I suppose morons (and you) don't read their own sources (just the first one):
Well done - you dispatched some quick truth found within that libs own post.
Almost all of Moore's rants had nothing to do with actual capitalism but rather the effects of government regulatory abortions that caused the mess.
If anything, it is a testimony to how the government's role needs to be downsized considerably, not increased to the bloated proportions of Moore himself...
In addition, I do believe some are unclear on what 'but for' actually means. Oh well.
If anyone is interested in an excellent (non-partisan) analysis of the crash of the economy (I realize that is likely a pipe dream in a Michael Moore groupie thread), this is one of the best analyses I have seen:
Recipe for Disaster: The Formula that Killed Wall Street
How weird that the article you post defeats your own position. Michael Moore, while simplistic, is correct in his basic assessments. If there is fault with government it is the fault caused by the lack of regulatory structure. A close friend was a banking regulator years ago before the Greed Revolution, then they would inspect closely the books of the banking and investment firms. Sad that came to an end under Reagan / Clinton / Bush, the so called Contract with America. Only one word needs to change 'with' to 'on' to reflect the real story.
from piece
"Road Map for Financial Recovery: Radical Transparency Now!"
"As a result, just about anything could be bundled and turned into a triple-A bond—corporate bonds, bank loans, mortgage-backed securities, whatever you liked. The consequent pools were often known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. You could tranche that pool and create a triple-A security even if none of the components were themselves triple-A. You could even take lower-rated tranches of other CDOs, put them in a pool, and tranche them—an instrument known as a CDO-squared, which at that point was so far removed from any actual underlying bond or loan or mortgage that no one really had a clue what it included. But it didn't matter. All you needed was Li's copula function...."
In hindsight, ignoring those warnings looks foolhardy. But at the time, it was easy. Banks dismissed them, partly because the managers empowered to apply the brakes didn't understand the arguments between various arms of the quant universe. Besides, they were making too much money to stop....
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, hedge fund manager and author of The Black Swan, is particularly harsh when it comes to the copula. "People got very excited about the Gaussian copula because of its mathematical elegance, but the thing never worked," he says. "Co-association between securities is not measurable using correlation," because past history can never prepare you for that one day when everything goes south. "Anything that relies on correlation is charlatanism...."
"On the day when Saddam was caught, the bond market went up in the morning, and it went down in the afternoon. So here we had two headlines — "Bond Market Up on Saddam News," and in the afternoon, "Bond Market Down on Saddam News" — and then they had in both cases very convincing explanations of the moves. Basically if you can explain one thing and its opposite using the same data you don't have an explanation. It takes a lot of courage to keep silent." Nassim Nicholas Taleb
