Back on Uncle Sam's Plantation
I thought we were on the road to moving socialism out of our poor black communities and replacing it with wealth producing American capitalism. But, incredibly, we are going in the opposite direction.
Instead of poor America on socialism becoming more like rich American on capitalism, rich America on capitalism is becoming like poor America on socialism. Uncle Sam has welcomed our banks onto the plantation and they have said, "Thank you, Suh."
Now, instead of thinking about what creative things need to be done to serve customers, they are thinking about what they have to tell Massah in order to get their cash. There is some kind of irony that this is all happening under our first black president on the 200th anniversary of the birthday of Abraham Lincoln.
Worse, socialism seems to be the element of our new young president. And maybe even more troubling, our corporate executives seem happy to move onto the plantation.
~Star Parker
38 Comments:
Heh, you're going to deep-shit direction (I can tell you from my own experience, because I live in Slovenia which is ex-Yugoslavian republic).
And maybe even bigger problem is that everybody's saying now: Hey, look even the US "bought" their banks -> the capitalism isn't working...
People are just now beginning to grasp that socialism "seems to be the element of our new young president."
Throughout my lifetime the mantra of the Democratic party has been that "Life is a series of problems to be solved by government." With socialized medicine and a stated objective of "Spreading the wealth around" instead "expanding our national wealth and providing opportunities for all" Obama has made it clear that we are headed for yet another failed chapter of wax to limit prosperity and spend on social engineering schemes designed by liberal bureaucrats. Didn't we learn ANYTHING from forced busing, welfare for all for life, etc, etc, etc...?
More moralizing, more idealogy, more self-rigtheousness...
No understanding of what financial crises are or how to deal with them.
I think I now know why the Federal Reserve has been so opaque over the course of its existence. Because its founders understood the need for its existence, but they knew that the "mob" like A42, Anonymous and even trained economists like Mark Perry, would not understand the reason for its existence.
"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of "Liberalism", they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened." He went on to say: "I no longer need to run as a Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democratic Party has adopted our platform."
- Norman Mattoon Thomas (1884-1968) - American socialist, pacifist and six time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America, 1944 speech
Prof Perry, Why don't they just give the "stimulus" money to us? So we could all pay off our houses. There must be some kind of economic reason. Would it cause inflation?
"No understanding of what financial crises are or how to deal with them"...
ROFLMAO!
Thanks mach for showing us your Peggy Joseph side...
Maybe Deroy Murdock's America moves quickly to democratic-socialist state can clear up some of your inability to grasp reality...
From the Barron's editorial section, a commentary from Scott Powell: The Culprit Is All of Us...
The government's meddling got us into this mess.
CONTRARY TO A VIEW POPULARIZED DURING THE 2008 presidential election season, the current economic crisis was not the result of deregulation. (there's more)
The government's meddling got us into this mess.
No it didn't. No one forced the banks to write the mortgages that they did. And definitely no one forced the investment bankers to invest in those mortgages and create securities out of them. AND DEFINITELY no one forced the ibanks to leverage up to 30:1 and 40:1 ratios to invest in those mortgage securities. And definitely no one forced the rating agencies to abandon any standards when evaluating those mortgage-backed securities. And definitely no one forced the appraisers to indulge in fraud during the boom.
These are just the natural herd-like irrational responses of humans during a bubble.
Amen Brother.
Enjoy the ride on a road to Serfdom.
1,
I also want you to explain why conservatives like to focus so much on Fannie and Freddie. Yes, Fannie and Freddie did a lot of dumb things. But nothing any more dumb than the private investment banks.
Why don't you focus more on Bear Sterns and Lehman. They did things just as stupid as Fannie and Freddie.
So is the reason you focus on Fannie and Freddie is because they were quasi-public institutions?? I think your ideology is showing again...
"No it didn't. No one forced the banks to write the mortgages that they did. And definitely no one forced the investment bankers to invest in those mortgages and create securities out of them"...
Well mach you're almost right about this EXCEPT for the fact that these banks that did do these stupid things had to compete with the GSEs of Fannie and Freddie...
"I also want you to explain why conservatives like to focus so much on Fannie and Freddie. Yes, Fannie and Freddie did a lot of dumb things. But nothing any more dumb than the private investment banks"...
Your DETERMINED efforts to ignore reality is nothing short of amazing mach...
Democrats in their own words Covering up the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac Scam that caused our Economic Crisis
Democratic Congress Delaying Hearings on Freddie & Fannie
mach why do you refuse to learn the lessons of history?
FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate...
"No one forced the banks to write the mortgages that they did."
Oh, really?
"Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.
In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates -- anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans."
-NY Times 9/30/99
The government did, in fact, put a lot of pressure to expand these risky mortgages. Look, I'm not saying it's ALL the government's fault. But to say it isn't at all, now that just seems to be irrational.
Well mach you're almost right about this EXCEPT for the fact that these banks that did do these stupid things had to compete with the GSEs of Fannie and Freddie...
What the hell is that supposed to mean?? Do the stupid actions of my competitor force me to also make stupid actions.
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?? Do the stupid actions of my competitor force me to also make stupid actions"...
Ahhh, a comment from someone NOT competing in the free market...
BTW the way mach thousands of smaller, regional banks didn't go the stupid route...
I still haven't come up with a rational reason why YOU and your like minded ilk think the productive in this nation should have $9.7 Trillion stolen from them...
" .... a top Clinton regulator acknowledges that he and his colleagues a decade ago "beat back" regulatory efforts that could have prevented credit markets from becoming so precariously balanced they were “milliseconds” from disaster.
“That was a point in history when perhaps we should have anticipated something like where we are today, at least the possibility,” says Arthur Levitt, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1993 to 2001.
In 1998, an obscure federal agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, raised the prospect of regulating the burgeoning market in complex financial instruments, which then had a notional value of $28.7 trillion. Today the notional value is $531.2 trillion, according to the International Swaps and Derivatives Association.
The nation’s leading financial officials – Levitt, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, and his deputy Lawrence Summers – pummeled the proposal, saying it was dangerous to even discuss the idea.
Link
While President Carter in 1977 signed the Community Reinvestment Act, which pushed Fannie and Freddie to aggressively lend to minority communities, it was Clinton who supercharged the process. After entering office in 1993, he extensively rewrote Fannie's and Freddie's rules.
In so doing, he turned the two quasi-private, mortgage-funding firms into a semi-nationalized monopoly that dispensed cash to markets, made loans to large Democratic voting blocs and handed favors, jobs and money to political allies. This potent mix led inevitably to corruption and the Fannie-Freddie collapse.
Despite warnings of trouble at Fannie and Freddie, in 1994 Clinton unveiled his National Homeownership Strategy, which broadened the CRA in ways Congress never intended.
Clinton saw homeownership as a way to open the door for blacks and other minorities to enter the middle class.
Though well-intended, the problem was that Congress was about to change hands, from the Democrats to the Republicans. Rather than submit legislation that the GOP-led Congress was almost sure to reject, Clinton ordered Robert Rubin's Treasury Department to rewrite the rules in 1995.
The rewrite, as City Journal noted back in 2000, "made getting a satisfactory CRA rating harder." Banks were given strict new numerical quotas and measures for the level of "diversity" in their loan portfolios. Getting a good CRA rating was key for a bank that wanted to expand or merge with another.
Loans started being made on the basis of race, and often little else.
"Bank examiners would use federal home-loan data, broken down by neighborhood, income group and race, to rate banks on performance," wrote Howard Husock, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute.
But those rules weren't enough.
Clinton got the Department of Housing and Urban Development to double-team the issue. That would later prove disastrous.
Clinton's HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo, "made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis," the liberal Village Voice noted. Among those decisions were changes that let Fannie and Freddie get into subprime loan markets in a big way.
By 2007, Fannie and Freddie owned or guaranteed nearly half of the $12 trillion U.S. mortgage market -- a staggering exposure.
Worse still was the cronyism.
Fannie and Freddie became home to out-of-work politicians, mostly Clinton Democrats. An informal survey of their top officials shows a roughly 2-to-1 dominance of Democrats over Republicans.
Then there were the campaign donations. From 1989 to 2008, some 384 politicians got their tip jars filled by Fannie and Freddie.
Link
"Uncle Sam has welcomed our banks onto the plantation . . . There is some kind of irony that this is all happening under our first black president"
no. wrong. all the money given to banks up to right now, has come from GWB, a far right wing president and his investment bank crony, paulson.
as time goes on there will be plenty to blame obama for. and i'll be right there at the front of the line with criticism. in fact, i have a list already.
but don't try to shift the blame for this whole financial trainwreck bush and the republican congress wrought over the last 8 years.
its called denial. take some responsibility.
Ahhh, a comment from someone NOT competing in the free market...
Again I ask, what da hell are you talking about?? Isn't the whole purpose of the free market supposed to be that the stupid actions of one firm lead it to fail and a successful one to succeed? Did the horrible Vista operating system cause Apple to make a horrible operating system for its computers?
I still haven't gotten an explanation from you why the large PRIVATE investment banks did the same thing as Fannie and Freddie. And don't point out the regional banks. They are so small in comparison to the big banks they are essentially inconsequential.
I still haven't come up with a rational reason why YOU and your like minded ilk think the productive in this nation should have $9.7 Trillion stolen from them...
This is a LIE!! I am not even going to address that the $9.7 trillion is just a commitment and we have only put in $350 billion dollars in so far. But even if it was $9.7 trillion, no one is stealing anything from anyone. To understand why, you have to understand how government will raise the money for the bailouts and the stimulus. The answer is they will issue Treasury securities and people will, on their own accord, buy them. In fact, over the past 6 months the best performing asset class have been cash and TREASURIES!! This means that the only thing people are willing to invest more into is government debt. Not equities, not commodities, not bonds, but TREASURIES!
So, stop with the moralizing statements. No one is stealing anything from anyone. People are willfully lending money to the US government.
1: "BTW the way mach thousands of smaller, regional banks didn't go the stupid route..."
good point, 1.
thousands of sensible banks weren't 'forced' by the CRA and GSEs
to self destruct.
i think you just validated mach's viewpoint.
@Anon,
The rewrite, as City Journal noted back in 2000, "made getting a satisfactory CRA rating harder." Banks were given strict new numerical quotas and measures for the level of "diversity" in their loan portfolios. Getting a good CRA rating was key for a bank that wanted to expand or merge with another.
78% of subprime mortgages were written by independent lenders not subject to any CRA guidelines because the CRA only pertained to banks.
The CRA also said nothing about creating securities backed by mortgages or about leveraging up 30:1 into these securities.
The housing bubble also took place in several other countries such as Spain and Britain where needless to say there was no CRA.
Now go away back to the WSJ Op-Ed page.
I know its hard for you to accept, but sometimes people out of greed do stupid things. Herd like behavior commences and everyone does stupid things. Then the bubble pops and people panic and hoard cash. This is how recessions happen.
Like a vampire, you just can't kill the beast...socialism that is.
"These are just the natural herd-like irrational responses of humans during a bubble."
But we created that bubble by making money too cheap and then flooding it into housing by the risk subsidized Fannie and Freddie who continuously increased their leveraging on the pressure of Congress. If interest rates were set by a market and not manipulation by the Fed and Fannie and Freddie did not have the government guarentee that allowed them to borrow money below market rates and therfore over leverage, this would have never happened.
If the Fed and the GSE's didn't screw up the natural incentive forces in the market that normally balance return and risk and act as natural regulators, we wouldnt have this problem.
Fannie and Freddie who continuously increased their leveraging on the pressure of Congress
UGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Did you not read this whole thread??
Fannie and Freddie were just 2 of the many many firms who did this. How do you explain all of the private investment banks that have done the very same thing Fannie and Freddie have done? Or the independent lenders outside of any federal influence who also piled into the subprime game. Or the investors who bought into the mortgage backed securities.
How do you explain all those people?
One of the many fallacies of Austrian economics thinking is that most people are rational all the time. Yes, occasionally some people act irrationally but if only government did not prop them up, they would fail and the world keep on spinning.
But the theory never takes in the possibility that many people can act irrationally sometimes.
"78% of subprime mortgages were written by independent lenders not subject to any CRA guidelines because the CRA only pertained to banks."
You truly are clueless.
Myth: The CRA could not have led to financial Armageddon, because the overwhelming share of subprime mortgages came from lenders that were not banks and not regulated by the CRA.
Fact: Nearly 4 in 10 subprime loans between 2004 and 2007 were made by CRA-covered banks such as Washington Mutual and IndyMac. And that doesn't include loans made by subprime lenders owned by banks, which were in effect covered by the CRA.
Last year, when the bubble burst, bank subprime loans totaled $142 billion, dwarfing those made by lenders.
What's more, the biggest subprime lender, Countrywide, while not subject to the law, still came under federal pressure to make risky loans in minority communities.
Clinton created a separate department at HUD to police "fair lending" at Fannie and Freddie and also at lenders like Countrywide, which became Fannie's biggest client. In 1994, Countrywide became the nation's first mortgage lender to sign with HUD a "Declaration of Fair Lending Principles and Practices."
Link
Marks founded Boston-based NACA last decade to fulfill his warped sense of the American dream. He thinks owning a home is a right, not a goal. And he thinks every American should have a house — even those who can't pay for one.
Marks, who proudly calls himself a bank terrorist, has extorted billions of dollars from Citigroup and other large banks to subsidize uncreditworthy borrowers in the inner city, where he accused the banks of "redlining."
In 2004, for example, he threatened to blow up a merger deal between Bank of America and Fleet Bank by complaining to regulators that the banks weren't making enough loans to minorities under the Community Reinvestment Act. The banks, in turn, paid him off with $6 billion in mortgage commitments.
The nonprofit NACA uses such ransom money to fund its own mortgages to high-risk borrowers without requiring down payments or good credit. Marks considers such underwriting requirements "patronizing and racist."
He boasts that 99% of the mortgage applications taken through NACA are approved, giving new meaning to the term "easy lending." Listen to NACA's pitch:
"Come to NACA, and regardless of how bad your credit is, regardless of how little you have saved, we will work with you for as long as it takes, until you are prepared for a mortgage better than what the wealthiest, most connected borrowers get."
These are the standards NACA and ACORN and other bank terrorists foisted on the banking industry, using as their cudgel the Community Reinvestment Act, which mandates (under threat of severe penalty) that banks make inner-city loans to people who can't afford them. Now these groups have the nerve to demonize the banks for the inevitable foreclosures.
Link
Here's your boy Andrew Cuomo, Clinton's HUD Sec., bragging about suing banks
In January of last year, Mr. Frank also noted one reason he liked Fannie and Freddie so much: They were subject to his political direction. Contrasting Fan and Fred with private-sector mortgage financers, he noted, "I can ask Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to show forbearance" in a housing crisis. That is to say, because Fannie and Freddie are political creatures, Mr. Frank believed they would do his bidding.
And this is exactly what Mr. Frank attempted to prove when the housing market started to go south. He encouraged the companies to guarantee more "affordable" mortgages, thus abetting their disastrous plunge into subprime and Alt-A loans. He also pushed for, and got, an increase in the conforming-loan limits to allow Fan and Fred to securitize and guarantee larger mortgages. And he pressured regulators to ease up on their capital requirements -- which now means taxpayers will have to make up that capital shortfall.
But the biggest payoff for Mr. Frank is the "affordable housing" trust fund he managed to push through as one political price for the recent Fannie reform bill. This fund siphons off a portion of Fannie and Freddie profits -- as much as $500 million a year each -- to a fund that politicians can then disburse to their favorite special interests.
Link
Fact: Nearly 4 in 10 subprime loans between 2004 and 2007 were made by CRA-covered banks such as Washington Mutual and IndyMac. And that doesn't include loans made by subprime lenders owned by banks, which were in effect covered by the CRA.
NOT FACT. But lets just assume that it is. That still means that 60% of subprime loans were written by lenders outside the reach of the CRA. Indeed, none of the 300+ mortgage originators that imploded were depository banks covered by the CRA. (By the way, I haven't even discussed whats inside the CRA and how it says nothing at all about loosening lending standards, but I don't even need to point the actual substance of the law to prove that it wasn't at fault)
Also, 100% of mortgage-backed securities and CDOs were created without any CRA prodding. Also, the decision to leverage up to 30:1 into those mortgage backed securities was done without any CRA prodding.
Meanwhile, since Bear Stearns collapsed in March, there has been a veritable parade of bankers, mortgage originators, lenders, fund managers, and investment banks CEOs all testifying in Washington D.C. about the causes of the crisis. By some strange coincidence, not a single one blamed the CRA (Dick Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers was even asked about it). Not a one.
This is a an intellectually silly argument from other perspectives also. Why was there no credit/housing meltdown from 1977 to 2005? Why did 30 other countries, none of which have are covered by the CRA, have a remarkably similar housing boom and bust to the USA?
Oh and that story about a "bank terrorist". Again, I am not even going to question its veracity. What did he get from BoA? $6 billion? HA! A drop in the bucket.
Sadly, neither Perry nor the majority of the bloggers here know what Socialism is or isn't which makes it silly to read these posts.
Read the whole thing loser!
...that doesn't include loans made by subprime lenders owned by banks, which were in effect covered by the CRA.
Mortgage lenders like Countrywide signed "Declaration of Fair Lending Principles and Practices."
Where are the links to sources, other than yourself, that back up your assertions?
Time to troll on back to Michael Moores website.
Sadly, neither Perry nor the majority of the bloggers here know what Socialism is ...
No one is as enlightened as you, oh great one.
There is only one truth, nothing good ever began with the word "social".
@Anonymous comment from 2/09/2009 4:19 PM:
well at least 270M people knew what socialism and communism is, but they cannot tell you, because they were killed by the (socialist/communist) regime...
and please don't forget that Nazism is officially National _Socialism_ (if we change subject a little to "BUY AMERICAN")
Where are the links to sources, other than yourself, that back up your assertions?
Do you mean an IBD editorial unsourced with data or the Federal Reserve study number 1 or Federal Reserve study number 2 or the Federal Reserve Governor's speech or the Controller of the Currency?
The welfare state works in the short run as we loot the accumulated wealth. However, it will collapse when we run out of other peoples' money to spend on the benefits.
And borrowing is not cost free.
Treasury debt has a very real cost.
There is no free lunch.
Machiavelli999, I think you are going to find that no amount of logic or reasoning will work in discussions on this site. The Carpe Diem crowd is convinced that markets *always* work if the government stays out of the way, that taxes should approach 0% for everything, that the population of the bottom 4 or 5 income brackets are dregs and parasites on society since the top bracket pays half the tax burden, that CRA is completely and solely responsible for the current financial mess and forced banks to make all of their subprime loans, and...if you go back in CD history, you will find that 'we're not really in a recession', 'there is no real estate bubble', and yeah..the Dow would break 14,000 in 2008 according to Dr.Perry.
There's simply no point; reasonable discussion has no place here. Instead ad-hominem attacks are the rule. How do you think I got this moniker? CD-land operates in a parallel reality where John Galt is President and the only religion is praying at the feet of St.Rand.
John Galt is President...
I'll take John Galt over some half-wit community organizer any day.
Foul!
Poisoning the well and Strawman logical fallacies by Libtard.
Simply present a convincing argument and then we can agree to disagree.
It's not that hard when you stick to the original topic and facts; while avoiding arguing with a cartoon of each other.
bobble says: "its called denial. take some responsibility"...
Who should take responsibility bobble? Those who suffer from BDS because they supported the elected criminals that foisted this problem on the rest of us?
The Bush administration made many mistakes, but deregulation was not one of them.
Not only was there no major deregulation passed during the past eight years, but the Bush administration and a Republican Congress approved the most sweeping financial-market regulation in decades.
The bipartisan Sarbanes-Oxley Act was enacted in 2002 to prevent corporate fraud and restore investor confidence after the collapse of Enron and WorldCom. It failed to prevent the accounting fraud and influence-peddling scandals at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And even after those scandals were widely understood, regulators sent Fannie and Freddie back into the market to continue buying subprime loans, lending and borrowing with implied taxpayer backing.
Across the government, the Bush administration supported new regulations that added almost 1,000 pages a year to the Federal Register, nearly a record. If this is insufficient regulation, it's hard to imagine a scope that would be effective.
mach says: "Again I ask, what da hell are you talking about?? Isn't the whole purpose of the free market supposed to be that the stupid actions of one firm lead it to fail and a successful one to succeed?"...
Hmmm, obviously you need this site for a refresher...
"I still haven't gotten an explanation from you why the large PRIVATE investment banks did the same thing as Fannie and Freddie"...
You are purposely mistaken mach or your command of the English language is spotty at best... I already told you why these banks did it...
"NOT FACT. But lets just assume that it is. That still means that 60% of subprime loans were written by lenders outside the reach of the CRA"...
LOL! Fact: Nearly 4 in 10 subprime loans between 2004 and 2007 were made by CRA-covered banks such as Washington Mutual and IndyMac. And that doesn't include loans made by subprime lenders owned by banks, which were in effect covered by the CRA.
Last year, when the bubble burst, bank subprime loans totaled $142 billion, dwarfing those made by lenders.
What's more, the biggest subprime lender, Countrywide, while not subject to the law, still came under federal pressure to make risky loans in minority communities
...
There you go again mach, you refuse to get a grip on the fact that the banks that weren't covered by CRA had to compete against the ones that were...
What did you expect them to do?
some day the loony theories of the right wing will be fit neatly beside those of astrology, where they always belonged.
Post a Comment
<< Home