StrangeSox

I'd give pretty good odds on some gop state rep thinking this is real and trying to copy it.

This whole "mandatory invasive medical procedure before an abortion to shame and humiliate women" in Virginia keeps getting more and more disgusting. http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared...ginia_wants.php

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Feb 19, 2012 -> 03:10 PM) "In Time" was f***ing terrible. We shut that trash off. yeah, there was some awful writting and acting

QUOTE (lostfan @ Feb 21, 2012 -> 01:49 AM) Lol. My cats? Girls named them, don't blame me for that, Anyway any way you want to look at it the banking corruption started in the early 80s, Reagan couldn't stand Volcker so he put in Greenspan... That's when the ball got rolling. Everything traces back to this era. The idea that corruption in finance started with Obama is kind of hilarious, it took decades. at least people went to jail for the s&l stuff

Sox badger your posts violate my constitutional rights.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Feb 19, 2012 -> 03:36 PM) That pretty much sounds like exactly the claim the Economist apologized for. If you read the next sentence of the original article, they say "many observers think this was unlikely."

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Feb 19, 2012 -> 03:21 PM) I'd say a lot of people agreed with that position at the time. A number of them have recanted, even apologized for it. There could have been slight tweaks to how the final deal went down that might have been more fair in one way or the other, but the principle of doing the bailout and having it work is the right one. From what I recall and have recently re-read, there were several positions. That they didn't deserve the money and would fail anyway. That a government run bailout was best. That a private bailout utilizing government-backed loans was best. What I haven't really seen are contemporaneous claims that gm would be perfectly fine with zero government intervention and that of course tens of billions in private equity are available, which is ss's and kap's claim. Quick clarification: "this idea" referred to the above, not the differences between a bank and gm.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 19, 2012 -> 01:33 PM) It is also worth pointing out again that the comparison between banks and auto is a complete fail, as was explained in detail, and ignored as usual. Why did barely anyone, including conservatives, agree with this position at the time? Why do many people, including conservatives, still think that this idea of yours is a "fantasy?"

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Feb 19, 2012 -> 10:02 AM) Just give up, because they don't want to understand how a market really works. They just don't. It's easier to say that the government had to step in to defend the point that the government now has to step in on everything because it's the only mechanism that works to save the world of all of the fallacies of an evil capital market. It was a payoff, everyone knows it except those who want to scream there was no money. And yes, George W. Bush did it. And it was wrong. I'm trying to understand by reading things written by tenured economists at prominent schools but I'm bring told it is just propaganda and that a gm liquidation was impossible because the market finds a way. Help me reconcile these things! "everyone" knew that private capital was available, but in public damn near everyone was calling for government intervention in some form. I'm confused.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 19, 2012 -> 09:50 AM) Ford had a credit line that didn't get canceled. You have an automotive company getting money during the crisis. If things were as bad as being stated, they sure wouldn't have kept it under the guise that repayment would have come at some later date if they would have collapsed. If things were that bad, that wouldn't have been good enough, because the bank could very well have collapsed in terms of capital ratios by the time they were to have received those loan repayments from the government. Were Ford and gm's situations then really analogous? Ford had a government-guaranteed credit line but want facing immediate bankruptcy and $30b in liabilities. If this is true, why aren't there any contemporaneous articles arguing that private capital is available? Why did Romney himself argue for government-backed loans? Was every single piece calling for government intervention really "propaganda" as you claimed, even if it was coming from conservative economists and politicians?

QUOTE (BigSqwert @ Feb 18, 2012 -> 11:46 AM) Portlandia's 2nd season has been a bit of a disappointment. I watched an episode and a half of season 1 and have zero desire to see any more.

Wow, strong argument!

The FBI has protected us from another one of its own bombing plots! http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/201...9157983635.html

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 18, 2012 -> 08:03 AM) Good god. After reading this circle jerk last night, I am glad I went to HS games for last night. MJ was the most dominant player I have ever seen, but time does not freeze and the game changes. If you guys want to keep on slapping each other on the backs over the 90's like they are the only period of NBA basketball, feel free. Wade>>>>Jordan!

The kicker is that this whole thing that started this, Romney's original op. ed., still called for government interference in the form of loan guarantees. So even he didn't seem to believe that a government-free structured, orderly bankruptcy was possible.

Why did the two economists from UofC strongly disagree with your assertions that private capital was available?

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Feb 17, 2012 -> 07:26 PM) He does. But he loves their checkbooks. He shows his hate in the form of showering them with money. I'll take some of that hate.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Feb 17, 2012 -> 11:56 AM) Why does it have to be Michael Bay? :sad:

Not that there was much doubt before, but Heritage has admitted that it strives not to accurate, objective analysis but to ideological conformity. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012...r-business.html

It's board policy, period. Stop arguing about it.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 17, 2012 -> 02:48 PM) Honestly, pretty much everything except dunks and probably defense. QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Feb 17, 2012 -> 02:49 PM) You are on drugs. QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Feb 16, 2012 -> 07:25 PM) You are delusional.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 17, 2012 -> 03:13 PM) This whole "discussion" started with people being quoted on exactly this topic. But you hand-waved them away, narrowing the standards to people you approved of. When I did the same thing using the same general non-standard, you had a problem with it. Go figure. This is an interesting perspective on the events. It started with a TPM link talking about Romney's editorial. I will openly state that I do not consider Romney to be a reliable, impartial commentator on this issue. He's running a political campaign against Obama and is using this as a political issue. I do not put any weight into his unsupported assertions that private capital was available. You immediately started with the hyperbole, stating that anything saying that private capital wasn't available is "propaganda." You follow this up with unsupported assertions that everything would have been just fine without government intervention and that private capital would have stepped in. Noticeably absent is any support for this claim. Balta responds by pointing out that the credit markets weren't exactly in good shape post-Lehman. Your response is to continue to claim that private capital was available and any claims to the contrary were propaganda. In your first two posts, you've entirely dismissed any possible contrary evidence to your ideologically driven belief.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 16, 2012 -> 10:06 AM) There would have been a source of funding. The idea there wouldn't have is just propaganda. Is this "propaganda" from The Economist? What makes it propaganda instead of an honest evaluation of the realities of the credit markets in early 2009?

I've actually yet to see you cite anyone. I've looked around myself a little, which is actually how I found that UofC paper. But, please, any time you feel like addressing the majority of my posts instead of picking one line and ignoring the rest...

You have not. You still aren't, as you didn't address a word of that post. Your first post was to hand-wave away anything stating that funding wasn't available as propaganda. You haven't done anything to actually address the substance of what Balta and I have posted aside from plainly asserting that funding would have been available. You haven't provided a single source to back up what you've been saying. Unsupported assertions deserve to be dismissed out of hand, but they've been dismissed with cites to others in the industry, to economists, to people in finance. But you refuse to address any of that, instead focusing on one line in a given post, saying "I've addressed that" and then ignoring everything else. You don't have to "explain every single opinion that agrees with [me]," but, if you're going to discount Ford lobbying for GM bailouts, you need to present a logical case. If you're going to dismiss Autonation saying you're engaged in a fantasy, you need to present a logical argument. Instead, you've merely claimed that they're defending "auto industry" bailouts, as if they're all part of a monolithic entity. If they weren't legitimately concerned that GM would fall apart and destroy the auto industry with it without the baliout, why wouldn't Ford be more than happy to let a competitor fail? What interest does Autonation's CEO have in claiming that private equity wasn't available in 2009 right now?