A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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SIGNYM

Saturday, May 19, 2018 4:20 AM

Quote:
I suppose a decision to commit nuclear suicide would immediately destroy an economy, but short of that the economy has to be at a really unstable point before it can be pushed into freefall by one decision or one event.- SIGNY

Or an event which forebodes 4 years of disaster.- JSF

I don't understand. Maybe an example would help.- SIGNY

Such as the Election of Obama. Or the impending doom preceding it.- JSF

Understanding-fail at this end. If you're trying to say that Obama was responsible for the financial collapse, it was well underway even before the Nov 2008 election. There were signs of impending doom in 2007, the collapse of Bear Stearns (Hey, I bought muni bonds from that company lo these many years ago!) was a harbinger of things to come. The fall of Shearson Lehman (which took down an investment of mine in the Forex) occurred Sept 15, 2008, and my bank (WAMU) was seized by the FDIC in late Sept 2008.

All of the problems ... fraudulent lending, the real estate bubble, naked CDSs, low-low interest rates, banks lacking reserves and commingling customer deposits with speculative money, the widening of the wealth gap, the deficit and trickle-down ... came about because of things that Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and The Fed did all together. It was a clusterfuck of greed and speculation over many years.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

America is an oligarchy
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

SECOND

Saturday, May 19, 2018 5:12 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
I suppose a decision to commit nuclear suicide would immediately destroy an economy, but short of that the economy has to be at a really unstable point before it can be pushed into freefall by one decision or one event.- SIGNY

Or an event which forebodes 4 years of disaster.- JSF

I don't understand. Maybe an example would help.- SIGNY

Such as the Election of Obama. Or the impending doom preceding it.- JSF

Understanding-fail at this end. If you're trying to say that Obama was responsible for the financial collapse, it was well underway even before the Nov 2008 election. There were signs of impending doom in 2007, the collapse of Bear Stearns (Hey, I bought muni bonds from that company lo these many years ago!) was a harbinger of things to come. The fall of Shearson Lehman (which took down an investment of mine in the Forex) occurred Sept 15, 2008, and my bank (WAMU) was seized by the FDIC in late Sept 2008.

All of the problems ... fraudulent lending, the real estate bubble, naked CDSs, low-low interest rates, banks lacking reserves and commingling customer deposits with speculative money, the widening of the wealth gap, the deficit and trickle-down ... came about because of things that Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and The Fed did all together. It was a clusterfuck of greed and speculation over many years.

Nice try, Signym, but the true explanation has many more details involving bonds that were fraudulently rated (or incompetently rated, depending on who you ask) as being high quality investment grade.

What happens when the public discovers that a company owns a portfolio full of garbage, rather than AAA rating bonds? The case of Enron is illustrative. Throughout the summer and fall of 2001, even though its credit was rapidly deteriorating, the rating agencies kept it at investment grade. This was not unusual; the agencies typically lag behind the news. On Nov. 28, 2001, S.&P. finally dropped Enron’s bonds to subinvestment grade. Although its action merely validated the market consensus, it caused the stock to collapse. To investors, S.&P.’s action was a signal that Enron was locked out of credit markets; it had lost its “license” to borrow. Four days later it filed for bankruptcy.

On with the story of the Financial crisis of 2007–2008:

Triple-A Failure
By ROGER LOWENSTEIN, APRIL 27, 2008
www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/magazine/27Credit-t.html

The Ratings Game

In 1996, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, remarked on “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” that there were two superpowers in the world — the United States and Moody’s bond-rating service — and it was sometimes unclear which was more powerful. Moody’s was then a private company that rated corporate bonds, but it was, already, spreading its wings into the exotic business of rating securities backed by pools of residential mortgages.

Obscure and dry-seeming as it was, this business offered a certain magic. The magic consisted of turning risky mortgages into investments that would be suitable for investors who would know nothing about the underlying loans. To get why this is impressive, you have to think about all that determines whether a mortgage is safe. Who owns the property? What is his or her income? Bundle hundreds of mortgages into a single security and the questions multiply; no investor could begin to answer them. But suppose the security had a rating. If it were rated triple-A by a firm like Moody’s, then the investor could forget about the underlying mortgages. He wouldn’t need to know what properties were in the pool, only that the pool was triple-A — it was just as safe, in theory, as other triple-A securities.

Over the last decade, Moody’s and its two principal competitors, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch, played this game to perfection — putting what amounted to gold seals on mortgage securities that investors swept up with increasing élan. For the rating agencies, this business was extremely lucrative. Their profits su

6IXSTRINGJACK

Saturday, May 19, 2018 6:46 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, You DO realize that you're becoming PIRATE NEWS-like? You're absolutely obsessed with Trump. You bring up one allegation, and when it's been found to be wrong, irrelevant, or trivial, rather than discussing THE TOPIC you drop that one and move on to another. Clearly, you have a longstanding hard on for the guy.

Just to go back to a previous discussion about your personal history, I can't imagine what would have propelled you to volunteer for Vietnam. Was it your family? I don't think so, because they're Jehovah's Witnesses, right? And eschewing politics, don't they also eschew military service? So, not your family. Republican friends, maybe? The zeitgeist of Texas? Desire for action and adventure? Whatever it was, it left you with permanent consequence. Well, whatever. I wanted a child, and we ALL have permanent consequences! Life happens, and at least it wasn't fatal. You were 17 at the time, give yourself a break. If we knew the future, we wouldn't make mistakes. But we don't, and we do. Stop blaming everyone else for your decision, and then forgive yourself. Shit happens. Really.

This.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

SIGNYM

Saturday, May 19, 2018 10:36 AM

Quote:
If you're trying to say that Obama was responsible for the financial collapse, it was well underway even before the Nov 2008 election... SIGNY

Nice try, Signym, but ...

Wow, I can't even DEFEND Obama without you disagreeing with me!

Yes, I know .... the causes of the Great Financial Collapse were many and varied, and the reasons why one event went "viral" through the financial system were even more varied. I just didn't want to detail all of them because that wasn't my point.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

America is an oligarchy
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

SECOND

Saturday, May 19, 2018 4:58 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
If you're trying to say that Obama was responsible for the financial collapse, it was well underway even before the Nov 2008 election... SIGNY

Nice try, Signym, but ...
Wow, I can't even DEFEND Obama without you disagreeing with me!

Yes, I know .... the causes of the Great Financial Collapse were many and varied, and the reasons why one event went "viral" through the financial system were even more varied. I just didn't want to detail all of them because that wasn't my point.

Signym wrote: "I just didn't want to detail all of them because that wasn't my point." Don't even try to detail anything, Signym. Your overly articulate brain is always tricking you into thinking you understand more than you do. A truer summation would be that the financial collapse was completely beyond the control of President Obama, Bush, or Bill Clinton, but well within the control of the SEC. If you dig down deeper into that article, there are tidbits about the geniuses running the financial world:

Quote:
In April 2007, Moody’s announced it was revising the model it used to evaluate subprime mortgages. It noted that the model “was first introduced in 2002. Since then, the mortgage market has evolved considerably.” This was a rather stunning admission; its model had been based on a world that no longer existed.

Poring over the data, Moody’s discovered that the size of people’s first mortgages was no longer a good predictor of whether they would default; rather, it was the size of their first and second loans — that is, their total debt — combined. This was rather intuitive; Moody’s simply hadn’t reckoned on it. . . . And homeowners without equity were making what economists call a rational choice; they were abandoning properties rather than make payments on them. Homeowners’ equity had never been as high as believed because appraisals had been inflated.

Over the summer and fall of 2007, Moody’s and the other agencies repeatedly tightened their methodology for rating mortgage securities, but it was too late. They had to downgrade tens of billions of dollars of securities. By early this year (2008), when I met with Moody’s, an astonishing 27 percent of the mortgage holders in Subprime XYZ were delinquent. Losses on the pool were now estimated at 14 percent to 16 percent — three times the original estimate.

www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/magazine/27Credit-t.html

The Securities and Exchange Commission could have stopped Moody's fake rating system before it became a disaster, but then the SEC would have been forced to listen to Republicans saying: "The younger generation, and society at large, is not yearning for a five-year plan of centrally delivered tractor quotas. Instead, we are a society that prizes individual autonomy and freedom of expression, and expects government to help us to achieve our goals, not set them." The SEC let Moody's profitable drama continue to the finish because the SEC couldn't be absolutely certain that the drama will end, several years later, tragically with a worldwide crash.

I changed my mind, it does matter who is President. What's important is how much risk will the President allow? Under Bush, large risks were allowed by the SEC. Under Obama, small risks. Under Trump, who is either a loose cannon or a monkey with a machine gun, the SEC is an erratic bureaucracy that will allow the financial world to take large, complicated risks with the economy.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Saturday, May 19, 2018 5:08 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, You DO realize that you're becoming PIRATE NEWS-like? You're absolutely obsessed with Trump. You bring up one allegation, and when it's been found to be wrong, irrelevant, or trivial, rather than discussing THE TOPIC you drop that one and move on to another. Clearly, you have a longstanding hard on for the guy.

Just to go back to a previous discussion about your personal history, I can't imagine what would have propelled you to volunteer for Vietnam. Was it your family? I don't think so, because they're Jehovah's Witnesses, right? And eschewing politics, don't they also eschew military service? So, not your family. Republican friends, maybe? The zeitgeist of Texas? Desire for action and adventure? Whatever it was, it left you with permanent consequence. Well, whatever. I wanted a child, and we ALL have permanent consequences! Life happens, and at least it wasn't fatal. You were 17 at the time, give yourself a break. If we knew the future, we wouldn't make mistakes. But we don't, and we do. Stop blaming everyone else for your decision, and then forgive yourself. Shit happens. Really.

This.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Nixon was a great persuader. He persuaded me that Vietnam was a war that was necessary to win. But he excluded a critical piece of information from his sales pitch: there could have been peace with North Vietnam in 1968 if only Nixon had not interfered with the South Vietnamese President. It is a very straight forward story which everyone who voted for Trump ought to know:
www.commondreams.org/views/2014/08/12/george-will-confirms-nixons-viet
nam-treason

If I had not gone to Vietnam after high school, I would have continued to work at Burger King for my father, the day manager. His job was not well paid. He worked it until he retired at age 62, as soon as Social Security was available. He and I both liked the food, but I preferred the Whaler and my father preferred the Whopper. Other than the tasty food, it was not the job for me. War was the job for me. As my luck would have it, war shortened my left leg and sent me back to Burger King. Returning to fast food was the easiest thing to do, but it could have worse. I could have ended in 1972 at Houston National Cemetery on Veterans Memorial Drive. Lucky me was the only one to survive more than a month a helicopter crash.

Once I’m back in Pasadena Texas to face my future in fast food, I realize I cannot stand on my feet and work for 8 hours at Burger King. I tried for months. But Nixon knew I needed to get a different job, one that can be done sitting down. Thus I went to the University of Texas at Austin, following the example of my two sisters (school teacher at HISD and nurse at many places), graduating with a BSME in 1977 at the age of 25, and had a better paying career than my father. I owe my success to Nixon and his sale pitch for winning the Vietnam War. If not for Nixon, I would have been a Burger King manager like my father. Too bad for Nixon that Watergate followed directly from the treason involving Vietnam that Nixon committed in ‘68. The story is short, yet very few have read and understood it at:
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-f-will-nixons-long-shadow/2014/
08/06/fad8c00c-1ccb-11e4-ae54-0cfe1f974f8a_story.html?utm_term=.45276f6d4a50

Maybe you will read the two short stories about Nixon. The stories look at the same event from two slightly different angles, giving a good view of what Nixon did. Someday there might be a similar story about Trump, but far more amazing and entertaining than Nixon’s. Trump is a greater showman than dull old Nixon, the Quaker.
http://quakerspeak.com/was-richard-nixon-a-quaker/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Saturday, May 19, 2018 6:09 PM

Bill Gates Wasn't Impressed With Donald Trump during a private meeting. Start at 2:36.

Why Trump should be intimately acquainted with both HIV and HPV
https://qz.com/1281889

Microsoft founder Bill Gates told his staff at the Gates Foundation, in a recently publicized video obtained by MSNBC, that he has had two meetings with Donald Trump since the president was elected.

Gates said he tried to persuade the president during both meetings to be a “leader who drives innovation.” Alarmingly, in both, Trump asked if vaccines weren’t a “bad thing,” said Gates, indicating that Trump believes in a conspiracy that has spread throughout the West in recent years, bringing back once-banished diseases like measles with it.

And both times, “he wanted to know if there was a difference between HIV and HPV,” Gates said, “so I was available to explain those were rarely confused with each other:”

Trump’s inattention to detail, lack of even rudimentary knowledge about American history ( https://qz.com/972825 ), and fundamental ignorance about global trade is a constant in his presidency. But given his personal history, the fact that he doesn’t know or understand the difference between HIV and HPV is an almost unfathomable.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SIGNYM

Sunday, May 20, 2018 12:57 AM

Quote:
Signym wrote: "I just didn't want to detail all of them because that wasn't my point." Don't even try to detail anything, Signym. Your overly articulate brain is always tricking you into thinking you understand more than you do. A truer summation would be that the financial collapse was completely beyond the control of President Obama, Bush, or Bill Clinton, - SECOND

Oh yes, you with your vast knowledge of economics and finance (gained in the very last article that you read on the topic) "really" understand what went on. [/snark]

The reality is that the crisis COULD HAVE been prevented at many points. ANY ONE of those points would have led to an entirely different outcome; "ratings" was just one of those points.

The crisis could be thought of as originating with the development of "fractional reserve banking", because if banks weren't able to loan money that they DIDN'T HAVE, then they would have not themselves been able to go so far into debt.

Then again, you could say that the crisis originated with Bill Clinton, because if he hadn't done away with Glass Steagall (which separated deposits from speculative ventures) or signed the Commodities Futures Modernization Act (both on the basis that our banks were being out-competed for capital by EU banks which operated under the less-restrictive Basel rules), Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) would have never been created, and so many depositors would not have had their money at risk.

Or you could blame the FDIC itself, which continued to insure deposits even as the risk increased, giving lenders and depositors a false sense of security.

Or, you could point to George W Bush, who (with his wartime spending, tax cut for the wealthy, and Part D gift to Big Pharma) blew up the deficit and grossly expanded the wealth gap, placing many people in the position of relying on debt to finance their lifestyle.

The again, you might say that The Fed (1913) caused the problem because instead of holding GWB's feet to the fire and allowing interest rates to rise with increasing public and private indebtedness, they kept interest rates artificially low, allowing a housing bubble to inflate.

Or, you can point to banks and other mortgage lending institutions like Countrywide, who wrote incredibly loose, if not downright fraudulent mortgages with surprise raises in interest rates, balloon payments, little down payment and no income verification (liar's loans) required. Do you remember ANTHONY? He used to work on the loan department of a bank and he posted here how terrible the loans were. The only reason why banks could write such shaky loans is because they knew they had a market for them, via the CDO's that they were able to create and sell.

You could blame the homeowners, who were either too greedy or too naive (or both) to understand what trouble they were getting into, and how they would come crashing down if the up-escalator of home prices ever reversed direction.

Or, back again to GWB. When States Attorney Generals attempted to prosecute banks for fraudulent lending, GWB DOJ forbade states from prosecuting banks, claiming it was a Federal matter.

You could blame the ratings agencies, who rated the bundled prime/subprime loan CDOs as AAA to be sold to other banks, Fannie and Freddie, and to investors like pension fund and other institutions who didn't understand they risk they they were buying.

And then, there were the investors on CDOs (and even CDSs) ... the retirement funds, OTHER BANKS, hedge funds ... who only saw returns on investment without looking under the hoods of the "investments" that they were buying. The bank-to-bank sales is what caused one event to spread like wildfire across the globe, as banks SUDDENLY distrusted each other's assets, and the London Interbank Overnight Rate (LIBOR) suddenly zoomed up from near-nothing to over 6% and caused a credit freeze from Lehman to Black Rock (Scotland) to

1KIKI

Sunday, May 20, 2018 5:29 AM

Quote:
Kiki is talking about people handing over at least 4 years of their life under 24/7 direct management from the Military, housing non-combat duty soldiers on American soil on the taxpayer dime. Huge difference.

Which we are ALREADY doing. It's generically called the military.

All I'm proposing is that we change the military's tasks and locale - from killing overseas, to providing societal value here.

SECOND is a troll because it constantly misrepresents what people post, fails to address their actual positions, and resorts to personal attacks when its brain isn't working (which is most of the time).

6IXSTRINGJACK

Sunday, May 20, 2018 6:49 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Quote:
Kiki is talking about people handing over at least 4 years of their life under 24/7 direct management from the Military, housing non-combat duty soldiers on American soil on the taxpayer dime. Huge difference.
Which we are ALREADY doing. It's generically called the military.

All I'm proposing is that we change the military's tasks and locale - from killing overseas, to providing societal value here.

SECOND is a troll because it constantly misrepresents what people post, fails to address their actual positions, and resorts to personal attacks when its brain isn't working (which is most of the time).

Okay. Well I'm 100% against this, for many reasons. Some of which I've already stated. I don't imagine you'd find much support from anybody for this idea. I'd be surprised if a single person on this board other than you supported the idea, and you know of the few of us left here that we all rarely agree on anything.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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