Obama Still Blaming Bush for our Economic Problems.

[CrusaderFrank]

Germany is not isolated, they need to export to the USA and Europe and if both those economies are suffering from "Higher taxes and Mo' n Bigga Gubbamint spending" then of course Germany is going to have problems

I thought it was obvious but I should have known Id have to spell it all out for you

 

[rightwinger]

Republicans still demanding a clean slate

Not only did they create our economic recession, they have done everything in their means to prevent us from escaping it

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Obama and the Dems have done enough damage; time for them to go

 

[itfitzme]

The trouble I'm having with the analogy of Greece or Germany to the US is that Greece, Germany, and the rest of the "countries" in the Eurozone are sharing a common currency and no longer monetarily independent. They are, in effect, more like a state in the United States then they are like an independent country.

 

[itfitzme]

Germany is not isolated, they need to export to the USA and Europe and if both those economies are suffering from "Higher taxes and Mo' n Bigga Gubbamint spending" then of course Germany is going to have problems

I thought it was obvious but I should have known Id have to spell it all out for you

Okay, I get it. I will update my translator app.

"How the fuck does anyone take Liberals serious with great minds like Paul Krugman and Rex Nutting dispensing economic advice?"

means

"Germany is not isolated, they need to export to the USA and Europe and if both those economies are suffering from "Higher taxes and Mo' n Bigga Gubbamint spending" then of course Germany is going to have problems"

Sure, now it makes sense.

 

[Trajan]

Recognizing the problem is why Obama has been succeeding.

The problem is that not only are conservatives not cowed by the destruction they caused..the are actively obstructing solutions.

Everyone else needs to be reminded why we are at this point. Because conservative propaganda lists that all our economic woes started the second Obama assumed office..and all expenditures started in 2009. Their propaganda changes the history.

Recognizing the problem is why Obama has been succeeding.

how about doing something about it? Its what he signed up for....or are the fund raisers keeping him to busy? and that rambling panned 54 minutes of dreck was....dreck.

 

[Trajan]

Republicans still demanding a clean slate

Not only did they create our economic recession, they have done everything in their means to prevent us from escaping it

its ot even noon there yet, jeez, lay off the juice.

 

[itfitzme]

Obama and the Dems have done enough damage; time for them to go

What damage is that, exactly?

 

[rightwinger]

Republicans still demanding a clean slate

Not only did they create our economic recession, they have done everything in their means to prevent us from escaping it

its ot even noon there yet, jeez, lay off the juice.

We suffered the worst economic collapse in 70 years by following the Republican principles of low taxes and deregulation. Why should the people be asked to forget that hard learned lesson?

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Facebook has a bigger market cap than Greece. As a world economy, Greece is a rounding error.

They are the first Progressive domino to fall victim to a redistributive economic theory with a 100% guaranteed fail rate. Spain is next. The USA better wake the fuck up and I think Dem losses from the Kennedy seat to the Walker recall means people are fed up with failure of Dem policies

 

[Synthaholic]

What a stupid article, how is Germany "immune" to the problems in Europe?

they had a strong exports in heavy industry to China, same with Australia. But Germany is not immune from financial problems. The US is because the rich just got through fucking the middle class.Again.

How the fuck does anyone take Liberals serious with great minds like Paul Krugman and Rex Nutting dispensing economic advice?

I knew it wouldn't take long for you to bring the stupidity. Second post! Congrats!

 

[Synthaholic]

they had a strong exports in heavy industry to China, same with Australia. But Germany is not immune from financial problems. The US is because the rich just got through fucking the middle class.Again.

How the fuck does anyone take Liberals serious with great minds like Paul Krugman and Rex Nutting dispensing economic advice?

I need to find a translator app...

Moron-to-English?

 

[Synthaholic]

Obama and the Dems have done enough damage; time for them to go

^ Bitch troll


True story!

 

[Synthaholic]

Facebook has a bigger market cap than Greece. As a world economy, Greece is a rounding error.

Facebook is a house of cards. How's that stock doing, bitch troll?

 

[itfitzme]

Obama and the Dems have done enough damage; time for them to go

I'm still waiting for that definitive list of specific details.

I get the sense all you have is this vague and ill defined feeling that they must have.

 

[Oldstyle]

Republicans still demanding a clean slate

Not only did they create our economic recession, they have done everything in their means to prevent us from escaping it

its ot even noon there yet, jeez, lay off the juice.

We suffered the worst economic collapse in 70 years by following the Republican principles of low taxes and deregulation. Why should the people be asked to forget that hard learned lesson?

Only a "true believer" would believe that low taxes caused the economic collapse. What is it with you progressives? You all have this misguided notion that if we would only tax everyone a whole lot more that all of our problems would be solved...yet that hasn't WORKED anywhere where it's been tried. Giving more taxes to the disfunctional government we now have is just pissing down a rat hole.

 

[itfitzme]

its ot even noon there yet, jeez, lay off the juice.

We suffered the worst economic collapse in 70 years by following the Republican principles of low taxes and deregulation. Why should the people be asked to forget that hard learned lesson?

Only a "true believer" would believe that low taxes caused the economic collapse. What is it with you progressives? You all have this misguided notion that if we would only tax everyone a whole lot more that all of our problems would be solved...yet that hasn't WORKED anywhere where it's been tried. Giving more taxes to the disfunctional government we now have is just pissing down a rat hole.

He said, " low taxes and deregulation". That word and is really important. It is a basic logic operator.

It works like this. If A and B then C. A must be true and B must be true for C to be true. If A is true while B is false or A is false while B is true, then C is not true.

Some people seem to have a real hard time with the concept of and. It is almost as if they don't have some basic neurological capacity for the concept of and. All they can conceive of is or.

We work within a monetary system. It seems that the combination of releasing more funds into the hands of investors combined with the lack of regulation of the banking and real estate industry allowed a massive housing bubble to form as the industry drove it's own demand and rising prices until the bubble finally burst. When it did, the combination of systematic risk in the financial system along with the loss of the consumption in the housing market resulted in a collapse of the economy. This was seen in negative GDP growth, deflation, and a contraction of the money supply as both consumer's and businesses began paying of debt en mass.

You see, it is a combination of factors. It isn't one or the other. It is both. That is the key, in the word and. Most things are a combination of two or more factors. As such, unless you can get the concept of and, you are hopelessly lost at understanding the effect of complex processes.

The problem is that we don't create rules and regulations to stop potential disasters. That isn't how we function as a society. We create the rules and regulations after the disaster has happened. We don't put people in jail because the might do something. We wait until they actually do something.

It is my understanding that we did have regulation in place for the banking and finance industry, in the form of Glass-Steagle, that would have mitigated some of the problem had it not been dismantled. And we have had recurring instances of fraud and just bad business practice in the real estate and mortgage markets that justified a certain level of regulation.

So fundamentally, it wasn't the lower taxes that was the issue, it was the combination of the tax decreases and the lack of justifiable regulation based on past experience that allowed for the problem to occur.

Maybe it would help you if he had said, "the Republican principles of deregulation and low taxes." Then you wouldn't have gotten all fixated on the "taxes" coming before the word and.

I'm just saying, given that he clearly said "low taxes and deregulation", to which you respond with only the object of "low taxes", you appear to have a fundamental cognitive disability in grasping that and creates an object, a gestalt, that is distinctly different than the two individual objects that it combines. A and B is a distinct object that is the combination of set A with set B. A and B is distinctly different then either A or B.

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

We suffered the worst economic collapse in 70 years by following the Republican principles of low taxes and deregulation. Why should the people be asked to forget that hard learned lesson?

our great newspapers and economists on left and right agree it was liberal government that caused the current depression.

"First consider the once controversial view that the crisis was largely caused by the Fed's holding interest rates too low for too long after the 2001 recession. This view is now so widely held that the editorial pages of both the NYTimes and the Wall Street Journal agree on its validity!"...John B. Taylor


" The Federal reserve having done so much to create the problems in which the economy is now mired, having mistakenly thought that even after the housing bubble burst the problems were contained, and having underestimated the severity of the crisis, now wants to make a contribution to preventing the economy from sinking into a Japanese Style malaise....... - "Joseph Stiglitz"





You may not have heard of the Federal Reserve system but it exists to inflate and deflate the currency supply through the housing market. They inflated too much for too long. This caused what they call a housing bubble. While the bubble was inflating all the big banks and many insurance companies bought bubble mortgages thinking they were sound rather than merely purchased or made possible by newly printed funny money. When the bubble deflated they all lost money on the mortgages. It would be analogous to the government making cars and giving them to GM so everyone could have a car. If GM got them by the ton and for very little money of course they would find a way to move them . This is essentially what the Banks did with the free money. In addition to the Federal Reserve System you had Fanny and Freddie which bought and guaranteed many of the mortgages so no one had to worry about them failing. Then you had CRA, FHA, Federal Home Loan Bank Board( 3% down payment loans) and several others that were designed to get everybody in their own home.

When the states tried to move against predatory lending by national banks they were blocked by the bank's federal regulator, the office of the comptroller of the currency, That empowered money lenders say Lynn Turner.

Just as significantly you had very badly conceived accounting rules that hid the problems from everyone until it was too late. Accounting rules are supposed to do the opposite, not move billions in potential liabilities off the balance sheet onto tiny footnote on the bottom of a page as happened at Citibank, or onto on sentence at the end of a 10-Q report as happened at AIG, or as generally happened with SIVs (structured investment vehicles). Then you had gov't rules from the last crisis, the Enron Crisis, the created mark-to- market accounting rules for this crisis that many believe greatly exacerbated this crisis.

Then you had the problem with the government backed ratings agencies that simply failed to rate the mortgage backed and related securities, properly. Sorry, it had little to do with Bush, but had everything to do with inane attempts by the liberal to regulate the free market!


Warren Buffett: "There are significant limits to what regulation can accomplish. As a dramatic illustration, take two of the biggest accounting disasters in the past ten years: Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. We're talking billions and billions of dollars of misstatements at both places".

Now, these are two incredibly important institutions. I mean, they accounted for over 40% of the mortgage flow a few years back. Right now I think they're up to 70%. They're quasi-governmental in nature. So the government set up an organization called OFHEO. I'm not sure what all the letters stand for. [Note to Warren: They stand for Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight.] But if you go to OFHEO's website, you'll find that its purpose was to just watch over these two companies. OFHEO had 200 employees. Their job was simply to look at two companies and say, "Are these guys behaving like they're supposed to?" And of course what happened were two of the greatest accounting misstatements in history while these 200 people had their jobs. It's incredible. I mean, two for two!

“Whatever regulatory changes are made, they will pale in comparison to the change already evident in today’s markets,” he said. “Those markets for an indefinite future will be far more restrained than would any currently contemplated new regulatory regime.”-Alan Greenspan

Courtesy A. Smith:FDR created Fannie.
LBJ Privatized Fannie - creating an "enron" like environment:
Greg Mankiw's Blog: Thanks, LBJ

Carter's Community Reinvestment Act - accelerated by Clinton - pushed risky loans:
Community Reinvestment Act - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Clinton pushed Fannie into Subprime - the most critical mistake:
Andrew Cuomo and Fannie and Freddie - Page 1 - News - New York - Village Voice

Even the NY Times figured this out: Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending - NYTimes.com

Bush and McCain attempted to reform Fannie on 17 occasions
Bush Called For Reform of Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac 17 Times in 2008 Alone Only To Have Dems Ignored His Warnings :: Political News and commentaries :: Hyscience

The risky subprime loans fueled another layer of risk - derivatives
https://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewarticle/articleid/2947518

The LA Times reported on Clinton's "subprime" success in 1999:
Minorities' Home Ownership Booms Under Clinton but Still Lags Whites' - Los Angeles Times


"First consider the once controversial view that the crisis was largely caused by the Fed's holding interest rates too low for too long after the 2001 recession. This view is now so widely held that the editorial pages of both the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal agree on its validity!"...John B. Taylor( arch conservative, author of the Taylor Rule)

" The Federal reserve having done so much to create the problems in which the economy is now mired, having mistakenly thought that even after the housing bubble burst the problems were contained, and having underestimated the severity of the crisis, now wants to make a contribution to preventing the economy from sinking into a Japanese Style malaise....... - "Joseph Stiglitz"


If you still can't grasp what happened why not read "Reckless Endangerment" by NY Times person and see if you can say with a straight face that the crisis was not caused by liberal interference wit the free market.


Fannie and Freddie had purchased $4.9 trillion of the mortgages outstanding as of the end of 2007, 70% of which the GSEs had packaged and sold to investors with a guarantee of payment, and the remainder of which Fannie and Freddie kept for their own portfolios. The fraction of outstanding home mortgage debt that was either held or guaranteed by the GSEs (known as their "total book of business") rose from 6% in 1971 to 51% in 2003. Book of business relative to annual GDP went from 1.6% to 33%.



Sum of retained mortgage portfolio and mortgage backed securities outstanding for Fannie and Freddie (from OFHEO 2008 Report to Congress) divided by (1) total 1- to 4-family home mortgage debt outstanding (from Census for 1971-2003 and FRB for 2004-2007) and (2) annual nominal GDP.


The problem is summed up succinctly by Stan Liebowitz of the University of Texas at Dallas:

From the current handwringing, you’d think that the banks came up with the idea of looser underwriting standards on their own, with regulators just asleep on the job. In fact, it was the regulators who relaxed these standards--at the behest of community groups and "progressive" political forces.… For years, rising house prices hid the default problems since quick refinances were possible. But now that house prices have stopped rising, we can clearly see the damage done by relaxed loan standards.



Washington Post:

Fannie Mae aimed to benefit from subprime loans and expand the market for them -- and hoped to pass much of the risk on to others, documents show. Along with subprime loans, which were typically issued to borrowers with blemished credit, the company targeted so-called Alt-A loans, which were often made with no verification of the borrower's income.

"By entering new markets -- especially Alt-A and subprime -- and guaranteeing more of our customers' products at market prices, we met our goal of increasing market share from 22 to 25 percent," Mudd wrote in a 2006 year-end report to the Fannie Mae board dated Jan. 3, 2007.

In other internal documents, there was a common refrain: One of Fannie Mae's objectives for 2006 was to "increase our penetration into subprime."

In an interview, Fannie Mae Executive Vice President Thomas A. Lund said the company pursued the purchase of subprime loans in 2006 and 2007 at the request of lenders, who wanted Fannie Mae to take the loans off their books. He said Fannie Mae hoped to bring higher standards to the market, and he added that the loans helped the company in its struggle to meet goals the government had set for Fannie Mae's advancement of affordable housing.



they reflected the company's appetite for subprime and Alt-A mortgages. The company had a long and deep involvement in this market through a different form of investment.

Instead of buying the loans and securitizing them itself, Fannie Mae had invested in securities packaged by others from pools of these loans. Going back at least as far as 2002, Fannie Mae had taken on tens of billions of dollars of such securities, according to regulatory data.

Fannie Mae's investment in Alt-A and subprime securities issued by others would later prove costly. But in Mudd's January 2007 report, as he reviewed the company's business, they didn't even draw a mention.



From 2004 to 2006, the two purchased $434 billion in securities backed by subprime loans, creating a market for more such lending. Subprime loans are targeted toward borrowers with poor credit, and they generally carry higher interest rates than conventional loans.

WP:Today, 3 million to 4 million families are expected to lose their homes to foreclosure because they cannot afford their high-interest subprime loans. Lower-income and minority home buyers -- those who were supposed to benefit from HUD's actions -- are falling into default at a rate at least three times that of other borrowers.



WP: Fannie and Freddie finance about 40 percent of all U.S. mortgages, with $5.3 trillion in outstanding debt. Owned by private shareholders but chartered by Congress, they are exempt from state and local taxes and receive an estimated $6.5 billion-a-year federal subsidy because they can borrow money more cheaply than other investors. In return, they are expected to serve "public purposes," including helping to make home buying more affordable



Since HUD became their regulator in 1992, Fannie and Freddie each year are supposed to buy a portion of "affordable" mortgages made to underserved borrowers. Every four years, HUD reviews the goals to adapt to market changes.

In 1995, President Bill Clinton's HUD agreed to let Fannie and Freddie get affordable-housing credit for buying subprime securities that included loans to low-income borrowers. The idea was that subprime lending benefited many borrowers who did not qualify for conventional loans. HUD expected that Freddie and Fannie would impose their high lending standards on subprime lenders



But by 2004, when HUD next revised the goals, Freddie and Fannie's purchases of subprime-backed securities had risen tenfold. Foreclosure rates also were rising.



In 2003, the two (fanny/Freddie)bought $81 billion in subprime securities. In 2004, they purchased $175 billion -- 44 percent of the market. In 2005, they bought $169 billion, or 33 percent. In 2006, they cut back to $90 billion, or 20 percent. Generally, Freddie purchased more than Fannie and relied more heavily on the securities to meet goals.

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

It is my understanding that we did have regulation in place for the banking and finance industry, in the form of Glass-Steagle, that would have mitigated some of the problem had it not been dismantled. .

of course if true you would not be so afraid to explain why Glass had anything to do with it let alone why it had more to do with it than a Fed policy specificially designed to subvert the free market to get people into homes the free market said they could not afford.

 

[starcraftzzz]

It is my understanding that we did have regulation in place for the banking and finance industry, in the form of Glass-Steagle, that would have mitigated some of the problem had it not been dismantled. .

of course if true you would not be so afraid to explain why Glass had anything to do with it let alone why it had more to do with it than a Fed policy specificially designed to subvert the free market to get people into homes the free market said they could not afford.

glass seigal made it illegal to make the loans that caused the crissis retard. you are braindead saddly you are the on;y person who doesnt know it