StrangeSox

Some cool SR-71 stories http://gizmodo.com/5950763/holy-fcklook-at...kbirds-together this one is about the plane breaking up at Mach 3 and one of the pilots surviving: http://www.barthworks.com/aviation/sr71breakup.htm

^he says on a message board dedicated to a sports team.

Look at those dumb, shallow dems watching cartoons! Why can't they watch an show ripe with insight and intelligence, like golf or The X Factor?!

QUOTE (bmags @ Oct 12, 2012 -> 03:32 PM) Over all, the Democratic list contained a lot of animated comedies — “The Cleveland Show,” “Family Guy,” “American Dad” — as well as lightly viewed but critically acclaimed sitcoms like “30 Rock” and “Community.” The favorite late-night show for Republicans was Jay Leno’s “Tonight” show. That is embarrassing. oh hey you buried the lead here:

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 12, 2012 -> 03:24 PM) And no one is doing that. Stop embellishing the arguments that have been made in this thread. Even if we assume that F&F were the prime buyers of s***ty MBS's that caused the bubble (they weren't), they still did not force anyone to create and sell them for substantial profit. The blame still does not lie with them.

some might say...that ur arguments are cartoonish

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 12, 2012 -> 03:22 PM) So if you set up a system that has a massive hole in it, the people who set up the system aren't at fault? The people who actively exploit such a system for their own personal profit, and quite a handsome profit at that, are at fault. Investment banks and mortgage companies weren't actors without agency here.

that is a criticism of TBTF, not F&F. Nor does it remove culpability from private-sector actors.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 12, 2012 -> 02:59 PM) So let's put em' to work. 70% of Detroit should be torn down and returned to nature. Start there! I am completely on-board with a massive jobs program structured around infrastructure that needs to be built and rebuilt anyway.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Oct 12, 2012 -> 02:55 PM) Cannot have full employment or inflation would would go beyond what the alarmists call hyper inflation. Unemployment, sadly, is a necessary evil of capitalism. "Full" employment is defined as something like ~4% unemployment rates. There's always people looking for jobs, but not chronically and in large groups.

cartoons are awesome. do you watch Archer? you should watch Archer.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 12, 2012 -> 02:44 PM) At peak efficiency there are millions out of work. And we're paying those people to be unemployed anyway. It's not like people are dying in the streets. At full employment, yes, at any given time, millions are out of work. We are nowhere near peak employment, and we have millions of chronically unemployed people who have been suffering for years. At the very least, it's a tragic waste of human potential.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 12, 2012 -> 01:51 PM) 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 say hi!

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 12, 2012 -> 02:26 PM) Emergencies - war, national tragedies, etc. We're in a s***ty spot, but not an emergency, and both sides think they have the best solution to get us out of it so they're going to stick to that. Millions of unemployed americans seems like a national emergency to me!

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 12, 2012 -> 02:25 PM) Weren't you the one just saying that subprime wasn't the problem? You just showed me that freddie and fannie were doing the guarantees for the group you are saying was at fault. I was saying that F&F weren't the problem with subprime mortgages. Where did you get the idea that I was saying subprimes (and all of the associated financial instruments) weren't the problem? Of course they were, but the leaders on that market were private institutions, not F&F. edit: I think maybe I misread what you said here, but you misread the CBO quote. That quote explicitly says that private-label lenders were the primary players in the non-conforming market that GSE's can't participate in, such as most of sub-prime.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 12, 2012 -> 02:22 PM) You'll also note that their total amounts of guarantees never went down. In fact it went up 40-50%, even though their market share went down something like 5 points, which means they were still doing big business, even though others thought the market was infinitely profitable, again showing that these companies were wide open for business, despite their statements about how they didn't know what they were doing. But the place where the bubble actually was, the subprime market, was not driven by F&F. They were neither the primary originators nor the major secondary market buyers. F&F were followers in the sub-prime market, not leaders.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 12, 2012 -> 01:49 PM) Taking the word of institutions who literally have a vested interest in being able to spin the blame to someone else isn't really substantive proof of anything. At the end of the day, Freddie and Fannie were their as the backstop to this whole s*** show. It is immaterial who the primary seller of the original mortgage was. They all knew at the end of the day, rich Uncle Sam was there to back them up if no one else would. The fact that the whole world knew the feds were backing this paper garbage is even admitted by the CBO. They aren't about to take the next logical step and assign blame for setting up a system like this. Page 30 shows they guaranteed a majority of the mortgages out there, long before this crisis happened. You can also take a peak at the chart on Page 31 to show you that their guarantees were by far the largest share of the marketplace. They also averaged about a 40% share of all mortgage debt in this country, far larger than any other entity out there, even if you take "private banks" as a category all to themselves, instead of being a sum of singular entities like they are in reality. http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbo...nniefreddie.pdf Report page 54 (pdf page 74)

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 12, 2012 -> 01:49 PM) Taking the word of institutions who literally have a vested interest in being able to spin the blame to someone else isn't really substantive proof of anything. But you'll quote the CBO at me later in this post? okay... If you want to make an argument against implicit government guarantees of T-B-T-F for the big banks, that's one thing. That is separate from blaming F&F for the inflated sub-prime and MBS markets, let alone all the CDS's that sunk AIG and others. "All loans" and subprime loans are not the same thing. You are conflating categories. You'll also notice Fannie and Freddie's total share of the secondary market declining starting in 2002, which is when the bubble really started to inflate.

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-t...economic-crisis This puts things about as clearly as they possibly could be. Moody's was concerned that Freddie (the same applied to Fannie) was losing market share to the private issuers because they were not big actors in "adjustable-rate loans and other hybrid products [i.e. junk]." However, they were cheered by the fact that Freddie was moving in this direction. In other words, the private issuers were very clearly the big actors and Fannie and Freddie were jumping in as a business decision to preserve market share. In other words, it was profit, not government compassion that drove this bubble. Just to be clear, Fannie and Freddie were horrible actors in this story. I criticized them throughout this period and raised the possibility of these two mortgage giants being sunk by the bubble as early as 2002. Housing is all they do, how could they have totally missed the largest housing bubble in the history of the world?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 12, 2012 -> 01:35 PM) Which is funny, because what did Obama do? Put the auto companies through bankruptcy. Romney's plan would have resulted in liquidation, not a managed restructuring bankruptcy. For colloquial use, "bankruptcy" is understood as having GM end as a company.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 12, 2012 -> 01:33 PM) Sometimes I wish you would read instead of changing what I say to fit your left wing talking points to go along with some insults and conjecture. Having someone out there who would purchase any loan supported and encouraged risky activity by ensuring that no matter how bad a loan was, it could be sold to fannie and freddie. There was literally no risk in the system. It was an incredibly stupid and short sighted system set up, and it was proved out with all of the stories about freddie and fannie, despite being the largest guarantee of mortgages in the country, didn't understand what the hell they were purchasing. If there would have been a traditional system that forced banks to be responsible for their own mortgages there wouldn't have been nearly the approach to risk. Instead the thought was that by giving them a place to sell the mortgages they had already financed, it would free up capital to finance more mortgages, which pushed the mortgage market past where its equilibrium should have sat. This caused a historic run in home prices, that shouldn't have been supported by reality. Pretty much it turned into a pyramid scheme that collapsed. Fannie and Freddie were not the dominant players in the market. Some of the MBS's could be sold to F&F, but most were not. They were part of the problem, but not the problem and not a primary cause. I know, you reject any report or finding that doesn't agree with you out-of-hand. It is lol-worthy. Can you substantiate your assertions in this post with actual data or reports or anything besides more assertions?

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 12, 2012 -> 01:23 PM) I don't think anyone said it caused it, but it played a major role in it. If you know you're going to be backed by Freddie/Fannie, it's easy to make the decision to give out a loan you know has a 90% chance of defaulting. Blame for sure goes to the private lenders, but Republicans saw this issue in 2006 and tried to increase the lending standards but congressional dems blocked them. Would it have prevented or stopped everything? No. Would it have made the financial impact a little smaller? Yes. 2006 was already too late. The bubble had peaked and things were unwinding from there. Fannie and Freddie did not play a major role. The investigation into the crisis specifically said this. Were they engaged in a bad business model? Absolutely. Did they need serious reform? Sure. But they're not the whipping boy conservatives make them out to be to excuse a historic market failure.

QUOTE (Cknolls @ Oct 12, 2012 -> 01:22 PM) Did Biden reference the Op-Ed? And did he actually read it? Because no where did Romney say let Detroit go Bankrupt. He pretended that private capital was available at the time instead. His plan would have been to let Detroit go bankrupt. But that doesn't make Ryan's segue into that story about Mitt any less clumsy.

from the report itself: