It's been awhile my loyal readers!
I haven't posted in about a week. I was busy following the economic news, and the fallout from the Palin/Biden debate. A few thoughts.
1. I thought the Palin/Biden debate was a draw. Biden did what he had to, appearing knowledgeable throughout the debate, and pinning everything on Bush. Palin outperformed expectations, and did a decent job of pointing out Biden's Bush Derangement Syndrome. She dropped the old Reagan line "There you go again". It worked well, but couldn't they have written something new for her rather than recycling Reagan?
2. I think Palin/Biden being a draw favors Obama, since he's up by an average of 6 points in the RCP average.
3. Sarah Palin should start trying to pin the community reinvestment act, and this economic downturn on Obama. She's the perfect messenger, and bringing up his past history of race baiting lawsuits could trigger a swing in the polls. She could simply say: "the democrats wanted to help poor people get houses, and now their sticking the middle class with the bill from the defaults."
4. On the economy, it is somewhat disheartening to watch the banker bailout bill get passed when the people were largely against it.
5. It's even more annoying to see people blame 'capitalism' for this problem, when the facts show that government manipulation and race baiting leftists led to this crisis.
6. The action in the market (Everything heading down, including gold while the dollar is heading up) is indicating deflation.
If you haven't read my earlier posts on the CRA, watch this movie as it explains the situation pretty well:
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10 comments:
raddy summed up the crisis pretty well I think. http://www.radikalnoise.com/
And I still think it's rather idiotic to oppose a cast that's going to save us all from a wound poison stack on our economy, even if it takes a bit of mana.
I probably have understood this and talked about it long before you even had a clue what was going on.
To call me idiotic because you simply disagree shows what a worthless moron you are. I suggest you slit your wrists, people like you are what is wrong with this country.
Oh, and I read radikal's blog, and no he doesn't get it, he thinks "Home Flippers" caused this, which is pretty much a fucking joke, just like you.
Vir have my babies
Reading comprehension. You don't have it.
Let me get this straight. Investment banks and insurance companies run by centimillionaires blow up, and it's the fault of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and poor minorities?
These arguments are generally made by people who read the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and ignore the rest of the paper—economic know-nothings whose opinions are informed mostly by ideology and, occasionally, by prejudice. Let's be honest. Fannie and Freddie, which didn't make subprime loans but did buy subprime loans made by others, were part of the problem. Poor Congressional oversight was part of the problem. Banks that sought to meet CRA requirements by indiscriminately doling out loans to minorities may have been part of the problem. But none of these issues is the cause of the problem. Not by a long shot. From the beginning, subprime has been a symptom, not a cause. And the notion that the Community Reinvestment Act is somehow responsible for poor lending decisions is absurd.
Here's why.
The Community Reinvestment Act applies to depository banks. But many of the institutions that spurred the massive growth of the subprime market weren't regulated banks. They were outfits such as Argent and American Home Mortgage, which were generally not regulated by the Federal Reserve or other entities that monitored compliance with CRA. These institutions worked hand in glove with Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, entities to which the CRA likewise didn't apply. There's much more. As Barry Ritholtz notes in this fine rant, the CRA didn't force mortgage companies to offer loans for no money down, or to throw underwriting standards out the window, or to encourage mortgage brokers to aggressively seek out new markets. Nor did the CRA force the credit-rating agencies to slap high-grade ratings on packages of subprime debt.
Second, many of the biggest flameouts in real estate have had nothing to do with subprime lending. WCI Communities, builder of highly amenitized condos in Florida (no subprime purchasers welcome there), filed for bankruptcy in August. Very few of the tens of thousands of now-surplus condominiums in Miami were conceived to be marketed to subprime borrowers, or minorities—unless you count rich Venezuelans and Colombians as minorities. The multiyear plague that has been documented in brilliant detail at IrvineHousingBlog is playing out in one of the least-subprime housing markets in the nation.
Third, lending money to poor people and minorities isn't inherently risky. There's plenty of evidence that in fact it's not that risky at all. That's what we've learned from several decades of microlending programs, at home and abroad, with their very high repayment rates. And as the New York Times recently reported, Nehemiah Homes, a long-running initiative to build homes and sell them to the working poor in subprime areas of New York's outer boroughs, has a repayment rate that lenders in Greenwich, Conn., would envy. In 27 years, there have been fewer than 10 defaults on the project's 3,900 homes. That's a rate of 0.25 percent.
I've been too busy keeping up with the economic stuff, but just to give you a short reply, you're full of shit, and the numbers you're quoting are from an impartial study done by...CLINTON'S SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY.
Yeah, low income people aren't risky, and Clinton telling banks they had to accept welfare as a 'revenue stream' when someone applies for a loan had NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.
Are you really so retarded that you believe your own bullshit?
-Vir
All of you are wrong.
The economy is fucked because of vaginas.
you could say this economic crisis was created by deregulating conservatives letting banks run wild with subprime loans...but you'd never admit that republicans have done anything wrong
Hi vir! This is Opet.
Just thought I would say that I think the CRA was not the problem in itself, as banks have traditionally not dealt with bad loans in this fashion. The lurking culprit was the opacity of the derivatives market - if there is very little information available in a market, it will behave very oddly. And this is an example of such a piece of behaviour :<
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