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http://finance.moneyandmarkets.com/reports/SMR/4597/vsp-smr2.php?s=MSAV&e=4626101
With those kind of credentials, you should definitely listen to everything he has to say.
confusion between fiscal solvency crisis and financial crisis
BEEEEP
That's crazy
The rich are almost certainly going to come out ahead
*close window*
...
The way I'm reading this, Bank of America has some risky derivatives that are likely to go bad (I have a poor understanding of derivatives and how to talk about them), and they've moved the risk from the investment part of their bank to the depository part of their bank so that in the event that they lose money on these derivatives they can use leverage from the depositors money to pay for them?
According to the Young Turks these derivatives are worth significantly more than the bank itself. Wouldn't the bank failing have drastic effects on the economy, and doesn't it seem that based on this information that is a likely scenario?
If BoA failed we would be, in a word, fucked.
[citation needed]
"There is not a man of us who does not at times need a helping hand to be stretched out to him, and then shame upon him who will not stretch out the helping hand to his brother."
You can tell it's not well informed because he opens with opinions, stories, and fearmongering rather than the stats. A solid sign that someone doesn't believe in their own opinions.
edit - He also doesn't understand how debt works. He seems to think that taxation is illegal confiscation of wealth.
edit2 - Hey, here comes the pointless personal anecdotes about how big the debt is! And considering debt in dollars at the time it was held.
edit3 - And here come the graphs which fail to account for inflation and growth in population in terms of debt. And the misunderstanding of the way the world economy works. I'm betting at no point does he say "Of course, the US could solve this entire problem with raising taxes by 1%"
I'm convinced that a lot of the fearmongering over the national debt just comes from its name. People immediately assume that the national debt is like a household debt. We should give it a different name- something boring and technical- so that people will stop worrying so much about it.
Remember how everyone talks about too big to fail? They're mostly talking about BofA.
Because 9% think it's too high, and shouldn't be cut! 9% of respondents could not fully
get their arms around the question. There should be another box you can check for, "I
have utterly no idea what you're talking about. Please, God, don't ask for my input."
Really? You need a citation on why the failure of the 2nd largest bank in the US and the 3rd largest company in the world would be a bad thing for the US economy? Really?
From my perspective, if the banks need a bailout, we need to nationalize them. If you can't not wreck the entire economy when you fail, and you do fail, you need to be run by the government.
I don't think we need the federal government to be in the business of running the financial sector.
We do, however, need fewer "innovations" (that wind up pushing the global economic system to the brink of collapse) in the financial sector.
But once it becomes clear that people are conducting business in such a way that it threatens an entire industry or sector... well, it'd be nice if the regulators did something.
Fun fact: Adam Smith specifically warned that the Invisible Hand mechanism doesn't apply to the financial sector.
Whoa whoa whoa, dutch tulips were never a historically low risk investment.
Can you tell us more?
But when nationalized are they any better or any inherently risky? Unless you're saying that the act of nationalization is just a way to wind the bank down completely.
Don't have a page reference, sorry.
My Band "The Wicked Girls" http://soundcloud.com/the-wicked-girls/sets
Permanently nationalizing would also be really unethical. You think there isn't already a lot of regulatory capture?
It's as simple as that.
"There is not a man of us who does not at times need a helping hand to be stretched out to him, and then shame upon him who will not stretch out the helping hand to his brother."
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
They want loans, make them pay in preferential shares. There's no point in privatizing profits and socializing losses.
Yep. More than just monopoly laws, we need to have some sort of economic load-bearing boss law. Any company so large that it can hold the country hostage needs to be broken up into smaller companies.
I understand the desire and all but how the fuck do you stop them from becoming the Bank of Somalia and telling you to fuck your size limit laws?
Borderlands 2 PA Xbox Metatag - Bazillion Guns
Same way we handle monopolies when we're not bought off by the monopolies?
We could simply just use our police powers takeover all the financial centers, hold the executives under a national security directive while we transfer control. Break down the business and resell it. Let the executives out of custody and then stone wall them with executive privilege when they try to go to court. The government could do that and get away with it.
I think the realities of the situation are slightly different from 100 years ago, or even 30 when we broke up Ma Bell. Note that Ma Bell had a huge infrastructure that firmly tied them to a specific country. A large portion of the investment finance stuff from BoA could happily base off shore.
I think this is a giant can of worms that isn't as easy as saying "Pass a Law."
Borderlands 2 PA Xbox Metatag - Bazillion Guns
I will concede that if we want to become a dictatorship we could do it by cutting all ties to the world economy. We could have our very own little North Korea in America.
Borderlands 2 PA Xbox Metatag - Bazillion Guns
This is like saying that Nike can have sweatshops in the US because they have them in China.
No, the problem is that investment finance does not a have strong tie to a locality. This is like what happened when they tried to ban online poker in the US except there is more money involved by a factor of a 1000 and a much greater incentive for a small country to simply get bought out. This is going to raise the whole question of where sovereignty ends when the world is as interconnected as it is.
These are issues we are going to have to address at some point in the future but brushing them aside to say "Fuck x!" is very much the wrong way to do it.
Borderlands 2 PA Xbox Metatag - Bazillion Guns