor condition of the economy? That is absolutely false.

I also take issue with this. If we have to wait for Bush to make a substantive address, neither candidate could comment yet. To suggest that Obama offered no suggestions is also patently false. He cut a two minute long speech, widely available on the internet, that offered suggestions regarding his ideas for the economy. If you disagree with his ideas, that's one thing. To suggest he offered none is another, and not grounded in reality.

Snaieke, you have yet to connect the dots between observing the state of the economy and partisan politics. You wouldn't suggest that the economy is in good shape, correct? Unless observing the condition of the economy is now partisan, I don't think you're on the right track here.

I also think you may be picking the wrong battle. Could Obama's statement have eroded some confidence? I suppose so. Could McCain's statement have boosted confidence? I doubt it. The reason is because people will base their responses on the reality with which they are presented. If AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac weren't clearly in trouble, people would laugh at Obama for saying the economy was weak, and rightly so. When he says it and it agrees with what they see, they may well appreciate that a politician understands the problems that they're observing.

And John McCain isn't trying to score some political points with the whole guilt by association game with Obama and execs from Fannie May? Come on.....

As far as solutions go, Obama seems to be more serious about this crisis than McCain seems to be. All McCain seems to want to do is kick it over to a commision to study. Not smart when the economy is in meltdown mode.

You're still not reading what I wrote. There is a time and a place for economic discussions, in the morning when a major company announces they're going bankrupt is not the time. It will make the situation worse and it did.

The two minute speech was the day after the event in question. You're still not reading what I wrote.


The conditions of the economy are perfectly relevant in an election and they can talk about it until they run out of breath AFTER a crisis has happened. You didn't see politicians coming out playing partisan politics DURING the disaster(see 9/11, Katrina etc..), that's when you tow the company line and say everything will work out, we're working on it and then afterwards you wag the finger and assign blame.

The point wasn't for McCain to boost confidence, the point was for him to NOT erode away at consumer and investor confidence. Investors had been prepped for Lehman bothers for months, everyone and their brother had come out saying a big one will fall soon just a week prior. Everyone knew what was coming the key here was damage control. If it spirals out of control the market tumbles, people cash out their 401k's, they pull their money out of their banks and the banks lose liquidity, which means no more loans.. no more money for you to withdrawal.

Did you know that gold and precious metals increased dramatically this week? That means people cashed out.

Like I said, look at Chuck Shumer and IndyMac.

Oh, in the news huh? Why don't we lose 500 points every day?

edit -

For the record, Cox put an end to short selling after McCain called him out on it and we rebounded today because of it. Also, the Deomcrats should be condemned for suggesting taking an early recess on Wednesday. I still don't think McCain is some economic dynomo but I certainly think he'd be better for America than Obama and if you want to get into that discussion we can but I'm mostly talking about the economy in here. I don't think anyone is going to be swayed one way or the other at this point in which candidate is getting their vote and there is little point in discussing it.

That would be before McCain "called him out."
Snaieke, what is it about these talking points they send you? They're completely irrelevant. Haven't you been reading about all these emergency meetings with Bernanke and Paulson? Don't you realize this is all happening in real time?

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
Sorry, had to get that out of my system.

Snaieke, do you acknowledge that McCain's chief economic adviser is Phil Gramm? Do you acknowledge that he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar with the Keating 5? Do you realize that his central core of advisers have all lobbied for all these welfare case "too big to fail" institutions? THIS is the guy you put forward as better than Obama for this economic apocalypse? Shouldn't the new Republican talking points be that they're going to let Democrats take the job and therefore have to clean up the mess?

All joking aside, do you understand the scope of what's happening, and what will continue to happen over the coming weeks? Do you realize the economic philosophy that made financial ruin a fait accompli is the very same one McCain has long championed, especially during his recent far right conversion?

Snaieke, you are obviously a McCain voter. I am obviously an Obama voter. We're both reasonably informed. There are a lot of people out there who are utterly uninformed about what's happening, but as the emergency room team goes to work on the critical patient that our economy has become after a 30 year pummeling by greedy, back-slapping free-market Republicans, I think a lot of people are going to get wise to exactly what crimes were committed and which side is better equipped to resuscitate.

Edited to add: Here's one more piece of evidence of McCain's proximity to the financial meltdown: Bankrupt AIG was a major underwriter for McCain's "Reform Institute."

The rest of the story is here.

So are we gonna hit the 2nd Great Depression in the coming days? What scares me about this whole situation is that everyone says we're at the end times but no one is really explaining what it's going to look like? Are we Beyond Thunderdome? It can't look like 1931 again because the world doesn't look like that anymore. So what's the worst case scenario and how does tomorrow look different than today?

I was watching the Rachel Maddow Show and the nutshell is that banks might not be able to lend money because the credit system is fucked which leads to little to no expansion of businesses and which leads to lay offs and no jobs being created. Plus it makes it hard for people to buy houses.

From everything I've heard in the press and from experts on this, it sounds like it's a matter of days before our country is fucked and fucked hard if we don't do something about it.

Edit: Here's the NYT article on it.....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/wa...gewanted=print

I do know one thing. George W Bush's legacy will not only be the war in Iraq but also the architect of our country's biggest shift to Socialism since the Great Depression.

I gleefully await the potential nationalisation of ~ $700 billion worth of our country's financial industry. Socialism from the mouth of the Capitalist beast.

I hear Greenspan's still defending his deregulatory mantra regarding the housing industry, by the way. I sincerely hope his reputation gets a huge shit taken on it as the next Depression rolls our way.

Bear Stearns, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and now AIG.

Yeah, I know AIG still owes us the money at a high interest rate. Doesn't matter. We won't see it for years and we will be the ones that will have to pay it back.

This government has fucked up so bad and now we are slowly turning into a socialist state. The government bails out large banks that made terrible business decisions... this happens every day to mom and pop stores and there are no real security measures dedicated to helping those small business owners. The big guys get help because they have the money... oh wait. No they don't. They got greedy and preyed on people who wanted to own houses that had no business owning them. They deserve to fail miserably and not be in business.

Would that fuck up the economy? Sure. Our fault for not doing anything to stop it. I'd rather go into recession because companies fucked up than our government creating wealth making our currency fucking worthless and pumping up immoral and unethical banks.

Now my kids are gonna have to pay for it. Not me anymore. My kids. That's a fucking shame.

I hate that we had to bail out all these companies but wouldn't the alternative have been worse? Wouldn't we be spiralling into an economic depression if the government didn't step in?

The problem is that, in my understanding, the GOP has been systematically reversing depression era regulatory laws that were enacted so we wouldn't be in this mess. Surprise, surprise, guess what happened as a result of that?

On the one hand, we kinda have to bail these companies out for the good of the global economy. On the other hand, deregulation has set up this system where the profits are privatized and the losses are socialized. The whole thing is completely unfair to taxpayers and worst of it could've been avoided with better government to be sure. But I just want to be clear that free market capitalism is inherently amoral and needs to be regulated. To expect it to do anything else is to repeat the same mistake. Again, for a third fucking time.

I'm not too terribly knowledgable about economics, but I know enough that this week's actions scared the shit out of me. If I'm reading it right, we're pretty damn close to the point where all banks will simply stop issuing credit in any way shape or form.

Ironically, up here in Canada, where we have a lot more actual socialism, we're going to be somewhat insulated from the coming downturn. Though having a big honking source of oil helps, too.

In a nutshell, yeah.

Of course, after Thursday and Friday, you could say that we were pretty damn close to this happening. What they did stop doing (which resulted in the events of Monday and Wednesday) is stop lending money to each other...which is much more important than most people realize.

Yes, the alternative would have been much worse. We didnt bail out Lehman not because the amount of negative equity on their balance sheet grew to hundreds of billions (as I saw mentioned earlier), but rather because everybody on the street knew Lehman's demise was only a matter of time. Speak to anybody in the industry and chances are they will tell you the moment they heard of Bear Sterns the first thing they said was "Well, I'm sure Lehman will be next." AIG is really what did it...not only because it was a surprise but because AIG (or its numerous subsidiaries) has a hand in almost everything...everywhere.

And I wouldnt say that the GOP has been systematically reversing regulatory laws, it's just that folks in the finance industry are really good at coming up with alternative investments that (based upon currently regulatory laws) require very little if any actual oversight via Uncle Sam. Either the SEC cant keep up, or they dont really see the need to as (for the time being) everybody is making money off of these things and therefore nobody is complaining about them.


For a perfect example, see hedge funds up until March of this year.

Ron Paul made a great point about this whole crisis. He said that the bailouts of these banks is like giving a fix to a drug addict.

Sure, it's going to help the banks now... but it's going to hurt us later. And I would also argue that keeping the value of our currency and watching bank after bank fall is a lot better than what could and probably will happen with this.

Banks get money from the government that they will mass produce, thus inflating the dollar. The value plummets and the dollars that we own will be of lesser value. Not only the inflation threat, but our country will just continue to raise its debt and our kids' kids will be paying it off.

Politically, what do you guys see as happening? Are we going to see the Republicans go into the wilderness again just like we did during the Great Depression or will they survive this crisis? Best case scenario is that they will probably have to rebuild their brand for the next 10 years or so. Worst case they will be diminished to the point of being a third party. Am I overstating things or did George W just destroy the Republican party?

Considering George W and the Republican party had little to nothing to do with the events of this week (and the past 12 months) I dont really see why the aforementioned would occur.

Then again, I do realize that a lot of people in this country are stupid and would believe anything the TV tells them.

There are really two issues here. Stopping the blood-loss from the short term crisis, and recognizing the current and future systemic problems that the credit market needs to maintain stability moving forward. I don't know nearly enough about the economy to say what those pieces might be, but neither of those things alone is going to be enough. Both pieces have to be well written, clear pieces of legislation.

Huh? How can you say that with a straight face? Being the leader of a party that has vociferously pushed a flawed ideology (in this case laisse-faire, free market capitalism) on the American people, and they had little to do with it? Not trying to attack, but some clarification is needed. Or... you can call it stupid. I mean, doesn't everyone have a certain amount of blame to take? Being president while all this stuff is going on certainly means that more blame can be placed onto one's shoulders. [/edit]

It's amazing. Once upon a time, the US was so well off it could send a man to the moon just to see if they could do it. Think we'll ever get back to that sort of prosperity?

You can't blame the current administration because the problems began before their time. IMO at the end of the day it would make more sense to blame:

Mrs. Cupp - The 5th grade teacher making $40,000/year who is leveraging the equity in her home to purchase a $500,000 investment property.

Diego Sanchez - The 19 year old high school dropout turned loan officer who told Mrs. Cupp the aforementioned would be a great idea and pushed for her approval knowing her financial situation so he could get his $10,000 commission check.

And

Henry William Prentice III - The CFO who kept having his I-bankers purchase the phant securities the mortgage was applied to.

*The above contains stereotypes.

If you absolutely must point your finger at one person, point it towards Alan Greenspan...but again even then its not as simple as we want to try to make it.

Closer, you can't blame Mrs. Cupp, but you're right to blame Greenspan for at least part of it.

I know it's convenient to blame ordinary Americans for this crisis from the Republican point of view, but I would like you to take a good, long look at the history of the conservative aka neoliberalistic aka free market philosophy, first proposed as an economic theory in the 1920s, popularized decades later by Milton Friedman, practiced by Greenspan and embraced wholeheartedly as policy by every Republican in power since Reagan.

This philosophy dictates that the market will take care of the market. The unfortunate side-effect is that it strips away the majority of profits from the supply-side and places the majority of profits into the financial market. This philosophy is what has given Republicans, from Reagan to the likes of Phil Gramm and John McCain, their passion for deregulation. It's what gave Grover Norquist the hubris to say that he wanted to reduce the size of government to such a degree that it can be drowned in a bathtub. The problem is that, like Communism, this philosophy sounds good when you're sitting around discussing it as a theory, but in practice is a total, catastrophic failure.

What it does is shift wealth from the middle class created by FDR, the New Deal and the WWII/GI Bill era to the richest 1% of the country, who make their money by playing with money and sitting on wealth. The difference between the era following the Great Depression and the era that will follow this collapse is that we don't have the manufacturing base we had then to help get the country back to a paying basis again.

This crisis could be seen, and was seen, from a mile away. The reason is that it's like a Ponzi scheme writ large, with the government sufficiently de-fanged by regulatatory enemies like Phil Gramm.

Where Bush figures into the situation is that he has a total and complete lack of interest or background in any of this. He has appointed cronies to every position he could. He has rubber-stamped every effort to deregulate this country into oblivion, plunge the country into debt (quoth Cheney, "We learned from Reagan that deficits don't matter.") and send every manufacturing job he could overseas. He has proved to be the world's best cheerleader for laissez faire economics. Part of his 2004 pitch for reelection was how great the real estate market was doing -- this was at the height of the bubble created by these sub-prime loans that were being bundled and sold overseas. Instead of being a leader at a time when a leader could have helped, he was working on gaining control of Iraqi oil, the only thing he has been single-minded (if incompetent) about accomplishing.

So, back to your analogy, Mrs. Cupp may have been sitting on a perfectly sound home loan when her broker called her and told her to take advantage of these low rates, without pointing out to her that buried in the small print was the crucial information that everything would balloon out in a handful of years. Mrs. Cupp, for being inadequately informed about the latest white collar criminality being blessed by people who were supposed to watch out for her best interests in Washington, probably lost her home in the bargain and is living with her kids now. I just hope Mrs. Cupp has since learned enough about this disaster to not vote for John McCain, who loves deregulation and relies on people like Phil Gramm for his economic advice.

Personally I would blame any politician who wanted loan companies and banks to provide sub-prime mortgages. This is what really started the dominoes to fall.

Getting people to own homes is a great thing for our economy. I just think no one really realized how bad it could have (and, it did get) gotten if a mass of people who could not afford those mortgages couldn't really pay them.

I think it all boils down to people wanting to own homes who had no business owning a home. They either did not make enough income to pay for the mortgage they received or they were too ignorant or lazy to read the fine print.

The banks and loan companies are also to blame for this because they preyed on those people and gave out mortgages like it was fucking candy. They didn't really tell these people how serious the shit could be if they didn't pay them. And, if they did tell them, they certainly didn't tell them the specifics of payment.

Muhalruhz, the reason the banks wanted to give out as many of these loans as they could is that the greater volume of loans they had, the more they could profit from speculation with foreign investors. It's not about people being too stupid or lazy to read the fine print. It's about CEOs and shareholders being so greedy that they willfully ignored the lessons of the Great Depression to get rich quick while they could -- aided, of course, by cronies like Phil Gramm, who went from being the Senator that stripped away the Depression-era insurance against a catastrophic fall like this -- to being on the board of French super-bank UBS and one of its heaviest-hitting lobbyists, to being John McCain's economic adviser while still drawing a paycheck from UBS.

I don't disagree with you, I just think that (especially after taking a contract law class) people should read what they are signing and be informed as to what they are doing.

I know many people have dreams about owning a house, but those people have got to think sensibly about the major investment/risk they are taking on when paying off a mortgage.

The banks and loan companies played a much larger role in this debacle than the little guy... that I agree with you on vt. But, I cannot ignore the fact that it was the choice, and not coercion, of these people to sign their lives over to those banks who preyed on them.

But it was coercion. We also live in a society in which the same people who are pushing to give people with money and power more money and power are pushing to wreck education and consolidate media to such a degree that four mega-companies own the majority of newspapers, news networks and radio stations. In other words, people at large are not as sophisticated as they were even 30 years ago, and worse, they've been conditioned into this consume-at-all-costs-to-solidify-your-identity mentality by the over commercialization/over-advertised world.

At the height of the housing bubble, I kept hearing these ads on the radio and hearing about how easy it was to get these loans. Everyone was telling me to refinance my house, etc., etc., but luckily my loan broker has been a friend of my family's for a long time and she told me straight up that these were bad loans and that I should stick with the loan I'm currently paying off. Everyone wants to have a better life and give a better life to their kids. You get lulled into this fantasy that you can grasp things previously unavailable to you and your family, and you take the bait. I didn't take the bait because I had someone trustworthy to throw me a line. A lot of people didn't. And here we are.

But that's where I see where good governance comes into it. These are the people that we pay to look out for our society and the commons we all share. If they're only working for the millionaires and billionaires that lobby them every second of every day, then the smart laws that would have prevented something like this from happening -- laws put into place as a direct result of something like this happening -- get stripped away, and as a result, we get screwed. But those at the top who profited from this get to keep their money thanks to the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires and now those profits are safely tucked away in the Caymans while Americans get thrown out on their asses.

Because things aren't dismal enough, allow me to chime in with something else this financial catastrophe ruins: social reform. Even if Obama wins the election, I don't see how he'll be able to afford reforms like universal health care or full college tuition. Is he going to have to spend his whole time in office cleaning up the mess that the Bush administration made all over the rug?

um Mccain said that he wanted Cox fired. He didn't call him out to "stop short selling" that was Cox's own idea. On top of that, ending short selling is the most anti-capitilism thing the government could do and damages the free market system. Finally, just because the stock "rebounded" for 1 day doesn't mean squat. Any little glimmer of hope will cause the market to rally but then any little sign of weakness will bring it back down the next day its a bipolar system and does not represent the health of our economy.

Mccain has no understanding of the financial system and if he is elected you can expect big business and wall street to walk all over him.

It's not coercion if you are being bombarded with media persuading you to do something that may not be in your best interest.

Coercion is when the banks put a gun to your head and force you to do something you don't really want to do.

I bet that 90% of those homeowners who got foreclosed on really wanted to own a home. There's nothing wrong with that, but I want a yacht to sail in the Pacific. Yet, I'm a measly law student with no income. I'm not going to take a huge loan to pay for a yacht with the knowledge that I can't afford to pay that loan off.

EDIT: I think the banks committed their crimes by hiding facts from these people as well as telling half-truths and lying to people. I do think that people have to understand what they are doing however. If something is too good to be true, chances are it is.

Muharulz, I see where you're coming from but I think that perspective -- one many people share -- is missing the forest for the trees. If you want to know more about how this happened, watch this Frontline about Cleveland's attempt to deal with this crisis and what kind of reception that effort got. Now read about Elliot Spitzer's attempt here and here, to deal with predatory lending. Guess what kind of back-up he got from Washington.

This is not just a case of Joe Schmoe being stupid and taking out a loan without reading the fine print. Not every borrower in this market got a subprime loan. "73% of HIGH INCOME Black and Hispanic borrowers were given sub-prime loans versus 17% of similar-income Whites." They were steered to these loans.

All I'm saying is it's a much deeper issue than can be explained away by what common sense might dictate. There are good guys and bad guys in this story. The Republicans are seeking to muddy the waters right now because it's looking a little too much like McCain was hanging out with the bad guys.

That video really scared me. I actually live in Cleveland and I live very close to many of those suburbs. I just moved here, so I didn't realize how devastated the city was. Since I live close to Downtown, I haven't really seen the great impact this crisis has done to my new city. Thanks for sharing.

It looks like a similar argument was had on Bill Maher's show last night between Naomi Klein and Andrew Sullivan:

Source.

Sorry. The reason this is being couched the way it is is that our corporate media does not report the news as it should and therefore most people have no way of internalizing why and how this happened. But people need to know that the Republican framing of this crisis is deliberately misleading.

It's cool.

I actually watched that Maher show and I kinda side with both Sullivan (which I normally do on other topics) and Klein.

I guess I just stand by my notion that this crisis is mostly the financial industry's fault, then the government's, and then the American people's.

I hate to quote myself but in another thread I described the social pressures people here in Northern CA (And probablly most other parts of the US) were under. Go into a supermarket and you'll see ads for realators on the little rubber bars they use to seperate people's orders at the checkout stand. An airbrushed realtor's face stares out at you from bill boards, bus stops etc. All of these people are competing with each other to sell you a home. Are you more likeley to listein to the guy telling you should get a smaller home at a reasonable interest rate, or the guy telling you you can get that house in the good neighborhodd near the good schools and pay a lower interest rate?

(Behind the realator's are the banks who had the same problem. The profits were huge and the risks minimal becuase risk was transferred to someone else.)

And at parties, work, baseball etc. all your friends and neighbors brag about the vacations to Europe they took by refinancing their home. Also how much they made by buying and flipping that investment property in Vegas or Phoenix.

America is by and large a materilaistic society (even the fundamentalists really believe a weird "religion of prosperity" ) and this is a huge blow to that way of looking at the world. Owning stuff is of primary importance and that whole outlook on life just took a huge kick to the nuts. Maybe we will see a change in the way Americans view themselves and the world. I hope.

Im not a republican and have voted for only 1 in my entire lifetime (and it was a local election) so Im not sure what "viewpoint" you would be referring to.


Yes, I can blame Mrs. Cupp. There is nothing wrong with people taking responsibility for their actions. At least a little bit. Should all the blame be placed on her? No, and I never suggested as much. We got into this mess via a team effort, but Mrs. Cupp was an integral part of that team. We should make sure she knows that, too. That way there is less of a chance of something like this happening again.


Indeed it was. Yet nobody...republican or democrat...did anything to deal with it.

As does Obama. As does McCain. I assume that is not going to stop you from voting for at least one of them, so lets set that aside as a non-issue.

And what people fail to realize is that there are literally hundreds if not thousands of alternative investments that you could, in one way or another, compare to CMOs and CDOs. The events we are pulling ourselves out of have little or nothing to do with the current administrations desire for a deregulated market. You can prove me wrong by naming one piece of regulation or legislation that was removed by Dubya during his retarded tenure that contributed to this.

I despise Dubya as much as the next man, but blaming him for this is akin to blaming the dot com bubble burst on Clinton.

And unfortunately, at the end of the day it is Mrs. Cupp's fault for not reading the small print. I know that the "democratic view" is that really nobody is responsible for the mistakes they make (perhaps her city councilman should have accompanied her to her loan closing to review things?) but again, there is nothing wrong with telling Mrs. Cupp that its her fault she signed off on something she didnt fully understand.

And when you say "blessed by people who were supposed to watch out for her best interests in Washington" I can only assume you are referring to folks like Obama, correct? Seeing as how he was a big supporter of lax lending standards.

As I mentioned a few posts above, no matter what piece of regulation is put into place you have to remember that folks on Wall Street are a lot smarter than folks in Washington and they are masters and finding loopholes in the rules that end up making lots of people a ton of money. I would know, seeing as how I work for one of the firms left standing.

I'm black though, so you cant call me racist for not supporting the idea of mortgages for people who can barely afford a car. Just a heads up.

Uh, he wouldnt be able to afford any of it anyway.

Im sure that the events of the past few months wouldnt stop him.

This post > Everything.

I think blaming working people for signing onto reckless loans is a little like blaming gravity for a plane crash. Yes, its obvious to those who are smart and well-rounded with their personal finances that they shouldn't be naively signing a sub-prime. Same goes for these corporate conmen who took all the cash and ran. Its well-known (or at least it should be) that corporations are inherently amoral so to expect them to behave like angels in an environment of relaxed regulatory oversight is also totally ridiculous. But government is supposed to know better.

Also, not a huge fan of Greenspan. I'm surprised that he's gotten away with not taking any heat for a lot of what happened during his tenure. Some of this can be blamed on Clinton, but then if that's true, some of it can also be blamed on the Republican Congress that set the legislative agenda. The bottom line is that there is plenty of blame to go around. The roots of this crisis really go back decades. Although I do take particular fault with the "government is the problem" ideology. Its very destructive and leads to nothing but bad ineffective government. If you can't have a small amount of faith that government can do some good, then you've already lost so to speak.

Yup.

And I dont really fault the "working persons" ignorance as much as his blind greed.