@georgeob1,
georgeob1 wrote:
Cycloptichorn wrote:
This is Bullshit, George.
You are forgetting that these companies are supposedly coming begging for public monies.
It's not a question of 'blame,' - though you are incorrect and the CEOs and investment bankers are primarily at fault. They made the decision to invest in what they knew were risky securities. It doesn't matter what the Government did. The CEOs bear a personal responsibility to make strong decisions regardless of the climate they operate in. They chose bad investments and their banks crashed b/c of it. There literally is nobody more to blame for their losses than themselves. What kind of Conservative are you, anyway? The non-personal responsibility kind?
Anyway, it's a question of 'what will the public pay for.' We will not pay for multi-million dollar salaries for failed banks and executives. Now, you may disagree with that, but public sentiment is decidedly against you and as it is our money being spent...
Attempting to blame the housing cycle (natural) for the poor investment choices of these CEOs is ridiculous.
Cycloptichorn
This is a rather confused though typically intemperate response.
Are you arguing that the "housing cycle(natural) " that was one of the triggers for the current economic contraction was entirely natural and therefore unpreventable?
Yes, the housing cycle of boom/bust is natural and unpreventable. This is hardly some sort of revolutionary thought on my part.
It is true that people of various levels took action to make this cycle worse than in the past, but that's immaterial to the fact that the leaders of these businesses are paid lots of money to be able to accurately chart and navigate the business environment that they find themselves in, regardless of the conditions.
It's like the captain of a ship blaming a storm for his bad decisions. I think we both know that this isn't a good excuse. The captain bears responsibility for his decisions no matter what.
Quote:Are you suggesting that Congressional legislation that mandated loans to previously unqualified individuals and that required banks to report compliance and penalized them for failures to meet mandated quotas had nothing to do with the corrosion of mortgage underwriting standards? Economic history is filled with stories of the bad results of unwise and foolish government actions, and this is one of them. It really does matter what government does in such cases.
Are you presuming that the cause of this crisis lies primarily with poor folks who couldn't afford their mortgages? I'm not sure the facts bear that out at all. In fact, many very high-value mortgages have gone under, from people who would have passed applications previous to any Congressional Legislation.
Quote:Are you arguing that the mass securitization of mortgage based securities initiated by Fannie Mae, expressly to attract more capital to an already overheated housing market, actions that were loudly encouraged by folks like Barney Frank and Maxine Waters, had nothing to do with the problem?
There is no doubt that we have seen the collapse of an economic bubble (hardly a "natural cycle") ; that such bubbles have happened before and are an infrequent but apparently hard-to-avoid feature of capitalism. Nonetheless all of them had causes and all could have been either prevented or mitigated by wiser actions beforehand. The credulous greed of the banks, the securities industry and their insurers all fed the illusion that the party could continue. Exactly the same is true of individuals who refinanced their homes to cash in on accumulated equity and bet on continued appreciation of their values; etc. However these were not the only cause.
This is your best paragraph, for it's the only one which actually addresses the question at hand.
Quote:The credulous greed of the banks, the securities industry and their insurers all fed the illusion that the party could continue.
Yes. And for this their leadership bears responsibility. It doesn't matter what other rules or laws or idiocy happened on anyone else's part. We aren't discussing what should be done to the homeowners or how laws should be changed to prevent this in the future, but instead how we should handle those companies who come crawling to the public for help when they made poor decisions.
Quote:
Public sentiment on this and related issues is rather divided, and, frankly speaking, you don't speak for the public, though it often appears that you entertain the rather curious illusion that you do.
Would you be willing to allow votes on just what to do with "our" tax money to be cast in proportion to the amount of that tax actually paid?
Is it divided? Only because Republicans want Obama to fail.
This is all per Gallup's latest poll on this subject -
As you can see, majorities of both Dems and Independents support the bailout bill. It is the hard right which does not. As Nimh pointed out above, 36 of your wacko senators voted yesterday to axe
all spending in the bill.
Luckily we kicked your asses this last cycle and are no longer beholden to a bunch of dead-enders who don't know **** about financial policy.
Republicans oppose this bill primarily because they know their success hinges on it's failure, and they can't do anything else. It's kind of sickening to watch, and I doubt that anyone outside of your rapidly-shrinking tent thinks that obstructionism and Hooverism is the way to go right now.
Cycloptichorn
