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[J_Beck]

i was prepared to vote for romney. i was angry about voting for mccain.

I wouldn't be, he messed up Massachusetts pretty badly

His idea of budget-cutting was about half a billion out of education, which basically paralyze our universities for awhile

[85283-071]

Education is the duty of the Church. It's all that book larnin' that gets people tryin' to impose financial regulation so everyone doesn't get ass fucked by the halfwit dipshits that keep pretending the finacial system is simple enough that real education isn't necessary.


Fucking. Hell.


FACT. Lack of regulation has made a mess of this country. Not trying to be mean, Music Box, but the fact that someone can really, still lament the choice of Republicans one had is baffling. The only way anyone has been able to even hint that something other than republican fiscal ideology is responsible for the harm that has been done to so many people in this country and around the world, is to mine the facts ion such a way as to DECEIVE people regarding the nature and impact of the Community Reinvestment Act.

It's 2009. The republicans were, it turns out, officially wrong.

[CeeGBee]

...and while that doesn't necessarily mean the Dems are "right", it hasn't been disproven, yet.

[85283-071]

As far as the assertion that better regulation is vital, there isn't much else needed in the way of proof. Of course, that proof has cycled through history many times. When things get good, and the imaginary castles are being built faster than real materials can sustain them, profiteers, once again, will find ways to draw that fuel from the people. The catch is, without a financially solvent population, it all... falls... down. Socially, I am a liberal, but I am a fiscal liberal. Booyah.

Just tax the people less, right? People don't need to understand economics or institutionalized larceny as long as everyone works hard. No matter that there are more effective policies to keep dollars in the hands of the people than tax breaks and cuts... especially when those cuts are always balanced by local (even less efficiently applied) levies.

[Cheddars Cousin]

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/aEdXrfIMdiU" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/aEdXrfIMdiU</a>

[85283-071]

Democrats were definitely too conservative back then.

[CeeGBee]

Imagine, if you will, that you're driving down the road, and you come to an intersection....

Should you turn left, right, or not at all?

The correct answer, as is obvious to sensible folk, is:
D - Not enough information...



If circumstances warrant it, taxes should be cut...  in other circumstances, they should be raised...
These days, everyone in Washington seems too busy sticking his (or her) head up the Party's ass,
to unwilling to consider whethet "party line" is the right thing to do...

It's one of the things I quite admired about SENATOR McCain, but he clearly abandoned the habits
that had made him a true "maverick" when he signed on to run for President.  It's too bad the label
became a joke, because when he was willing to think for himself, he was a damn good Senator.

[imaginary friend]

She's cashing out. She'll never be as well-known and popular as she is right now, so...here comes the radio/cable TV deal and a ghostwritten book.

#@!

You've seen the ego...  Do you really think she'll ever 'just go away'?   

who said anything about going away? All I'm saying is that her earning ability is peaking as we speak. Given that she's unemployed w/o insurance at the moment, I fully expect (and endorse) her to market herself in every way imaginable.

well, almost every way. 

#@!

They've got abundant cash in the bank (even if you just count what they had to disclose in electoral
paperwork last year).  She's already got the book deal and "assistant" writer, and there's almost certainly a
waiting list to get her to speak at rallies and the like.  I don't see her tying herself down to a long-term, standing
commitment like a radio show, though.


Our own Doug Wilder did that the other way around:
Governor => wannabe-Presidential candidate => radio host => pain-in-the-ass-mayor...
...and a back-room-meeting', favor-trading wheeler & dealer all the way...

define "abundant"

#@!

[85283-071]

Imagine, if you will, that you're driving down the road, and you come to an intersection....

Should you turn left, right, or not at all?

The correct answer, as is obvious to sensible folk, is:
D - Not enough information...



If circumstances warrant it, taxes should be cut...  in other circumstances, they should be raised...
These days, everyone in Washington seems too busy sticking his (or her) head up the Party's ass,
to unwilling to consider whethet "party line" is the right thing to do...

It's one of the things I quite admired about SENATOR McCain, but he clearly abandoned the habits
that had made him a true "maverick" when he signed on to run for President.  It's too bad the label
became a joke, because when he was willing to think for himself, he was a damn good Senator.

Right, and in the circumstances that have been built over the last twenty-eight years, the tax issue has become so disproportionately central to economioc discussions that we are in crisis. It has favored the right for most of that stretch. We know, in quaintifiable terms, what percentage of tax breaks make it back into the economy. The fact is, food stamps are a more effective stimulus. The things society is coming to realize need to be done, will have to be paid for with public funds. These changes in society will take work. Workers and money. Things will be produced. People are so willing to spend money to fight wars that produce nothing, but a war against unsustainibilty and crumbling infrastructure is too rich for our blood. That's madness.

Fuck party line. I don't give a shit about it either, and when a republican idea seems right (like defense of the Second Amendment) I will support it. For now, the issue is about building a system that will cost us less, down the road, in energy, health care and loss of productivity due to economic disenfranchisement. We need to spend money on that now, and there is only one entity with that ability. The people... and yes, even the whiners need to pitch in.

[music box]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090710/ap_on_re_us/us_palin_resignation

this kid is starting to get annoying.

[CeeGBee]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090710/ap_on_re_us/us_palin_resignation

this kid is starting to get annoying.

...and yet, he & Bristol P. are clearly the perfect couple.  They should get a trailer together, and
she can sponge off mom & dad, and he can have a thing with the skinny waitress at the bar in
town, and someday he can murder her in a drunken rage and die in a shootout with the police.
(His rage will have been the result of her just never shutting up about the whole "we ought to
get married" thing...  )

Either that, or he'll move to California and star in Paris Hilton's next movie...  then move on to porn.

[Tiervexx]

FACT. Lack of regulation has made a mess of this country. Not trying to be mean, Music Box, but the fact that someone can really, still lament the choice of Republicans one had is baffling. The only way anyone has been able to even hint that something other than republican fiscal ideology is responsible for the harm that has been done to so many people in this country and around the world, is to mine the facts ion such a way as to DECEIVE people regarding the nature and impact of the Community Reinvestment Act.

Non economists tend to feel a lot more certain of this "FACT" than macro economists are...

There are a lot of things going on in an economy we still don't have the tools necessary to gauge exactly how big of an impact each one has relative to one another.

You sound so sure that it was the deregulation that made such a mess but how much have you studied Monetary policy?  I'm willing to bet heavily you have not looked at it very much and that is very common.  People who have not had formal economics education think so much about fiscal policy and just ignore monetary which seems to have a more direct effect on how well the economy functions.  I mean really... you hear main stream pundits and politicians go on and on about a 2% tax cut as if that really was going to matter but than say next to nothing about something as crazy as a sustained 1% interest rate.  Before every major recession there was a lot of credit expansion.  This was the case with the great depression, a lot of the troubles during the late 70s and 80s and Alan Greenspan did it again during the Clinton and early Bush years.

Business cycle theory is a very difficult subject so different economists will give different answers depending on their own biases but many economists would back me up when I say this:

1) There are a lot of subtle mechanics in an economy that result in the business cycle.  Nobody is totally certain how this works and nobody can say with any confidence that we would not have had at least a minor recession no matter what.  It is just a question of what might have caused it to be particularly deep.  It is possible that since our economy has been relatively stable for so long that we were overdue.  Here is one possible explanation of the business cycle that I think sounds very plausible:

A better understanding of economics would help people understand our financial crisis. The only sustainable way to improve the economy is to increase productivity. Productivity increases are only possible by the formation or saving up of capital goods, goods that are used to ultimately create consumer goods. The Fed's policy of continually injecting money into the economy follows the false Keynesian idea that spending drives the economy. Increasing the money supply doesn't increase capital goods, but diverts them from their most appropriate use, causing artificial booms that wouldn't have happened on a free market. The busts are inevitable because the boom is unsustainable.

Interest is a price of sorts, the price of borrowing money. The supply of money is provided by savers, and the demand for money comes from borrowers. The natural interest rate is where that supply and demand intersect. The Fed's interventionist policies prevent the free market rate of interest from occurring, and essentially creates an interest price control. They inject new money not backed by real savings, and thus create unsustainable booms that cause the business cycle.

Because it is an interventionist policy, the Fed faces the calculation problem: they have no way of knowing what the actual interest rate should be. The Fed has tried to improve the economy with these unsustainable booms unbacked by real savings, real capital, but economic reality cannot forever be evaded--the bust is inevitable as the market tries to correct for the economic disruption that has been caused.

Basically, if this theory is accurate and I certainly think it could be, than a large part of the reason why our economy was relatively stable for so long could have been because the Fed kept propping it up all these years with bubble after bubble and we are paying for some of that now.

2) The terribly expensive war in Iraq could be a large part of what made this recession worse than normal.

3) The housing bubble probably hurt even more than the war did.  And the housing bubble would have certainly been MUCH smaller if not for Alan Greenspan's decision to keep interest rates far too low for too long.  Greenspan himself acknowledged this mistake.

4) There is probably some truth to the idea that certain regulations will increase stability.  In particular, limits on how much leverage banks of various types can use is likely to help.  BUT such regulation might only be necessary when there is a lot of credit expansion because very easy credit makes borrowing seem a lot more attractive than proper interest rates do.

I think it is possible that the half-assed "free market" that republicans aim for is actually less stable than either European style socialism, like what you want, or an actual free market, which would mean market determined interest rates like what libertarians want.

[85283-071]

I'm actually usually pretty on guard over the fact that most of my information is derived from macro-economists. I am surely a layman, but I follow the Wall Street Journal, NPR and The Economist religiously. Ten of the last thirteen books I have read have been about the state and fate of the economy. I have recommendations, if you would like some. There are questions about what would have happened under other circumstances, but the mechanics of the economy crashed due to some very specific mechanisms. Credit default swaps, as abstract as they may seem, are actually pretty easy to explain. Derivatives, which are actually pretty convoluted, are demonstrably dangerous. The competing theory, that of what republicans call (the forcing of banks, by the government, to make loans to people who couldn't pay them" is verifiably mistated. Sure, we can speculate as to what regulations ought to have been in place, but the fact that the unregulated economy has been our downfall is pretty much a lock. If you want to debate details, I'm all for it. I take it you have studied economics?

[Tiervexx]

I'm actually usually pretty on guard over the fact that most of my information is derived from macro-economists. I am surely a layman, but I follow the Wall Street Journal, NPR and The Economist religiously. Ten of the last thirteen books I have read have been about the state and fate of the economy. I have recommendations, if you would like some. There are questions about what would have happened under other circumstances, but the mechanics of the economy crashed due to some very specific mechanisms. Credit default swaps, as abstract as they may seem, are actually pretty easy to explain. Derivatives, which are actually pretty convoluted, are demonstrably dangerous. The competing theory, that of what republicans call (the forcing of banks, by the government, to make loans to people who couldn't pay them" is verifiably mistated. Sure, we can speculate as to what regulations ought to have been in place, but the fact that the unregulated economy has been our downfall is pretty much a lock. If you want to debate details, I'm all for it. I take it you have studied economics?

I have a BS in economics.

I addressed the points you made in this post with:

"There is probably some truth to the idea that certain regulations will increase stability.  In particular, limits on how much leverage banks of various types can use is likely to help.  BUT such regulation might only be necessary when there is a lot of credit expansion because very easy credit makes borrowing seem a lot more attractive than proper interest rates do."

In my last post.  Basically I think it is true that certain regulations could have stopped this but I think tighter credit may have simply made this unnecessary because tighter credit makes it seem a lot less appealing to expand your debt.  And all of those fancy mechanisms like credit default swaps that contributed to the instability of the financial market boil down to expanding debt.

The financial market is not the whole economy either.  No matter how confident you are about certain things contributing to it's collapse there are still other things going on in the economy.  In particular, taking a trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of men in prime working age out of the economy is terrible for productivity (I'm talking about the war of course).

Also, back in the 70s and 80s we had some minor collapses of financial markets while regulations from the depression area were a bit tighter.  This is why I think the bigger relationship that recessions have with one another is the credit expansion.

In the modern world this is done by central banks but in the past this kind of thing also happened when a lot of new gold was discovered or when governments did something to inflate the currency.

It is easy to find a long, LOOOOOONNNNGGG list of examples of huge booms followed by huge busts right after credit expansion in an economy.  Meanwhile it is much harder to find such a rich history of regulations affecting such things.

Once again, I'm not saying that the deregulation was not a factor, just that I think it is a much weaker one.  Even when regulations are tighter there are always plenty of examples of companies finding interesting ways around said regulations.  In particular, credit default swaps were conceived just to get around an already existing regulation on how much banks could loan.


Basically, what I'm getting at is that the economy has always had unstable mechanics that are tempting to just outlaw but before such regulation and before even central banks these were often kept in check with market determined interest rates.  Sure there was still a boom and a bust cycle, but busts were generally short unless the government did something big such as fighting a huge war which is always bad in any system.

[85283-071]

I don't think we should necessarily outlaw any of the financial tools that have been abused, but I think some of them should be made less attractive. The path of a bill should be traceable, and there should be platforms of responsibility. Obviously, mass psychology plays a huge role in the economy, and there is little way to control that. Consumer and investor confidence will wax and wane like a heartbeat, but what is the difference between that crashing an economy and just slowing it a bit? How can we allow the movers of money to take chances with the money of people who aren't even aware of how it is being gambled? When it is suggested that we watch more carefully and control the degree to which this happens, the Right cries "Communism!"

...or even funnier, "Personal responsibility!"

If we are going to rely upon an entire community to do the right thing, we will never mitigate risk. The government can help. It can also help us out of this mess, and that is going to require spending. It doesn't take a financial genius to understand that producing something is a more efficient expenditure than destroying, but the Right tends to be so comfortable with spending on war... and so apprehensive about spending on bettering our communities. For all the discussion of the net gain or loss from green technologies, if the $700 billion that has gone into the Iraq War had gone into such things, we would have better economic prospects. We'd still have the economy around the production of the systems. We'd have an new industry, and it would produce something we use anyway.

What am I missing?