Article

2010-01-24 Economy

Big O's Bank Bashing Bludgeoning Buck Building

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Posted by Slosh Whith8948 2010-01-24 11:54|| || Front Page|| [11127 views ] Top

#1 The market is down over five percent in three days. Barry - kindly shut your marxist mouth.

Posted by DMFD 2010-01-24 13:43|| 2010-01-24 13:43|| Front Page Top

#2 The market is down over five percent in three days. Whether the market goes up, down or sideways is irrelevant, just like its current valuation, pumped up as it is by the Mother of All Bailouts.

Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2010-01-24 14:27|| 2010-01-24 14:27|| Front Page Top

#3 Opinion from Floyd Norris in NYT:
Could this have been avoided? Yes it could. If.

¶ If the Fed had shown a lot more contrition for its errors of monetary policy and regulation.

¶ If the banks had shown similar contrition, and accepted the idea that people who as a group almost sank the financial system did not deserve to return quickly to mega bonuses.

¶ If Goldman Sachs, in particular, did not insist that it never needed a bailout and was never in danger of collapse.

¶ If the Obama administration had chosen to exclude people with ties to the past errors.

Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2010-01-24 14:54|| 2010-01-24 14:54|| Front Page Top

#4 The market is down because of Obama's bank bashing speech in Ohio and because the Democrats are waffling on re-confirming Bernanke. Admittedly, Bernanke is not so great, but he's better than the liberal academics Obama would pick as an alternative.

Obama plans on spending the next few months attacking Wall Street, the banks, and business in general as a way to regain popularity. All he'll succeed in doing is increasing unemployment and trashing our 401K's.

So I repeat: Barry - kindly shut your marxist mouth.

Posted by DMFD 2010-01-24 14:57|| 2010-01-24 14:57|| Front Page Top

#5 And I repeat: the financial crisis is not a partisan issue. Those who want to make it one, are just guaranteeing it will get worse.

Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2010-01-24 15:07|| 2010-01-24 15:07|| Front Page Top

#6 Basel2 is the root cause. Zero reserve = infinite credit = 100% chance of banking meltdown.

Posted by Bright Pebbles 2010-01-24 15:10|| 2010-01-24 15:10|| Front Page Top

#7 increasing unemployment and trashing our 401K's The Dems haven't done anything to increase employment, and nothing the Republicans seem to be about is likely to do that either. 401K's were thoroughly and comprehensively trashed well before the 2008 election & show no signs of recovering in the next 8 years or so. The recent stock market gains are FAKE. Real economic improvement will be contingent on breaking the stranglehold the financial industry has on the larger economy, and the larger economy itself starting to produce things people want to buy (fraudulent financial instruments are excluded).

Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2010-01-24 15:13|| 2010-01-24 15:13|| Front Page Top

#8 the financial crisis is not a partisan issue

Fannie Mae. Of course it's not.

Posted by Procopius2k 2010-01-24 15:55|| 2010-01-24 15:55|| Front Page Top

#9 Fannie Mae. Of course it's not. There are many more factors besides GSE's contributing to the current financial mess. I have found fingerprints of both parties over all of them.

Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2010-01-24 17:28|| 2010-01-24 17:28|| Front Page Top

#10 Anguper Hupomosing9418

I'm glad someone else gets it. It's us against them.

Posted by Bright Pebbles 2010-01-24 17:37|| 2010-01-24 17:37|| Front Page Top

#11 Jerry Pournelle said it better than I ever could: The big problem is described by Peggy Noonan in today's WSJ [23 Jan 2010] : people see the parties now as the Nuts -- Democrats -- vs. the Creeps -- Republicans. Both parties have been captured, the Creeps by the Country Club crowd who think they have an hereditary right to rule and to the spoils of election, and the Nuts by a bunch of political theorists who dig Marx or his intellectual descendents allied with the union leaders who just want more and provide much of the ground game power.

Who can blame the union leaders? If the government is going to tax and spend, the logical position is "Don't tax me, spend on me, and I'll vote for you." The problem is that what the nation needs is people who do NOT directly benefit from government, and don't vote for a party for what they can get out of it, but for what it will do for the country. That's a hard position to take if you're unemployed and your health care runs out and you can't afford COBRA and your kids are sick. Even if you know better, even if you know that in the long run we can't exist by having government workers be the only people with secure employment and a real income, the temptation to take something from the government -- hell I paid taxes for all those years -- and vote to continue, or simply to get into the secure employment sector, is enormous.

What is needed is a restructure, taking the power to Do Good as well as to Tax and Spend out of Washington and handing it back to the States, where the inevitable result of tax and spend is bankruptcy. We can afford to have California and Michigan go bankrupt. We cannot afford to have the Federal Government collapse in an big Atlas Shrugged spasm. Ayn Rand didn't tell us what happens after you trace the sign of the dollar in the air; but it wasn't likely to be pretty. Think of Detroit writ large, only the regulators continue to be on the payroll and are now desperate to raise their department budget through fines and closer enforcement. Anarchy ain't pretty; degenerate democracy is even less so.

In other words, what is needed is that the Democrats stop being run by the Nuts, and the Republicans understand that the purpose of government isn't to let the Creeps run riot, and the only way to do that will be to really believe in transparency and subsidiarity and to understand that each man really is the best judge of his own interest; to return to a point when each election isn't so vital, you can afford to lose one, and the professional politicians are tamed down to where they used to be. That won't be easy. The natural course for a professional politician is to become a rapacious wolf and offer the voters more than his opponent can offer: in other words to promise largesse from the public treasury, and I don't give a damn about Snopes debunking that phrase: democracies really can't survive if the elections turn out to be contests for largesse from the public treasury, and that has been known since Aristotle and Cicero.

Without a party organization the tea party movement will go to hell. It's going to have to build a party structure because we aren't going to stand down from the mad era of Americans with Disabilities Act and No Child Left Behind: and it's going to take more than just deregulation. Some things have to be regulated. Anti-trust is important. Things too big to fail ought not exist, and that has to be fixed. It won't be easy. The Nuts and the Creeps will make common cause to stop any such movement.

Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2010-01-24 18:03|| 2010-01-24 18:03|| Front Page Top

#12 Bright Pebbles: "zero reserves" -- exactly.

Posted by Fester Thaiger8930 2010-01-24 19:56|| 2010-01-24 19:56|| Front Page Top

#13 And I believe this is the third massive banking system meltdown we've had since 1980. The first of those was well-hidden, but took 15 years to recover from.

Posted by Fester Thaiger8930 2010-01-24 20:00|| 2010-01-24 20:00|| Front Page Top

#14 I have found fingerprints of both parties over all of them.

Whether you like it or not, its all partisan. To wish it away is about as realistic as the socialist utopia. You're stuck with the political class you have, short of a real bloody revolution, for the near future. We have to address the financial situation with the pols we have. The choice is between those who engage in petty larceny and those who engage in grand felony theft.

Posted by Procopius2k 2010-01-24 21:23|| 2010-01-24 21:23|| Front Page Top

#15 You're stuck with the political class you have, short of a real bloody revolution, for the near future. We have to address the financial situation with the pols we have. I don't believe we are stuck with the political class or the pols we have. We still have elections, don't we?

Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2010-01-24 22:02|| 2010-01-24 22:02|| Front Page Top

#16 Your election choices are still controlled by parties and the laws and regulations they've put into place. And they do know how the play them. They're not going to disappear over night or in four years or eight years. You can chip away, but wholesale replacements are not going to happen as fast as many want.

Posted by Procopius2k 2010-01-24 23:39|| 2010-01-24 23:39|| Front Page Top

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