What cause the economic crisis?

[alice123]

Hi,
My name is Alice, I'm a graduate student and I need people to complete a short questionnaire (takes about 5 min.) about the current economic crisis for my thesis. It is part of an international study conducted by an academic group in the US, Europe and Africa .
The idea is to let people tell us what they people think about the economic crisis.
It is very important!
To participate, please click here …

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=6oI1yBcJxczXbjVzt_2fPA6g_3d_3d

Thanks!

Alice.

 

[Oddball]

Don't flood the forum....M'kay???

 

[alice123]

I won't. Promise.

Tough it is essential to reach as many as possible to get a clear view in this study, you see...

but still I don't intend to flood...

 

[alice123]

Thanks for all th people who care enough to express their opinion in the study and influence it's outcome.

Please don't stop stating what you think. The results of this study are going to be presented in an International conference dealing with the Psychological aspect of the current economic crisis, so every voice and opinion makes a great difference..

 

[Hum Dinger]

O.K., I answered your questionaire...now can we fight about something?

 

[alice123]

O.K., I answered your questionaire...now can we fight about something?

In this study, we wish to learn about the way that people think of the crisis and its origins. After we analyze the findings (taken from your responses) we are going to publish them . I don't believe we will fight someone but I hope that the people in charge will be interested in what this study has to say... Thank you for your participation

 

[neurosport]

i filled out your questionnaire

but your study is retarded because you're asking people who might actually have a clue regardless of whether or not they had formal education in economics

you should go on a forum where women discuss what is the best brand of hair straighteners and ask THEM

 

[Hum Dinger]

i filled out your questionnaire

but your study is retarded because you're asking people who might actually have a clue regardless of whether or not they had formal education in economics

you should go on a forum where women discuss what is the best brand of hair straighteners and ask THEM

If there is one educational discipline that has time and again proven itself to be totally useless and a complete failure it's economics. Having a 'formal education in economics' is only a certification of a complete misunderstanding of economics.

The opinion of the average, economically uneducated, stands a much greater chance of accurracy!

Besides which, the survey is about perception not about knowledge.

 

[neurosport]

i filled out your questionnaire

but your study is retarded because you're asking people who might actually have a clue regardless of whether or not they had formal education in economics

you should go on a forum where women discuss what is the best brand of hair straighteners and ask THEM

If there is one educational discipline that has time and again proven itself to be totally useless and a complete failure it's economics. Having a 'formal education in economics' is only a certification of a complete misunderstanding of economics.

The opinion of the average, economically uneducated, stands a much greater chance of accurracy!

Besides which, the survey is about perception not about knowledge.

i definitely agree with you about formal education in economics

my point was that his poll will not accurately represent opinions of American public

 

[Hum Dinger]

The questions in the poll obviously are slanted WAY to the left (I LIKED 'EM!)

If the title of the presetation is going to be 'A Survey of Left-wing whacko beliefs about the Economic Crisis' it'll do. The questions were extremely leading...exactly in the direction I like to go!

 

[Oddball]

If there is one educational discipline that has time and again proven itself to be totally useless and a complete failure it's economics. Having a 'formal education in economics' is only a certification of a complete misunderstanding of economics.

The opinion of the average, economically uneducated, stands a much greater chance of accurracy!

Besides which, the survey is about perception not about knowledge.

Very true.

However, it is possible to be educated in the standard Keynesian claptrap, and still survive with enough grey matter to check its voodoo premises.

 

[AVG-JOE]

Interesting survey, Alice. Please post whatever summary you build from the results.

-Joe

 

[JimJones]

I agree with some of you. I took the survey and found it very much leaning left. Your thesis is not based on the current economic crisis. Based on the majority of your questions, it’s about the benefits people are finding during an economic crisis.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Hi,
My name is Alice, I'm a graduate student and I need people to complete a short questionnaire (takes about 5 min.) about the current economic crisis for my thesis. It is part of an international study conducted by an academic group in the US, Europe and Africa .
The idea is to let people tell us what they people think about the economic crisis.
It is very important!
To participate, please click here …

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=6oI1yBcJxczXbjVzt_2fPA6g_3d_3d

Thanks!

Alice.

Not interested in giving you the personal info, except that I am an Ivy League grad, but here is an education:
The financial crisis is the result of Democrat philosophy, specifically that we help folks by giving things to them, as opposed to them earning and thus valuing things like homes.

You may have missed this in a previous post, but it's worth considering:

a.Congress passed a bill in 1975 requiring banks to provide the government with information on their lending activities in poor urban areas. Two years later, it passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which gave regulators the power to deny banks the right to expand if they didn’t lend sufficiently in those neighborhoods. In 1979 the FDIC used the CRA to block a move by the Greater NY Savings Bank for not enough lending.

b.In 1986, when the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn) threatened to oppose an acquisition by a southern bank, Louisiana Bancshares, until it agreed to new “flexible credit and underwriting standards” for minority borrowers—for example, counting public assistance and food stamps as income.

c.In 1987, Acorn led a coalition of advocacy groups calling for industry-wide changes in lending standards. Among the demanded reforms were the easing of minimum down-payment requirements and of the requirement that borrowers have enough cash at a closing to cover two to three months of mortgage payments (research had shown that lack of money in hand was a big reason some mortgages failed quickly).

d.ACORN then attacked Fannie Mae, the giant quasi-government agency that bought loans from banks in order to allow them to make new loans. Its underwriters were “strictly by-the-book interpreters” of lending standards and turned down purchases of unconventional loans, charged Acorn. The pressure eventually paid off. In 1992, Congress passed legislation requiring Fannie Mae and the similar Freddie Mac to devote 30 percent of their loan purchases to mortgages for low- and moderate-income borrowers.

e.Clinton Administration housing secretary, Henry Cisneros, declared that he would expand homeownership among lower- and lower-middle-income renters. His strategy: pushing for no-down-payment loans; expanding the size of mortgages that the government would insure against losses; and using the CRA and other lending laws to direct more private money into low-income programs.

f.Shortly after Cisneros announced his plan, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac agreed to begin buying loans under new, looser guidelines. Freddie Mac, for instance, started approving low-income buyers with bad credit histories or none at all, so long as they were current on rent and utilities payments. Freddie Mac also said that it would begin counting income from seasonal jobs and public assistance toward its income minimum, despite the FHA disaster of the sixties.

g.Freddie Mac began an “alternative qualifying” program with the Sears Mortgage Corporation that let a borrower qualify for a loan with a monthly payment as high as 50 percent of his income, at a time when most private mortgage companies wouldn’t exceed 33 percent. The program also allowed borrowers with bad credit to get mortgages if they took credit-counseling classes administered by Acorn and other nonprofits. Subsequent research would show that such classes have little impact on default rates.

h.Pressuring nonbank lenders to make more loans to poor minorities didn’t stop with Sears. If it didn’t happen, Clinton officials warned, they’d seek to extend CRA regulations to all mortgage makers. In Congress, Representative Maxine Waters called financial firms not covered by the CRA “among the most egregious redliners.”

i.Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) shocked the financial world by signing a 1994 agreement with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), pledging to increase lending to minorities and join in new efforts to rewrite lending standards. The first MBA member to sign up: Countrywide Financial, the mortgage firm that would be at the core of the subprime meltdown.

j.A 1998 sales pitch by a Bear Stearns managing director advised banks to begin packaging their loans to low-income borrowers into securities that the firm could sell. Forget traditional underwriting standards when considering these loans, the director advised. For a low-income borrower, he continued in all-too-familiar terms, owning a home was “a near-sacred obligation. A family will do almost anything to meet that monthly mortgage payment.” Bunk, says Stan Liebowitz, a professor of economics at the University of Texas: “The claim that lower-income homeowners are somehow different in their devotion to their home is a purely emotional claim with no evidence to support it.”

k.Any concern was quickly dismissed. When in early 2000 the FDIC proposed increasing capital requirements for lenders making “subprime” loans—loans to people with questionable credit, that is—Democratic representative Carolyn Maloney of New York told a congressional hearing that she feared that the step would dry up CRA loans. Her fellow New York Democrat John J. LaFalce urged regulators “not to be premature” in imposing new regulations.

l.In July 1999, HUD proposed new levels for Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s low-income lending; in September, Fannie Mae agreed to begin purchasing loans made to “borrowers with slightly impaired credit”—that is, with credit standards even lower than the government had been pushing for a generation.

m.In 2004 Congress pressed new affordable-housing goals on the two mortgage giants, which through 2007 purchased some $1 trillion in loans to lower- and moderate-income buyers. The buying spree helped spark a massive increase in securitization of mortgages to people with dubious credit.

n.In October 1994, Fannie Mae head James Johnson had reminded a banking convention that mortgages with small down payments had a much higher risk of defaulting. (A Duff & Phelps study found that they were nearly three times more likely to default than conventional mortgages.) Yet the very next month, Fannie Mae said that it expected to back loans to low-income home buyers with a 97 percent loan-to-value ratio—that is, loans in which the buyer puts down just 3 percent—as part of a commitment, made earlier that year to Congress, to purchase $1 trillion in affordable-housing mortgages by the end of the nineties. According to Edward Pinto, who served as the company’s chief credit officer, the program was the result of political pressure on Fannie Mae trumping lending standards.

o.In 1992, the Boston Fed produced an extraordinary 29-page document that codified the new lending wisdom. Conventional mortgage criteria, the report argued, might be “unintentionally biased” because they didn’t take into account “the economic culture of urban, lower-income and nontraditional customers.” Lenders should thus consider junking the industry’s traditional income-to-payments ratio and stop viewing an applicant’s “lack of credit history” as a “negative factor.” Further, if applicants had bad credit, banks should “consider extenuating circumstances”—even though a study by mortgage insurance companies would soon show, not surprisingly, that borrowers with no credit rating or a bad one were far more likely to default. If applicants didn’t have enough savings for a down payment, the Boston Fed urged, banks should allow loans from nonprofits or government assistance agencies to count toward one. A later study of Freddie Mac mortgages would find that a borrower who made a down payment with third-party funds was four times more likely to default, a reminder that traditional underwriting standards weren’t arbitrary but based on historical lending patterns.

p.The Congressional Hispanic Caucus launched Hogar in 2003, an initiative that pushed for easing lending standards for immigrants, including touting so-called seller-financed mortgages in which a builder provided down-payment aid to buyers via contributions to nonprofit groups. As a result, mortgage lending to Hispanics soared. And today, in districts where Hispanics make up at least 25 percent of the population, foreclosure rates are now nearly 50 percent higher than the national average, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_2_homeownership.html

 

[Care4all]

WOW, what a masterpiece PC....very creative to mask what ACTUALLY HAPPENED! Tell me, why didn't the banks go belly up in the 70's when cra was instituted or the 90's? Why did our crisis with the minimal requirements for a loan begin in 2003 through 2006, WHY NOT SOONER?

Loans given due to CRA are less than 10% of all loans in crisis....

are you trying to cover your own rear....did you and your hubby borrow from the equity in your own home and are now in the rears thus the reflecting on to others with less means?

sorry to say you are absolutely clueless on what happened....pc....with mortgaged backed securities and what caused this mess....

Care

 

[alice123]

i filled out your questionnaire

but your study is retarded because you're asking people who might actually have a clue regardless of whether or not they had formal education in economics

you should go on a forum where women discuss what is the best brand of hair straighteners and ask THEM

If there is one educational discipline that has time and again proven itself to be totally useless and a complete failure it's economics. Having a 'formal education in economics' is only a certification of a complete misunderstanding of economics.

The opinion of the average, economically uneducated, stands a much greater chance of accurracy!

Besides which, the survey is about perception not about knowledge.

Believe me neurosport, I ask also at the hair straighteners forums and many others in order to get the widest angle of views. your view of course is not less important.

I think that Richard-H comment about this survey dealing with perception and not knowledge is very true. More than that, as i mentioned, this survey is an international survey taking place also in Europe and Africa, we have a great interest in the differences in people perception of the current economic crisis across nations and continents. So your opinions are extra relevant for us...

Thanks again for all the kind people who cared enough to contribute this study.
It is extremely important.

Please continue to state your opinions... (to participate: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=6oI1yBcJxczXbjVzt_2fPA6g_3d_3d )

Thanks.

 

[alice123]

Interesting survey, Alice. Please post whatever summary you build from the results.

-Joe

Hi Joe,
This survey and its findings are going to be presented on July so I'll be more than glad to post a summary here in this forum.

Thanks for your participation.
Alice.

 

[PoliticalChic]

WOW, what a masterpiece PC....very creative to mask what ACTUALLY HAPPENED! Tell me, why didn't the banks go belly up in the 70's when cra was instituted or the 90's? Why did our crisis with the minimal requirements for a loan begin in 2003 through 2006, WHY NOT SOONER?

Loans given due to CRA are less than 10% of all loans in crisis....

are you trying to cover your own rear....did you and your hubby borrow from the equity in your own home and are now in the rears thus the reflecting on to others with less means?

sorry to say you are absolutely clueless on what happened....pc....with mortgaged backed securities and what caused this mess....

Care

Kind of violent reaction to my post, with a little twist of personal attack?

I guess I hit the nail on your head.

No, I clearly time-lined what happened, and placed the blame squarely where it belongs: the Democrat "road to hell" weltanschaung.

The puzzle is why you feel so stongly that you must defend, and, essentially, apologize for same. If the fiduciary responsibilities had not been compromised by the Democrat pressure, we would probably be facing no more than a normal recession.

Could it be the philosophy which has become so intimately entwined with your person been shown to be dead wrong? Could it be that you are the type of small minded individual that can never admit being wrong?

I believe your rage interfered with your reading, since you would not usually make a mistake along these lines: "why didn't the banks go belly up in the 70's when cra was instituted ..." You should know that the CRA was passed in 1977.

Now, go back and re-study the time line, which shows the steady drumbeat of pressure to loosen the requirements for mortgage loans. Steady. Continuous. Increasing. Democrat.

BTW, economics is not a science. It is an "educated guess." One year? Ten years? A generation? No one could know or correctly guess, when the house of cards, pun intended, would fall.

And, my hubby and I thank you for your good wishes.

 

[neurosport]

Thanks again for all the kind people who cared enough to contribute this study.
It is extremely important.

as the Russian saying goes "спасибо в карман не положиш" meaning you can't put a thank you into your pocket.

well ironically here on USBM you can.

just because i called you a retard and said that all women are good for nothing more than wigs now you don't want to thank me formally

women ... no concept of gratitude !