Phuking Republicans!

[Kirkland Laing]

Are you questioning my Infallibility again?

Bush is a high-functioning moron. A clueless dummy. Obama is a smart guy who has sane policies and in a radical departure to twent y-first century American governance is promising to staff his administration with qualified people. Not political operatives whose last non-political job was running the US Arabian horse society who end up running the Federal disaster response to Hurricane Katrina, like Bush, or lobbyists/nutters like McCain, but actual qualified people.

[Mar]

This stuff all cracks me up, people still actually belive that thier so called "vote" has anything to do with who wins these elections ??!! People are put into positions of power to represent the will of the people bottom line. Not thier own beliefs, beliefs of thier church, how they were brought up etc...even if they don't agree the will of the people are how they are supposed to vote. Not only do most of these guys not vote (unless there is some type of gain for them or thier individual districts which usuallly lines thier pockets all the same) when they do it's the will of the the group with the most cash not anything that has to do with any of us. Our current economic situation is a perfect example of how them listening to us is a joke. There are a very small small group of people in favor of this bailout 95% of the rest of us either don't want it or don't understand it yet they push along reguardless, they call themselves doing what they think we should want instead of what we actually do. The document started out as four pages and now once "the people" started to get interested it's this long 300 page book full of language no one can or is meant to understand except them. We all yell no..yet you wake up in the morning and hear they are still pressing forward against our wishes. Yet you belive you have any say whatsoever in who is the big cheese, the most powerful man in the free world Yea right. They're just keeping us all busy and feeling like we have a part. There is no republican and democrat red and blue or black and white it's green, money determines everything.....it's foolish to think otherwise. Well not foolish cause to each his own, just my thoughts.

[amat]

OumaFan this may come as quite a shock to you but Presidents and Vice Presidents haven't always gotten along, they haven't always been buddy-buddy, they haven't always been a perfect match and in this case the selection of Palin was merely a demographics decision.

I think you missed his point, just a little bit.

[Kirkland Laing]

This stuff all cracks me up, people still actually belive that thier so called "vote" has anything to do with who wins these elections ??!! People are put into positions of power to represent the will of the people bottom line. Not thier own beliefs, beliefs of thier church, how they were brought up etc...even if they don't agree the will of the people are how they are supposed to vote. Not only do most of these guys not vote (unless there is some type of gain for them or thier individual districts which usuallly lines thier pockets all the same) when they do it's the will of the the group with the most cash not anything that has to do with any of us. Our current economic situation is a perfect example of how them listening to us is a joke. There are a very small small group of people in favor of this bailout 95% of the rest of us either don't want it or don't understand it yet they push along reguardless, they call themselves doing what they think we should want instead of what we actually do. The document started out as four pages and now once "the people" started to get interested it's this long 300 page book full of language no one can or is meant to understand except them. We all yell no..yet you wake up in the morning and hear they are still pressing forward against our wishes. Yet you belive you have any say whatsoever in who is the big cheese, the most powerful man in the free world Yea right. They're just keeping us all busy and feeling like we have a part. There is no republican and democrat red and blue or black and white it's green, money determines everything.....it's foolish to think otherwise. Well not foolish cause to each his own, just my thoughts.

Most of the country is against the bailout but it'll have to happen. They'll have to give Wall Street (and a bunch of other firms) the money or the consequences for everybody will be much worse.

You're right in your post about how things get passed even though the majority don't want them. It's like the Dubai Ports thing. Nobody could understand why Bush would insist on them being allowed to buy US ports. But Bush had no choice. America owes so much money it can't afford to show the world it isn't open for business to people with money, especially oil money. He couldn't afford to set a precedent so he had to take his lumps and stand up for the Arabs against America's wishes.

[Kirkland Laing]

And there's every chance the bailout might not work btw. Whether the global financial system goes into total systemic meltdown is now beyond the control of the people who run the financial system. We 're going to see a bunch of hedge funds go bust now. One of them might be big enough to set things off. A bunch of foreign banks may decide to pull enough money out of the US and that will initiate collapse. There are a dozen things out of the financial system's control that might detonate the whole thing.

There could be a much better and effective bailout of the system than the one on offer. And we may see an eventual bailout v 2.0 that eventually works. But bailout of some kind there will have to be, otherwise things will get Depressingly bad. If we're lucky we can get away with just a severe recession for a year or three.

[El Kabong]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S_FotSAHDY


....I rest my case

[Kirkland Laing]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S_FotSAHDY

....I rest my case

What case is that?

[El Kabong]

The case that the Democrats have everything to do with the bad mojo in Fannie and Freddie and are directly responsible for the mess we're in right now! Ergo electing a democrat at this juncture especially an inexperienced one would be bad as they got us in this mess to begin with

[Kirkland Laing]

The case that the Democrats have everything to do with the bad mojo in Fannie and Freddie and are directly responsible for the mess we're in right now! Ergo electing a democrat at this juncture especially an inexperienced one would be bad as they got us in this mess to begin with

How are the Democrats at fault for what Fannie and Freddie have done?

What is this "bad mojo" you speak of?

How is anything Fannie and Freddie have done responsible for the current crisis?

What do you think caused the current crisis?


You recently complained nobody ever asked you specific questions. Well those are specific questions. Can I have specific answers please?

[Spicoli]

Ding Ding,it just started.....should do a RBR on this one

[El Kabong]

How are the Democrats at fault for what Fannie and Freddie have done?

What is this "bad mojo" you speak of?

How is anything Fannie and Freddie have done responsible for the current crisis?

What do you think caused the current crisis?


You recently complained nobody ever asked you specific questions. Well those are specific questions. Can I have specific answers please?

#1 DEMOCRATS have been in charge of Fannie and Freddie for a long time and starting with Jimmy Carter's "Reinvest in the community program" and reaching a head with The Clinton White House demanding banks make idiotic loans. Also that video shows Republicans wanted more oversight on Fannie and Freddie because Mr. Franklin Raines was making MILLIONS of dollars digging the hole we have since fallen into and even BILL CLINTON blames the Democrats for what has happened.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfGWxqsKFmY


#2 "Bad Mojo" encompasses all that has gone on banks making bad loans, Fannie and Freddie buying those loans, people (who didn't really deserve houses to begin with) being foreclosed on, tax payers having to flip the bill etc etc.

#3 Fannie and Freddie guaranteed money to banks making bad loans....hello GUARANTEED!!!! The free market was bound to take advantage of that AND the government had been forcing...yes FORCING banks to make these bogus loans.

#4 Well it's the improper mixing of government controls and regulations and the free market....the free market is going to follow the path of least resistance and with regulations come road blocks but also loop holes and if there is nobody looking regulations don't mean shit.

....so yeah have your specific answers

[Kirkland Laing]

How are the Democrats at fault for what Fannie and Freddie have done?

What is this "bad mojo" you speak of?

How is anything Fannie and Freddie have done responsible for the current crisis?

What do you think caused the current crisis?


You recently complained nobody ever asked you specific questions. Well those are specific questions. Can I have specific answers please?

#1 DEMOCRATS have been in charge of Fannie and Freddie for a long time and starting with Jimmy Carter's "Reinvest in the community program" and reaching a head with The Clinton White House demanding banks make idiotic loans. Also that video shows Republicans wanted more oversight on Fannie and Freddie because Mr. Franklin Raines was making MILLIONS of dollars digging the hole we have since fallen into and even BILL CLINTON blames the Democrats for what has happened.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfGWxqsKFmY#2 "Bad Mojo" encompasses all that has gone on banks making bad loans, Fannie and Freddie buying those loans, people (who didn't really deserve houses to begin with) being foreclosed on, tax payers having to flip the bill etc etc.

#3 Fannie and Freddie guaranteed money to banks making bad loans....hello GUARANTEED!!!! The free market was bound to take advantage of that AND the government had been forcing...yes FORCING banks to make these bogus loans.

#4 Well it's the improper mixing of government controls and regulations and the free market....the free market is going to follow the path of least resistance and with regulations come road blocks but also loop holes and if there is nobody looking regulations don't mean shit.

....so yeah have your specific answers

1. Democrats have not been in charge of Fannie and Freddie for ages. No political party is "in charge" of them. The Republicans ran the Senate and House Banking Oversight Boards for fourteen years up to 2006, when the Democrats took over by which time the deregulatory damage had all been done.

The Community Reinvestment Act has nothing at all to do with the current meltdown, it's just the only way that conservatives can blame Bill Clinton (and Jimmy Carter) for what they've done. Over 80% of the subprime loans made are by firms not covered by the CRA. Of the 20% of loans that were, almost none have gone bad. The reason? The CRA mandates that checks anddocumentation must be made for each loan, which prevented CRA-covered firms from making bad loans. The bad loans were all made by deregulated firms not covered by the CRA.

Republicans have removed all regulation of the mortgage, banking, credit rating and investment banking/securities industries over the past couple of decades but especially since 2000. This is why we have the current crisis, nothing to do with Clinton or Carter. The Bill Clinton video clip is taken out of context. You'd need to show the whole interview to see exactly what he was talking about.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'll give you a quick rundown of why this actually happened.

Firstly the GOP removed all regulations preventing mortage originators (commercial banks, mortgage lending firms etc.) selling those loans to a third party once they'd made them. These laws were introduced in the Depression because similar crooked stuff in the 1920s helped create the Depression.

These third parties broke up the rights to the payments from the mortgages into lots of little pieces, combined these pieces with the rights to payments for little pieces of lots of other mortgages, repacked these in “creative” ways, and re-sold them to fourth, fifth and sixth parties. Four, five and six then used these promises as their own equity in order to raise further debt of their own. This would be like you using an IOU from your neighbour as your down payment for a mortgage. So when lots of these over-leveraged homeowners started to miss mortgage payments, parties four, five and six had less money than they expected, and they had problems making their own debt payments if they themselves had taken out enough debt. Oh yeah, many of these debt contracts are in fact between parties four, five and six.

When Greenspan cut the lending rate to effectively zero in 2004 in an attempt to jumpstart the economy after the failure of the Bush tax cuts to create growth, it became possible for the mortgage industry to make vast numbers of new loans. The third, fourth and fifth parties were all desperate to buy more. So the mortgage industry went crazy from 2004 onwards, creating vast numbers of new products (no document loans, no proof of income loans, interest-only loans etc.) They weren't worried if these people could pay the loans off because they didn't have to hold onto them any more due to deregulation -- they could sell them all off to securities firms.

But there was still a ton of regulatory bodies that prevented predatory lending, again created in the Depression era. These Federal agencies had to power to investigate, prosecute and close down predatory lenders. The Bush administration's solution to this? Staff them with banking lobbyists and use the agencies to prevent investigation and prosecution of bad lenders -- that's right, using the agencies to doi exactly the opposite of what they were intended to do.

Here's the former Governor of New York explaining what happened when he and a bunch of other States tried to stop bad lending :

The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules. But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks. In fact, when my office opened an investigation of possible discrimination in mortgage lending by a number of banks, the OCC filed a federal lawsuit to stop the investigation.



Eliot Spitzer - Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime - washingtonpost.com




Here are a few good quotes I was going to make into a blog post on this :




"Where once more-marginal applicants would simply have been denied credit, lenders are now able to quite efficiently judge the risk posed by individual applicants and to price that risk appropriately. These improvements have led to rapid growth in subprime mortgage lending."

Alan Greenspan
Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank,
April 2005




"Mr. Howard made it clear to the mortgage broker that he could not read or write, but his loan application erroneously claimed he had had 16 years of education."

Center for Responsible Lending report
"IndyMac: What Went Wrong?"
June 30, 2008




"I would reject a loan and the insanity would begin,"
one former underwriter
told CRL. "It would go to upper management and the next
thing you know it's


going to closing... I'm like, 'What the Sam Hill?
There's nothing in there to
support this loan.'"

Center for Responsible Lending report
"IndyMac:
What Went Wrong?"
June 30, 2008


What is that movie? Boiler Room? That's what it's like. I mean,
it's the [coolest] thing ever. Cubicle, cubicle, cubicle for 150,000
square feet. The ceilings were probably 25 or 30 feet high. The
elevator had a big graffiti painting. Big open space. And it was
awesome. We lived mortgage. That's all we did. This deal, that deal.
How we gonna get it funded? What's the problem with this one? That's





all everyone's talking about . . . 
We looked at loans. These people didn't have a pot to piss in. They can barely make car payments and we're giving them a 300, 400 thousand dollar house.






Then the next one came along, and it was no income, verified assets. So you don't have to tell the people what you do for a living. You don't have to tell the people what you do for work. All you have to do is state you have a certain amount of money in your bank account. And then, the next one, is just no income, no asset. You don't have to state anything. Just have to have a credit score and a pulse.
[reporter] Alex Blumberg: Actually, that pulse thing. Also optional. Like the case in Ohio where twenty-three dead people were approved for mortgages.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


But even after these loans are made there's no crisis that will bring down the entire financial system. How did that happen? You can't just take a bunch of bad loans, slice and dice them to "spread the risk", package them into securities and sell them to investors, because the securities have to undergo a rating process by the credit-rating agencies. The best credit rating you can get is AAA, which US government bonds, the safest investment on the planet, have. There's no way that junk loans could ever get a AAA rating, right? Not after they have to go through a ratings process which would investigate the original loans, interview and check the documentation of the mortgage-holders etc., right? Wrong. The GOP scrapped all oversight of the credit-ratings industry in 2002. They were left to self-regulate. And lo and behold, by an alchemical process involving the payment of hefty fees from the securities firms where this junk paper originated subprime loan securities got a AAA rating, allowing them to be sold and traded as high-quality investments comparable to US bonds.

[Kirkland Laing]

When house prices started to fall and foreclosures started to spike the firms that held this paper realised they had a problem. If a mortgage had already been split into hundreds of pieces and was included in hundreds of different secutities, who had right of ownership on the foreclosed property? Who got paid first and last from whatever the house eventually sold for? With house prices in freefall, putting a value on how much the securities were worth became impossible. Nobody would pay what they were worth and the only stuff traded recently has been sold for between 5-20 cents on the dollar. So firms have huge losses and massive debts that they used these securities to guarantee and even leverage. Now nobody knows which banks are solvent and which aren't so nobody is lending to each other and nobody is trading. Firms that own a ton of this are being short-sold out of existence by speculators. That's where we are right now.


Here's a picture and a graph that explain what happened nicely. Here are a bunch of banking lobbyists that Bush put in charge of overseeing banking and lending practices taking a chainsaw and tree shears to a stack of banking regulations, "cutting red tape" so that the free market can make profits soar :





Now here's one that shows exactly how the subprime metdown started all this. All subprime loand had a teaser rate that lasted for typically 2-3 years. This rate meant that the first 2-3 years' payments were like rent money or even less. But after 2-3 years the interest rate on the mortgage resets and the payments balloon. So this graph shows how subprime lending went stratospheric after the rate was cut in 2003, and shows the dates this vast quantity of mortgage paper reset its interest rates. You'll see how the huge numbers of resets match exactly the start of the current meltdown. Nothing to do with Jimmy Caret and a 1977 bill which was a major success, but everything to do with the effective end of regulation of the mortgage/commercial banking/securities industries after 2000.


There's a lot of stuff I've forgotten or missed out but this should give you a good overall picture of the reality. You know, what actually happened. I'd be interested to hear your reply to this :





It's a shame it doesn't show 2006. The 2006 numbers were small fractions of even the January 2007 numbers. Anyway you can see all these bad loans were made from 2004 onwards.

[Trainer Monkey]

How are the Democrats at fault for what Fannie and Freddie have done?

What is this "bad mojo" you speak of?

How is anything Fannie and Freddie have done responsible for the current crisis?

What do you think caused the current crisis?


You recently complained nobody ever asked you specific questions. Well those are specific questions. Can I have specific answers please?

#1 DEMOCRATS have been in charge of Fannie and Freddie for a long time and starting with Jimmy Carter's "Reinvest in the community program" and reaching a head with The Clinton White House demanding banks make idiotic loans. Also that video shows Republicans wanted more oversight on Fannie and Freddie because Mr. Franklin Raines was making MILLIONS of dollars digging the hole we have since fallen into and even BILL CLINTON blames the Democrats for what has happened.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfGWxqsKFmY

#2 "Bad Mojo" encompasses all that has gone on banks making bad loans, Fannie and Freddie buying those loans, people (who didn't really deserve houses to begin with) being foreclosed on, tax payers having to flip the bill etc etc.

#3 Fannie and Freddie guaranteed money to banks making bad loans....hello GUARANTEED!!!! The free market was bound to take advantage of that AND the government had been forcing...yes FORCING banks to make these bogus loans.

#4 Well it's the improper mixing of government controls and regulations and the free market....the free market is going to follow the path of least resistance and with regulations come road blocks but also loop holes and if there is nobody looking regulations don't mean shit.

....so yeah have your specific answers

No in fact they havent
From 1994 until 2006 it was a REepublican controlled congress
Its long been a Republican controlled Judiciary
And for only 8 of the last 28 years its been a Republican controlled executive branch,12 out of the last 40 years
Nope sorry,if you shit on yourself,it isnt the other guys fault

[El Kabong]

So you're telling me Kirkland that being the Chairman and CEO of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac doesn't matter at all?

Let's get this straight buddy the banks would NEVER have made those loans had not a GSE been there to buy those bad loans up because smart businessmen know that people who can't afford a home CAN'T AFFORD A HOME ergo they don't deserve a loan no matter what good intentions one might have. If a bank wanted to make money on bad loans yes they could abuse the system and that's what happened, the money was guaranteed and well here we are.

But let's all just wait for the magical Barrack Obama to come in a wave his magic wand and fix all this...Democrats NEVER mess up....they never do...even to think such a thing is blasphemy.