Totally Corrupt America - Paul Craig Roberts

[sirs]

Yea....and Obama is this all-awesome graduate from Columbia & Harvard...look how bad he's been. 

If its just a matter of finding economists that can point directly to the Government's role in both Fannie & Freddie, as well as in how they modified the CRA, as the principle source for our housing meltdown & economic collapse, I'm sure there are plenty to be found.....that you'd then start shooting each of those messengers with their "obvious corporate connections" and having been "bought and paid for by the 1%".   SOP

[Plane]

I will try again.

     The Motley Fool , (an organisation that owes no corporation a cent) comes to the conclusion that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were a large part of the problem based on certain well established facts.
     Anticipateing the possibility that these facts could be rejected because of not knowing much about the Motley Fool I quote a very well established Liberal Opinioneer who agrees on the nature of the  the basic facts reguarding the nature of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac.

     No, I am not surprised that the liberal guy explans away the signifigance of the facts he admits to, so I shall not try to claim the Krugman is in real agreement with the Motley Fool or with me , he is here only to establish as firmly as possible that the facts I consider significant are indeed facts.

   I see evidence that you carefully read the Krugman article , but no evidence that you read the Foolish article , does the name put you off?  I assure you that though they are indeed fools they are no ones stooges.


 

plane, The Motley Fool, whose article you quote, is a provider of financial services to the general public, and as such is part of the problem and not part of the solution.  Its analysis of the crash of 2008 is far from impartial, and can be expected to present the views of Wall Street and the financial services industry generally, i.e., that Fannie and Freddie bear most if not all of the blame.

Your Krugman quote was extremely misleading, for it begins immediately after Krugman's following sentence, which you deliberately excluded from the quote you posted here:

<<Furthermore, while Fannie and Freddie are problematic institutions, they aren’t responsible for the mess we’re in.>>

It's getting late now, and I'm very tired.  So I think I'll turn in before going over your quotes in detail, but they're definitely something I'd want to take a closer look at.

[Michael Tee]

<<The Motley Fool , (an organisation that owes no corporation a cent) . . . >>

plane, I am not suggesting that the Fool is SPONSORED by Wall Street, I am suggesting that the Fool IS Wall Street.  The Fool is a financial services provider and as such, regardless of its physical location, is in the same business as Goldman Sachs, has the same general interests as Goldman Sachs, the same reasons to hate government "interference" or regulation as Goldman Sachs and the same distrust of Fanny and Freddy as Goldman Sachs.

<<comes to the conclusion that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were a large part of the problem based on certain well established facts.>>

There are well-established facts that show Fannie and Freddy as PART of the problem and if taken in complete isolation from all other relevant facts would show that Fannie and Freddy might have been a major part of it.

However you can only believe that F&F were "a large part of the problem" by totally ignoring ALL of the other facts, including the reckless loans to obviously unqualified borrowers, the financial institutions who bought and bundled the loans to re-sell in bundles to their own clients and others, the rating agencies showering all this shit with their triple-A ratings, the insurers through credit default swaps recklessly insuring the mortgage-backed bonds against default, etc.

It's as if someone painted a huge canvas showing all the criminality in the sub-prime mortgage collapse, and you have zeroed in on one square inch of the canvas.  You start your TV show with a full-screen close-up of the one square inch and there are Fanny and Freddie rolling a drunk in an alleyway.  And you start to talk about Fanny and Freddy and their role as robbers engineering this whole gigantic collapse.  And then the camera accidentally rolls back and there is the whole canvas filling the screen, with thousands of other criminal characters robbing, stealing, cutting throats, swindling, issuing forged documents, whatever . . .  it's NOT all Fanny and Freddie any more and you can't pretend any longer that it is.

[BSB]

Well, how about a purge? Lets kill 'em all, and rape their wives (the bunch of bitches, and their mothers to who suckled these capitalist criminals at their breasts).

The real problem had a lot less to do with criminality, and more to do with laziness. Wall St was producing shity products just as Detroit was producing shity cars.

BSB

[Michael Tee]

Laziness?  You obviously don't know what the fuck you are talking about.  A typical prospectus for a sub-prime mortgage bond runs close to 200 pages of single-spaced legalese, the products of the best legal and financial brains on Wall Street and the major law firms of mid-town Manhattan.  The creation of credit default swaps was as inventive in its own field as new softward is in the computing field.

There's unfortunately a lengthy history of ever-escalatiing financial scandals that starts with the Teapot Dome scandal of the Twenties, goes through the collapse of the Insull Empire in the Thirties and then really takes off after the war with the Savings and Loan Scandal, the so-called Keating Five (including our old friend John McCain) the Enron, Worldcom, Waste Management, Tyco et al. scandals, then the collapse of Lehman Bros., AIG and others leading to the collapse of 2008.

Ridiculous to refer to this as "laziness" resulting in "shitty products."  Laziness would result in the top dogs LOSING shitloads of money.  This was criminal planning in action, an essential and inseparable part of capitalism.  The buying of the people who make the laws is part and parcel of the criminal scheme.  If it turns out to  be all legal, that would be no surprise at all.  Why the fuck do they spend good money on their Congressmen and Senators?

[Plane]

<<The Motley Fool , (an organisation that owes no corporation a cent) . . . >>

plane, I am not suggesting that the Fool is SPONSORED by Wall Street, I am suggesting that the Fool IS Wall Street.  The Fool is a financial services provider and as such, regardless of its physical location, is in the same business as Goldman Sachs,....

   No, this is not the nature of the Motley Fool, you cannot buy any product from them nor can you use them for brokerage.
    If you join up, the fee gets you access to their reasearch, but you can also participate in their reasearch, that is, you too can be a fool.
     Motley Fool is more like Debategate than it is like Goldman Sachs.

[Plane]

There's unfortunately a lengthy history of ever-escalatiing financial scandals that starts with the Teapot Dome scandal of the Twenties, goes through the collapse of the Insull Empire in the Thirties and then really takes off after the war with the Savings and Loan Scandal, the so-called Keating Five (including our old friend John McCain) the Enron, Worldcom, Waste Management, Tyco et al. scandals, then the collapse of Lehman Bros., AIG and others leading to the collapse of 2008.

   The Government participated in this one no less than in the Teapot dome. I don't see why you consider the US government innocent this time.

[BSB]

MTee >> Laziness would result in the top dogs LOSING shitloads of money.<<

Nonsense, that's your need for some sort of payback. That's your Old Testament God speaking again. Even though you claim to be an atheist you've been soaked in old time religion.

Detroit made losey cars, in fact consumer reports has just reported that the American auto industry is slipping again, including Ford. Would you like to share with me the CEOs of the big three's salaries over the past 40 years and point out where they lost shitloads of money? Don't bother, by far and away they were racking up unprecedented salaries. A couple, for short spurts, took cuts. But in one case that was for publicity. The other guy was serious.

Putting a good product out there that is reliable, fairly priced, and ethical, is not an easy thing to do. Making shitloads of money for a period of time by cutting corners involves about half the work. 


BSB

[Plane]

...............  The buying of the people who make the laws is part and parcel of the criminal scheme.  If it turns out to  be all legal, that would be no surprise at all.  Why the fuck do they spend good money on their Congressmen and Senators?

http://www.evil-comic.com/archive/20080913.html