The First 100 days

Not selling houses to people that can't afford them doesn't create a crisis. In fact, just the opposite does, which is what that nimrod is proposing.
 
Yes. But remember it was the government who was putting pressure on lenders to give loans to people who didn't really qualify. The crash was inevitable once the people who never had the resources to keep up with the loans started to default.

All the stuff the banks did was to try to make as much money as possible before the market cratered.

Guess what, the government agencies that work with housing have been pressuring lenders to grant subprime loans again. Like all the economic problems we have, government intervention has caused them.
 
Monahorns said:
But remember it was the government who was putting pressure on lenders to give loans to people who didn't really qualify.
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Absolutely. Senator Barney Frank and others of his ilk were threatening to investigate lenders for redlining if they didn't write enough of what any sober person would know was a trash loan.

And yet who was screeching about predatory lending practices after the fact? Barney Frank and his ilk.
 
Banking is just another area in which we have half-assed economic fascism. We leave the industry privately owned and operated, so politically well-connected bankers make lots of money. However, we regulate the hell out of them in a process that's dominated by agency capture and bail them out when trouble comes up. And the whole structure is riddled with ugly unintended (or supposedly unintended) consequences. Those consequences lead to failure, which leads to bailouts and more regulations, which lead to more failures and more bailouts and more regulations. It's a horrible cycle.
 
Sangre Naranjada said:
Absolutely. Senator Barney Frank and others of his ilk were threatening to investigate lenders for redlining if they didn't write enough of what any sober person would know was a trash loan.

And yet who was screeching about predatory lending practices after the fact? Barney Frank and his ilk.
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And that's what's particularly stupid about it. Even if the government is going to regulate banks, it should do so in a way that encourages risk aversion, not riskiness. It should, if anything, be telling banks to be more careful about giving loans to people who aren't credit-worthy, because making bad loans is ultimately why the banks failed and why we had bailouts.
 
Average unemployment during the first 26 months of presidential terms:

Obama: 9.5%
Reagan: 8.9%
Ford: 7.9%
Clinton: 6.4%
Carter: 6.4%
JFK: 6.1%
GW Bush: 4.8%
LBJ: 4.5%
Nixon: 4.4%
Trump: 4.1%
 
Deez, you are right there are some unintended negative consequences but most of them are intended. It all stems from fractional reserve banking and holding interest rates low. Those 2 things from the Fed encourage banks to lend, usually to politically and socially connected elites. It is literally money out of thin air, legal counterfeiting. Those who receive it by stuff, usually stocks, real estate, other assets. All that money increases demand, short term, for those assets, which increases the prices. The loanees make money with free money and get to pay back the loans with artificially low interest. That low interest also helps the government pay back its debt. The government also benefits from this "free" money, that is where the deficit spending comes from. If the Fed rate goes back to a more normal level, >1% at least, paying the interest on the debt becomes very burdensome. Could even lead to a default.

Maybe it is unintended, it wouldn't surprise me it was intended. All those things I describe above steals wealth from the rest of us. Purchasing power goes down. Money in savings erodes. People are forced to put there money in more risky investments just to keep up with their retirements funds.
 
Monahorns said:
That low interest also helps the government pay back its debt. The government also benefits from this "free" money, that is where the deficit spending comes from. If the Fed rate goes back to a more normal level, >1% at least, paying the interest on the debt becomes very burdensome. Could even lead to a default.
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And this is probably driving the problem as much as the corporate welfare and bailout factors are. If interest rates went up to any significant degree, there would have to be a serious reckoning on the budget. We've had budget battles in the last ten years, but they've been phony political theater, not a true reckoning in which people truly had to give anything up long term (or even very short term).

To put it into perspective, in 1998, we spent $241B on interest (with $5.4T of debt). In 2018, we spent $325B on interest (with $21.4T of debt). Obviously something is going on with interest rates when you can quadruple the principle with interest payments only going up by about 1/6. It also shows what our interest payments could look like if we didn't screw around with our interest rates or just screwed around with them less. We could easily get to a point at which 1/3 of our revenue went to interest.
 
If he can manage to not get in any stupid twitter slap-fights with gold star widows and void foaming at the mouth too much, he might just win re-election.
 
Horn6721 said:
There you go AGAIN JF.
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Liberals double hate that one given how they worship Euros.


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Joe Fan said:
Liberals double hate that one given how they worship Euros.
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Obama is out there actively attempting to undermine Trump on the world stage.
This is unprecedented for an ex-Pres
“Chancellor Angela Merkel has received former President Barack Obama at her office in Berlin for a meeting characterized by German officials as a routine private encounter with a former international peer.”​
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/a...eets-germanys-merkel-at-chancellery-in-berlin
 
LongestHorn said:
Both happened during Trump's presidency, BTW. Please, continue.
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You good people certainly chose weird things to get excited about
In any event, as the pic clearly demonstrates, Tiger barely survived 8 years of Obama. And, as I am sure we can all agree, he would not have survived a 9th of the O
It's better now for him. Along with everyone else

woods_456_doral13_d4_trump.jpg
 
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