Well for my major issues (energy and the environment) he has been pretty horrible.
By being half assed with every policy he has pushed the entire national discussion to the right.
Example: when used to talk about cap and trade and now we are talking about abolishing the EPA.
If some of the recent accounts by ex-insiders are to be believed, this is because Obama and his team were convinced that the country wanted to see him make peace with the GOP over any other priority. This seriously muddled the message he brought from his campaign and made him look like a fool when talking about bringing everyone together while the Republicans were calling him a socialist Muslim. It's created a perception of fecklessness that overshadows his real accomplishments.
Fortunately, it does seem like Obama has finally wised up and realized that no one outside the media and D.C. cocktail circuit gives a shit about building consensus. Still, he's wasted a term on a failed direction and is very lucky that the GOP seems too insane to nominate a decent candidate.
If the only thing preventing the President from using the military to secretly kidnap and imprison random American citizens doing nothing wrong is the fact that it's illegal, we're pretty much already done.
If the only thing preventing the President from using the military to secretly kidnap and imprison random American citizens doing nothing wrong is the fact that it's illegal, we're pretty much already done.
There, now that's the pessimism I remember!
But if you seriously consider the circumstances for a moment. In a despotic situation? They'd probably already be "disappearing" people, this would just give them the plausible deniability to do it in large numbers and obviously visible ways that would get reported in newspapers and provide a cover of "legality" to the actions so as to prevent mass backlash.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
We've seen how impossible it is to control social media in places like Iran and China, imagine trying to pry the internet out of American's cold, dead hands. By the time American Caesar (From the Makers of Tea Party! and Herman Cain) had control of the populace there wouldn't be one left.
There's a difference between fraud/coercion and not understanding the possible consequences of a deal you're entering into.
Really? What are they from your POV? I would consider any imbalance of knowledge in an agreement to constitute fraud because both parties do not fully understand the agreement. It's not in the same leagues as lying (or directly fabricating a false truth) but it is still a form of deception if practiced knowingly. Why should we not want this situation to become virtually impossible when it is this exact friction that is creating so many problems in the economy? Lenders lying to borrowers, banks lying to investors, etc.
Just wanted to address this. If you make it so that any sort of imbalance of knowledge=fraud, you make it virtually impossible for people to enter into deals.
Imagine a scenario where a real estate developer has done a lot of market research and determined that a particular parcel of land would be a great place to build condos. He then goes to the landowner and they negotiate a price for the property. The developer never tells the owner his plans for the property or his belief that the land is worth several times the agreed-upon price because of its location and the potential condo market.
Would you call that fraud? And, if so, how would anyone be able to legitimately make a profit off of a business deal if they were required to share everything with the other side on a deal?
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
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MalReynoldsThe Hunter S Thompson of incredibly mild medicinesRegistered Userregular
There's a difference between fraud/coercion and not understanding the possible consequences of a deal you're entering into.
Really? What are they from your POV? I would consider any imbalance of knowledge in an agreement to constitute fraud because both parties do not fully understand the agreement. It's not in the same leagues as lying (or directly fabricating a false truth) but it is still a form of deception if practiced knowingly. Why should we not want this situation to become virtually impossible when it is this exact friction that is creating so many problems in the economy? Lenders lying to borrowers, banks lying to investors, etc.
Just wanted to address this. If you make it so that any sort of imbalance of knowledge=fraud, you make it virtually impossible for people to enter into deals.
Imagine a scenario where a real estate developer has done a lot of market research and determined that a particular parcel of land would be a great place to build condos. He then goes to the landowner and they negotiate a price for the property. The developer never tells the owner his plans for the property or his belief that the land is worth several times the agreed-upon price because of its location and the potential condo market.
Would you call that fraud? And, if so, how would anyone be able to legitimately make a profit off of a business deal if they were required to share everything with the other side on a deal?
I would call it fraud if the developer was purposefully misleading the man into thinking the land was worthless; there's also the possibility that the developer tells the man the worth of the property, but explains how essentially worthless the land is undeveloped, and that he'd make more selling the land than not at all, which seems both fair, truthful, and ethical while still turning a proft for both parties.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
There's a difference between fraud/coercion and not understanding the possible consequences of a deal you're entering into.
Really? What are they from your POV? I would consider any imbalance of knowledge in an agreement to constitute fraud because both parties do not fully understand the agreement. It's not in the same leagues as lying (or directly fabricating a false truth) but it is still a form of deception if practiced knowingly. Why should we not want this situation to become virtually impossible when it is this exact friction that is creating so many problems in the economy? Lenders lying to borrowers, banks lying to investors, etc.
Just wanted to address this. If you make it so that any sort of imbalance of knowledge=fraud, you make it virtually impossible for people to enter into deals.
Imagine a scenario where a real estate developer has done a lot of market research and determined that a particular parcel of land would be a great place to build condos. He then goes to the landowner and they negotiate a price for the property. The developer never tells the owner his plans for the property or his belief that the land is worth several times the agreed-upon price because of its location and the potential condo market.
Would you call that fraud? And, if so, how would anyone be able to legitimately make a profit off of a business deal if they were required to share everything with the other side on a deal?
That's fraud, technically, but it's "good fraud" I guess, for lack of a better term. Also, most property owners would get an appraisal for themselves before agreeing to a deal.
It's also not the same as a bank or lending institution giving people a loan that they absolutely know the borrower will not be able to pay back barring some kind of miracle. Which, in the case of sub-prime mortgages is basically what happened for a lot of people. The blame rests with the bankers who knew they were playing a bullshit game, the government for letting them get away with it (and in some cases encouraging it, both Clinton's and Bush's administration had programs to increasing the number of home owners and in Bush's case, massive deregulation), and--to a lesser extent--the borrowers themselves for believing the hype.
But if I told you "take this money, don't worry about it" and you could get a nice place for your family are you telling me you wouldn't take it? Most people would (and did).
Just wanted to address this. If you make it so that any sort of imbalance of knowledge=fraud, you make it virtually impossible for people to enter into deals.
Imagine a scenario where a real estate developer has done a lot of market research and determined that a particular parcel of land would be a great place to build condos. He then goes to the landowner and they negotiate a price for the property. The developer never tells the owner his plans for the property or his belief that the land is worth several times the agreed-upon price because of its location and the potential condo market.
Would you call that fraud? And, if so, how would anyone be able to legitimately make a profit off of a business deal if they were required to share everything with the other side on a deal?
Yes, I would, because that situation has prevented an optimal and fair exchange of value between the two parties. The landowner does not have the resources of the real estate developer and obviously cannot realize the full value of the property by himself. But knowledge of what his land could be worth enables him to shop around and negotiate on better terms. This doesn't make the deal impossible at all, just makes it not as sweet as it could be for the real estate developer.
There is still one party with an asset and is unable to realize it's full value $ wise because he lacks the resources to capitalize on it. The real estate developer has this. So rather then slant the deal so the real estate developer gets most of the value out of the deal I'd prefer it be slanted only along terms of how able the landowner is able to find and negotiate with someone on terms for realizing the true value of the property. I mean yes the landowner can just refuse the real estate developer entirely if he feels like he's getting bilked but he could do that anyway, and if what's being offered is a fundamentally fair deal then I don't understand why he would?
That doesn't mean the developer doesn't get something out of the deal, just that his margin isn't nearly as high. You can say the margins might be necessary due to the risky nature of real estate but I think the primary reason there is so much risk is essentially because of this exact same situation. Everyone's trying to screw everyone over on deals, everyone hides info, and it creates a culture of graft behavior that means if you're not vicious, smart and fast enough you lose. This means nobody has full and accurate information which would actually remove the majority of the riskiness from the investments.
Again, it'd reduce everyone's margins, but if the reduction in margins was vastly outpaced by a decline in the risk of those investments I think that would be a pretty fair trade, don't you?
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
If they passed I'd say Ron Paul would be the only person I wouldn't lose sleep over. He obviously has his own issues, but being a war-mongering asshole isn't one of them.
Ron Paul would only destroy our country, not others.
That's just, like, your opinion, man.
Seriously, people are so quick to rationalize Obama's failures by pointing to an uncooperative Congress, yet they assume any GOP president will be able to unilaterally enact legislation equivalent to every last scary sound-bite they've ever recorded. It's mind-boggling.
It's an exaggeration for sure, but it's not unlikely that some fucked up legislation with a Republican President could pass. Or good legislation being vetod.
If they passed I'd say Ron Paul would be the only person I wouldn't lose sleep over. He obviously has his own issues, but being a war-mongering asshole isn't one of them.
Ron Paul would only destroy our country, not others.
That's just, like, your opinion, man.
Seriously, people are so quick to rationalize Obama's failures by pointing to an uncooperative Congress, yet they assume any GOP president will be able to unilaterally enact legislation equivalent to every last scary sound-bite they've ever recorded. It's mind-boggling.
It's an exaggeration for sure, but it's not unlikely that some fucked up legislation with a Republican President could pass. Or good legislation being vetod.
The thing is if a Republican wins hell have both houses.
They will pass every single thing they want with no opposition. A Republican president would be a de facto Caeser in 2012, ala Scott Walker
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
There is a fairly stable amount of fucking going on.
The thing that annoys me about this is why the hell do we take people who remain unemployed for a long time or give up on finding work out of the numbers? That just blows my mind.
If they passed I'd say Ron Paul would be the only person I wouldn't lose sleep over. He obviously has his own issues, but being a war-mongering asshole isn't one of them.
Ron Paul would only destroy our country, not others.
That's just, like, your opinion, man.
Seriously, people are so quick to rationalize Obama's failures by pointing to an uncooperative Congress, yet they assume any GOP president will be able to unilaterally enact legislation equivalent to every last scary sound-bite they've ever recorded. It's mind-boggling.
It's an exaggeration for sure, but it's not unlikely that some fucked up legislation with a Republican President could pass. Or good legislation being vetod.
The thing is if a Republican wins hell have both houses.
They will pass every single thing they want with no opposition. A Republican president would be a de facto Caeser in 2012, ala Scott Walker
Well, barring Democratic filibusters. But now we're relying on x assholes (Joe Manchin, Ben Nelson, etc.) to not fuck it up for us.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
There is a fairly stable amount of fucking going on.
The thing that annoys me about this is why the hell do we take people who remain unemployed for a long time or give up on finding work out of the numbers? That just blows my mind.
Because a substantial portion of the adult population doesn't have or want a job. If you reported everyone who could theoretically work your unemployment rate would be 30% in good years and 35% in terrible ones. So we exclude the "don't want" people from the "base" unemployment rate. Might be counted in one of the alternate (U-6?) measures, though.
Yes, I would, because that situation has prevented an optimal and fair exchange of value between the two parties. The landowner does not have the resources of the real estate developer and obviously cannot realize the full value of the property by himself. But knowledge of what his land could be worth enables him to shop around and negotiate on better terms. This doesn't make the deal impossible at all, just makes it not as sweet as it could be for the real estate developer.
What you're doing, then, is creating a system where the person who does less legwork and spends less money on due diligence gets favorable treatment.
The developer cannot force the owner to sell. He can just offer him a price that the owner finds attractive. The owner is free to do his own research, but if he chooses not to and instead just accepts the offer, that's his choice. He hasn't been taken advantage of.
Under your proposed system, every seller could wait a couple of years to see if the property increases in value, then sue to the buyer claiming he was defrauded. It goes against literally centuries of Anglo-Amercian contract law and rejects the very foundations of the concept that people should be held to the terms of their deal, unless the party on the other side defrauded or forced them into the deal.
What happens if the property goes down in value after the sale? Should the seller be forced to pay the buyer the difference?
Going back to our economy, we're not in the shape we're in because people entered into bad mortgages. We are where we are because bankers got too smart for their own good and created a system that didn't spread risk around (as they thought), but rather multiplied the risk and created a situation where if one large bank went down, so would the rest of them.
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
Hmm, that's what I figured. But I think in times like this there should be some way of distinguishing who has given up because there's nothing out there and who's just a bum. I imagine the former is the much larger group right now.
Contrary to the GOP's talking points, most people would rather work than suckle at the sweet teat of Uncle Sam.
Yes, I would, because that situation has prevented an optimal and fair exchange of value between the two parties. The landowner does not have the resources of the real estate developer and obviously cannot realize the full value of the property by himself. But knowledge of what his land could be worth enables him to shop around and negotiate on better terms. This doesn't make the deal impossible at all, just makes it not as sweet as it could be for the real estate developer.
What you're doing, then, is creating a system where the person who does less legwork and spends less money on due diligence gets favorable treatment.
The developer cannot force the owner to sell. He can just offer him a price that the owner finds attractive. The owner is free to do his own research, but if he chooses not to and instead just accepts the offer, that's his choice. He hasn't been taken advantage of.
Under your proposed system, every seller could wait a couple of years to see if the property increases in value, then sue to the buyer claiming he was defrauded. It goes against literally centuries of Anglo-Amercian contract law and rejects the very foundations of the concept that people should be held to the terms of their deal, unless the party on the other side defrauded or forced them into the deal.
What happens if the property goes down in value after the sale? Should the seller be forced to pay the buyer the difference?
Going back to our economy, we're not in the shape we're in because people entered into bad mortgages. We are where we are because bankers got too smart for their own good and created a system that didn't spread risk around (as they thought), but rather multiplied the risk and created a situation where if one large bank went down, so would the rest of them.
In real estate, there are multiple laws to prevent just this sort of thing from happening. If my roof leaks and I sell it without telling the person about it, that's illegal.
The bedrock of any capitalist system is the trust that in a deal both parties will get a fair (buy not equal) exchange.
Discussing the bailouts is interesting because I find it is one area where the right and the left agree. The government had so much leverage in negotiating with those companies before giving them bailout money, and nothing got done with it besides hoping that the banks would use the money in the best interest of the country, and not their own profits. Forget about a criminal investigation, there wasn't even a single forced resignation that I am aware of.
Just mind boggling how poorly it was executed.
And it is hard to get away from the idea that this was because the people who fucked up were friends and former bosses/coworkers of the decision makers in the Obama Administration. When you have people like Rahm Emmanuel making $16.2 million in two years at Wasserstein Perella, despite not having any investment banking experience and rarely showing up to the office, it's hard not to think that all the power players in both parties are - legally - on the take from Wall Street.
They also have friends in the GOP too. Better friends in fact.
Because a substantial portion of the adult population doesn't have or want a job. If you reported everyone who could theoretically work your unemployment rate would be 30% in good years and 35% in terrible ones. So we exclude the "don't want" people from the "base" unemployment rate. Might be counted in one of the alternate (U-6?) measures, though.
I'm going to call some pretty big bullshit here. Prove they do not want to work, provide some empirical evidence. I've looked into poverty studies and they all seem to say quite the opposite. The "lazies" who won't work often don't because of generational depression that their lives will not get any better because they already realized that our social mobility is an utter joke. If you'd like to provide some citations though I'd be more then happy to do the same.
What you're doing, then, is creating a system where the person who does less legwork and spends less money on due diligence gets favorable treatment.
This already happens though. What constitutes as legwork, what constitutes due diligence? Is it actually physical effort expended or does it more have to do with being in the right place, at the right time, with the right information? Take the financial sector, they make the highest salaries of anyone else and I really don't think it's because they are "more dilligent" than someone who writes software, is a soldier or works as skilled labor assembling things.
For anything to be fair you need to establish fundamental standards if fairness. I think "Whoever got lucky to have the insider info" is an abysmal standard of fairness and the 2008 collapse seems to agree with me. Rather I think fairness should be determined by someone's complete capability to realize the value of their assets. Obviously the farmer or whomever owned the land does not have the ability to turn a profit that the real estate developer does. The farmer probably does not even want to. But in a fair deal it is the responsible thing for the farmer to get a cut of the value generated by the developer, and the most fair way to do that is ensure everyone has complete information and therefore can truly use the market to determine what a fair price is on that land.
I mean hell, isn't that literally how the free market is supposed to self-regulate? By withholding information you prevent market self-regulation.
The developer cannot force the owner to sell. He can just offer him a price that the owner finds attractive. The owner is free to do his own research, but if he chooses not to and instead just accepts the offer, that's his choice. He hasn't been taken advantage of.
The farmer is only "taken advantage of" if he believes he got a bad deal. The only way for him to determine that is for him to have all the information necessary to decide if the terms are truly agreeable. By withholding information the only advantage again, goes to whoever is fast, smart and cruel and it cultivates the same sort of graft behavior we see in the financial sector, where evil behavior gets rewarded with record bonuses.
Under your proposed system, every seller could wait a couple of years to see if the property increases in value, then sue to the buyer claiming he was defrauded.
Why would this even be possible? If they both had the same exact information and understanding then why would the seller be able to sue the buyer? I'm not saying the seller has grounds to sue if he is not awarded money for the increase in value of his property. Merely that the buyer should have a direct requirement to disclose any and all information they posses in regards to the deal being made. It should be a simple matter to prove in court if the buyer did not disclose anything so I'd think stopping those sorts of lawsuits would actually be pretty trivial.
It goes against literally centuries of Anglo-Amercian contract law and rejects the very foundations of the concept that people should be held to the terms of their deal, unless the party on the other side defrauded or forced them into the deal.
I'm merely expanding the definition of fraud to include any situation where one party of a deal does not fully disclose any and all relevant information or insights they have into the deal when making it. Again, record keeping can nip any legal problems in the bud here. Or are you arguing that fairness in full disclosure goes against centuries of anglo-american tradition? That the terms of a deal are all equally valid if you can merely get someone to agree to it? Then why does Bernie Madoff go to jail but Goldman Cachs does not? Because of only mere technicalities over the nature of what business deception is?
What happens if the property goes down in value after the sale? Should the seller be forced to pay the buyer the difference?
No, but the point is that by requiring full disclosure it becomes much easier for the buyer to find an ideal plot without risk. Cooperation means several developers could even get together and plan a land purchase so as to develop a big new area around it. The only thing that decreases is the margin they can take by not sharing information. But again, if that decrease in margins comes with a greater decrease in risk (by enabling information to be publicly available and allowing everyone to work together to ensure the success of an overall deal) then is that not a worthy trade off?
Going back to our economy, we're not in the shape we're in because people entered into bad mortgages. We are where we are because bankers got too smart for their own good and created a system that didn't spread risk around (as they thought), but rather multiplied the risk and created a situation where if one large bank went down, so would the rest of them.
Commercial banks LIED to their customers to secure loans they knew they would not be able to afford, they forged documents then to lie to big investment banks to transfer the assets. Those banks figured out they had junk and then lied by cutting them up and selling them to the middle class via 401Ks and other retirement plans only the non-wealthy have. During this the ratings agencies LIED about the safety of those assets to try and sell them, and then they got screwed over by the same big investment banks betting on the failure of those loans right before the crash through the same company.
In all cases, it was deceptive behavior practiced in concert which facilitated absolutely every level of this situation. This was not a case of risk, Goldman Sachs revealed emails showing they knew well ahead of time the CDOs they were selling were junk and they got rid of them as fast as they could. Again, they knew it was bad, their response was to simply lie to pass the hot potato to someone else and then bet on the person dropping it.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
Because a substantial portion of the adult population doesn't have or want a job. If you reported everyone who could theoretically work your unemployment rate would be 30% in good years and 35% in terrible ones. So we exclude the "don't want" people from the "base" unemployment rate. Might be counted in one of the alternate (U-6?) measures, though.
I'm going to call some pretty big bullshit here. Prove they do not want to work, provide some empirical evidence. I've looked into poverty studies and they all seem to say quite the opposite. The "lazies" who won't work often don't because of generational depression that their lives will not get any better because they already realized that our social mobility is an utter joke. If you'd like to provide some citations though I'd be more then happy to do the same.
As you can see, 30% is a lowball estimate. Examples of people not wanting jobs are retirees and stay-at-home somethingorothers.
That is nice, but those statistics don't really provide any evidence for the reason of unemployment now do they? That was kind of what I was asking for, sorry for the confusion.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
Retirees aren't who I'm talking about and shouldn't be counted unless they have jobs (since they're retirees by definition they no longer work) same with stay-at-home people. They wouldn't be employed even in a great economy and are red herrings in this context.
I'm talking about the large number of people who have been out of work for so long that they give up. They shouldn't be dropped from the count, especially not in this job market. It might be hard to make the distinction, but I'm sure it's not impossible.
I had a suspicion that this was why they get dropped, but I think we should course correct.
Retirees aren't who I'm talking about and shouldn't be counted unless they have jobs (since they're retirees by definition they no longer work) same with stay-at-home people. They wouldn't be employed even in a great economy and are red herrings in this context.
I'm talking about the large number of people who have been out of work for so long that they give up. They shouldn't be dropped from the count, especially not in this job market. It might be hard to make the distinction, but I'm sure it's not impossible.
I had a suspicion that this was why they get dropped, but I think we should course correct.
What possible benefit is gained from this?
Perceptions often shape reality. People think things are bad, telling them they're actually multiple times worse (even though nothing's changed, people will perceive it this way) serves no rational purpose.
You'll hear no arguments for me. At the very least, there should have been a housecleaning at the banks we bailed out, as well as AIG. Theregulations should have been changed to prevent a potential cascading collapse of the banks if one went under.
Generally speaking, if a company is about to go under, the government should let it go. The taxpayers should not be backstopping dumb business decisions, any more than they should be saving homebuyers from their own dumb decisions.
There's always the Sweden 1992 way. Require all banks to immediately write down their bad assets, nationalize the insolvent ones, guarantee all their debts, and then IPO (privatize) the now solvent banks. As a bonus, the taxpayers reap all the profits from restoring confidence.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
Isn't the Supreme Court supposed to review it soon?
Next spring/summer.
I can't imagine that the argument is going to be anything other than "fuck you, commerce clause". Unless Thomas has more people in board with his "bring things back to 1920" theory of jurisprudence.
Isn't the Supreme Court supposed to review it soon?
Next spring/summer.
I can't imagine that the argument is going to be anything other than "fuck you, commerce clause". Unless Thomas has more people in board with his "bring things back to 1920" theory of jurisprudence.
Never underestimate a group of conservatives in their willingness to fuck over the people.
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HacksawJ. Duggan Esq.Wrestler at LawRegistered Userregular
Isn't the Supreme Court supposed to review it soon?
Next spring/summer.
I can't imagine that the argument is going to be anything other than "fuck you, commerce clause". Unless Thomas has more people in board with his "bring things back to 1920" theory of jurisprudence.
Never underestimate a group of conservatives in their willingness to fuck over the people.
Discussing the bailouts is interesting because I find it is one area where the right and the left agree. The government had so much leverage in negotiating with those companies before giving them bailout money, and nothing got done with it besides hoping that the banks would use the money in the best interest of the country, and not their own profits. Forget about a criminal investigation, there wasn't even a single forced resignation that I am aware of.
Just mind boggling how poorly it was executed.
And it is hard to get away from the idea that this was because the people who fucked up were friends and former bosses/coworkers of the decision makers in the Obama Administration. When you have people like Rahm Emmanuel making $16.2 million in two years at Wasserstein Perella, despite not having any investment banking experience and rarely showing up to the office, it's hard not to think that all the power players in both parties are - legally - on the take from Wall Street.
The key bailout was done by the Bush administration. When the investment banks realised they were going to get 100% of their money from AIG they couldn't believe their luck.
You'll hear no arguments for me. At the very least, there should have been a housecleaning at the banks we bailed out, as well as AIG. Theregulations should have been changed to prevent a potential cascading collapse of the banks if one went under.
Generally speaking, if a company is about to go under, the government should let it go. The taxpayers should not be backstopping dumb business decisions, any more than they should be saving homebuyers from their own dumb decisions.
There's always the Sweden 1992 way. Require all banks to immediately write down their bad assets, nationalize the insolvent ones, guarantee all their debts, and then IPO (privatize) the now solvent banks. As a bonus, the taxpayers reap all the profits from restoring confidence.
The US federal government does not, I think, have the power to do this against the will of bank shareholders. Neither does it have the constitutional power to make threats to nationalize the way Sweden did to the Wallenberg family, nor does it have the institutional discipline to do so in practice.
The US federal government does not, I think, have the power to do this against the will of bank shareholders. Neither does it have the constitutional power to make threats to nationalize the way Sweden did to the Wallenberg family, nor does it have the institutional discipline to do so in practice.
How is "nationalization" any different than the way the FDIC goes into smaller failing banks, takes them over, removes the board and executives, changes their name and sells them? They do this all the time. In my town, they've done this at least a half dozen times since 2008.
The US federal government does not, I think, have the power to do this against the will of bank shareholders. Neither does it have the constitutional power to make threats to nationalize the way Sweden did to the Wallenberg family, nor does it have the institutional discipline to do so in practice.
How is "nationalization" any different than the way the FDIC goes into smaller failing banks, takes them over, removes the board and executives, changes their name and sells them? They do this all the time. In my town, they've done this at least a half dozen times since 2008.
Hmm, technically the chartering authority closes the bank and appoints the FDIC as receiver. Regardless I guess I was wrong; I suppose it does have the constitutional authority under the Commerce Clause. Regardless the point about institutional discipline stands :P If the federal government had attempted to force Citi's shareholders to take losses, I suspect its largest shareholders would have hidden behind a shield of institutional investors like pension funds, as smaller but politically popular banks have done before against the FDIC.
Our Chief weapons are surprise. Surprise and Fear. And that we know how to actually run a fucking bank. Our 3 weapons are surprise, fear, we know how to run a bank and decent accounting standards.
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There, now that's the pessimism I remember!
But if you seriously consider the circumstances for a moment. In a despotic situation? They'd probably already be "disappearing" people, this would just give them the plausible deniability to do it in large numbers and obviously visible ways that would get reported in newspapers and provide a cover of "legality" to the actions so as to prevent mass backlash.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/us-unemployment-rate-falls-to-86percent-in-nov-120k-jobs-added/2011/12/02/gIQAFKZeKO_story.html?tid=pm_pop
Obama winning again.
Imagine a scenario where a real estate developer has done a lot of market research and determined that a particular parcel of land would be a great place to build condos. He then goes to the landowner and they negotiate a price for the property. The developer never tells the owner his plans for the property or his belief that the land is worth several times the agreed-upon price because of its location and the potential condo market.
Would you call that fraud? And, if so, how would anyone be able to legitimately make a profit off of a business deal if they were required to share everything with the other side on a deal?
Rigorous Scholarship
I would call it fraud if the developer was purposefully misleading the man into thinking the land was worthless; there's also the possibility that the developer tells the man the worth of the property, but explains how essentially worthless the land is undeveloped, and that he'd make more selling the land than not at all, which seems both fair, truthful, and ethical while still turning a proft for both parties.
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That's fraud, technically, but it's "good fraud" I guess, for lack of a better term. Also, most property owners would get an appraisal for themselves before agreeing to a deal.
It's also not the same as a bank or lending institution giving people a loan that they absolutely know the borrower will not be able to pay back barring some kind of miracle. Which, in the case of sub-prime mortgages is basically what happened for a lot of people. The blame rests with the bankers who knew they were playing a bullshit game, the government for letting them get away with it (and in some cases encouraging it, both Clinton's and Bush's administration had programs to increasing the number of home owners and in Bush's case, massive deregulation), and--to a lesser extent--the borrowers themselves for believing the hype.
But if I told you "take this money, don't worry about it" and you could get a nice place for your family are you telling me you wouldn't take it? Most people would (and did).
Yes, I would, because that situation has prevented an optimal and fair exchange of value between the two parties. The landowner does not have the resources of the real estate developer and obviously cannot realize the full value of the property by himself. But knowledge of what his land could be worth enables him to shop around and negotiate on better terms. This doesn't make the deal impossible at all, just makes it not as sweet as it could be for the real estate developer.
There is still one party with an asset and is unable to realize it's full value $ wise because he lacks the resources to capitalize on it. The real estate developer has this. So rather then slant the deal so the real estate developer gets most of the value out of the deal I'd prefer it be slanted only along terms of how able the landowner is able to find and negotiate with someone on terms for realizing the true value of the property. I mean yes the landowner can just refuse the real estate developer entirely if he feels like he's getting bilked but he could do that anyway, and if what's being offered is a fundamentally fair deal then I don't understand why he would?
That doesn't mean the developer doesn't get something out of the deal, just that his margin isn't nearly as high. You can say the margins might be necessary due to the risky nature of real estate but I think the primary reason there is so much risk is essentially because of this exact same situation. Everyone's trying to screw everyone over on deals, everyone hides info, and it creates a culture of graft behavior that means if you're not vicious, smart and fast enough you lose. This means nobody has full and accurate information which would actually remove the majority of the riskiness from the investments.
Again, it'd reduce everyone's margins, but if the reduction in margins was vastly outpaced by a decline in the risk of those investments I think that would be a pretty fair trade, don't you?
It's an exaggeration for sure, but it's not unlikely that some fucked up legislation with a Republican President could pass. Or good legislation being vetod.
That's certainly one take on that story
My take is that it indicates we're every bit as fucked as October, maybe moreso.
The thing is if a Republican wins hell have both houses.
They will pass every single thing they want with no opposition. A Republican president would be a de facto Caeser in 2012, ala Scott Walker
The thing that annoys me about this is why the hell do we take people who remain unemployed for a long time or give up on finding work out of the numbers? That just blows my mind.
Well, barring Democratic filibusters. But now we're relying on x assholes (Joe Manchin, Ben Nelson, etc.) to not fuck it up for us.
Because a substantial portion of the adult population doesn't have or want a job. If you reported everyone who could theoretically work your unemployment rate would be 30% in good years and 35% in terrible ones. So we exclude the "don't want" people from the "base" unemployment rate. Might be counted in one of the alternate (U-6?) measures, though.
The developer cannot force the owner to sell. He can just offer him a price that the owner finds attractive. The owner is free to do his own research, but if he chooses not to and instead just accepts the offer, that's his choice. He hasn't been taken advantage of.
Under your proposed system, every seller could wait a couple of years to see if the property increases in value, then sue to the buyer claiming he was defrauded. It goes against literally centuries of Anglo-Amercian contract law and rejects the very foundations of the concept that people should be held to the terms of their deal, unless the party on the other side defrauded or forced them into the deal.
What happens if the property goes down in value after the sale? Should the seller be forced to pay the buyer the difference?
Going back to our economy, we're not in the shape we're in because people entered into bad mortgages. We are where we are because bankers got too smart for their own good and created a system that didn't spread risk around (as they thought), but rather multiplied the risk and created a situation where if one large bank went down, so would the rest of them.
Rigorous Scholarship
Contrary to the GOP's talking points, most people would rather work than suckle at the sweet teat of Uncle Sam.
In real estate, there are multiple laws to prevent just this sort of thing from happening. If my roof leaks and I sell it without telling the person about it, that's illegal.
The bedrock of any capitalist system is the trust that in a deal both parties will get a fair (buy not equal) exchange.
They also have friends in the GOP too. Better friends in fact.
I'm going to call some pretty big bullshit here. Prove they do not want to work, provide some empirical evidence. I've looked into poverty studies and they all seem to say quite the opposite. The "lazies" who won't work often don't because of generational depression that their lives will not get any better because they already realized that our social mobility is an utter joke. If you'd like to provide some citations though I'd be more then happy to do the same.
This already happens though. What constitutes as legwork, what constitutes due diligence? Is it actually physical effort expended or does it more have to do with being in the right place, at the right time, with the right information? Take the financial sector, they make the highest salaries of anyone else and I really don't think it's because they are "more dilligent" than someone who writes software, is a soldier or works as skilled labor assembling things.
For anything to be fair you need to establish fundamental standards if fairness. I think "Whoever got lucky to have the insider info" is an abysmal standard of fairness and the 2008 collapse seems to agree with me. Rather I think fairness should be determined by someone's complete capability to realize the value of their assets. Obviously the farmer or whomever owned the land does not have the ability to turn a profit that the real estate developer does. The farmer probably does not even want to. But in a fair deal it is the responsible thing for the farmer to get a cut of the value generated by the developer, and the most fair way to do that is ensure everyone has complete information and therefore can truly use the market to determine what a fair price is on that land.
I mean hell, isn't that literally how the free market is supposed to self-regulate? By withholding information you prevent market self-regulation.
The farmer is only "taken advantage of" if he believes he got a bad deal. The only way for him to determine that is for him to have all the information necessary to decide if the terms are truly agreeable. By withholding information the only advantage again, goes to whoever is fast, smart and cruel and it cultivates the same sort of graft behavior we see in the financial sector, where evil behavior gets rewarded with record bonuses.
Why would this even be possible? If they both had the same exact information and understanding then why would the seller be able to sue the buyer? I'm not saying the seller has grounds to sue if he is not awarded money for the increase in value of his property. Merely that the buyer should have a direct requirement to disclose any and all information they posses in regards to the deal being made. It should be a simple matter to prove in court if the buyer did not disclose anything so I'd think stopping those sorts of lawsuits would actually be pretty trivial.
I'm merely expanding the definition of fraud to include any situation where one party of a deal does not fully disclose any and all relevant information or insights they have into the deal when making it. Again, record keeping can nip any legal problems in the bud here. Or are you arguing that fairness in full disclosure goes against centuries of anglo-american tradition? That the terms of a deal are all equally valid if you can merely get someone to agree to it? Then why does Bernie Madoff go to jail but Goldman Cachs does not? Because of only mere technicalities over the nature of what business deception is?
No, but the point is that by requiring full disclosure it becomes much easier for the buyer to find an ideal plot without risk. Cooperation means several developers could even get together and plan a land purchase so as to develop a big new area around it. The only thing that decreases is the margin they can take by not sharing information. But again, if that decrease in margins comes with a greater decrease in risk (by enabling information to be publicly available and allowing everyone to work together to ensure the success of an overall deal) then is that not a worthy trade off?
Commercial banks LIED to their customers to secure loans they knew they would not be able to afford, they forged documents then to lie to big investment banks to transfer the assets. Those banks figured out they had junk and then lied by cutting them up and selling them to the middle class via 401Ks and other retirement plans only the non-wealthy have. During this the ratings agencies LIED about the safety of those assets to try and sell them, and then they got screwed over by the same big investment banks betting on the failure of those loans right before the crash through the same company.
In all cases, it was deceptive behavior practiced in concert which facilitated absolutely every level of this situation. This was not a case of risk, Goldman Sachs revealed emails showing they knew well ahead of time the CDOs they were selling were junk and they got rid of them as fast as they could. Again, they knew it was bad, their response was to simply lie to pass the hot potato to someone else and then bet on the person dropping it.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EMRATIO
As you can see, 30% is a lowball estimate. Examples of people not wanting jobs are retirees and stay-at-home somethingorothers.
That is nice, but those statistics don't really provide any evidence for the reason of unemployment now do they? That was kind of what I was asking for, sorry for the confusion.
I'm talking about the large number of people who have been out of work for so long that they give up. They shouldn't be dropped from the count, especially not in this job market. It might be hard to make the distinction, but I'm sure it's not impossible.
I had a suspicion that this was why they get dropped, but I think we should course correct.
What possible benefit is gained from this?
Perceptions often shape reality. People think things are bad, telling them they're actually multiple times worse (even though nothing's changed, people will perceive it this way) serves no rational purpose.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
I would agree completely that perception about the economy is the biggest tool we could use.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2011/12/02/the-bomb-buried-in-obamacare-explodes-today-halleluja/
I really dislike the term Obamacare, personally, but I guess it might be because I've never heard it used in a positive way.
This seems like good news, and if companies are actually forced to stick to this, that would be a big win for Obama in my eyes.
Isn't the Supreme Court supposed to review it soon?
There's always the Sweden 1992 way. Require all banks to immediately write down their bad assets, nationalize the insolvent ones, guarantee all their debts, and then IPO (privatize) the now solvent banks. As a bonus, the taxpayers reap all the profits from restoring confidence.
Next spring/summer.
I can't imagine that the argument is going to be anything other than "fuck you, commerce clause". Unless Thomas has more people in board with his "bring things back to 1920" theory of jurisprudence.
Never underestimate a group of conservatives in their willingness to fuck over the people.
See also: Citizens United.
The key bailout was done by the Bush administration. When the investment banks realised they were going to get 100% of their money from AIG they couldn't believe their luck.
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Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
The US federal government does not, I think, have the power to do this against the will of bank shareholders. Neither does it have the constitutional power to make threats to nationalize the way Sweden did to the Wallenberg family, nor does it have the institutional discipline to do so in practice.
How is "nationalization" any different than the way the FDIC goes into smaller failing banks, takes them over, removes the board and executives, changes their name and sells them? They do this all the time. In my town, they've done this at least a half dozen times since 2008.
Hmm, technically the chartering authority closes the bank and appoints the FDIC as receiver. Regardless I guess I was wrong; I suppose it does have the constitutional authority under the Commerce Clause. Regardless the point about institutional discipline stands :P If the federal government had attempted to force Citi's shareholders to take losses, I suspect its largest shareholders would have hidden behind a shield of institutional investors like pension funds, as smaller but politically popular banks have done before against the FDIC.
Our Chief weapons are surprise. Surprise and Fear. And that we know how to actually run a fucking bank. Our 3 weapons are surprise, fear, we know how to run a bank and decent accounting standards.
Amongst our weaponry....