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I like Obama and I'm most likely voting for him, but he was on the team (w/ the Clintons) that's partly to blame for this big mess. http://www.youtube.com/watc

by pxlpshr 18y ago

I like Obama and I'm most likely voting for him, but he was on the team (w/ the Clintons) that's partly to blame for this big mess. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivmL-lXNy64 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivmL-lXNy64 NINJA loans made me cry. No income, no job or assets = APPROVED!

jobeirne 18y ago
Why would you still vote for the guy assuming you understand he had a hand in this current mess? That doesn't make any sense to me.
- SwellJoe 18y ago
  Because the other option also had a hand in this mess? Damned if you do, Palined if you don't.
- DougBTX 18y ago
  Not everything is black and white, he could still like him for other reasons, or even just like him more than the other guy.
- pxlpshr 18y ago
  Because I believe people learn from their mistakes...
gnaritas 18y ago
Bad loans did not create the mess, they are a symptom of the mess. Excess credit caused by some serious deregulation is what created the mess. Once the excess credit was available, banks wanted to leverage it and that started bad loan crap because they can't profit of their newly available leverage if they don't loan it to someone. The dems are not to blame here, mostly the republicans are. The housing market was just a convenient place to dump all the excess credit, had that not been doable the investment banks would have just found some other sector to lend to, problem would still have occurred.
- hugh 18y ago
  I don't think it makes sense to talk about "deregulation" as the problem. The problem is mis-regulation. No doubt some aspects of banking were over-regulated and others were under-regulated, but the real problem is that the regulations which were in place were the wrong ones. The danger in talking about "deregulation" as the problem is that it makes it sound as if we can solve it for the future just by putting more regulations in place. Unless the new regulations are exactly the right ones, it'll only create new problems.
  - gnaritas 18y ago
    Changing the rule that held banks to a 15:1 leverage and allowed to them to loan out at up to 40:1 in some cases can absolutely be called deregulation. Fractional reserve lending is already a seriously fucked up concept as is, let alone at such ridiculous ratios. 3 of the 5 companies that were allowed to do this have now sunk, the proof is in the pudding.
    - Prrometheus 18y ago
      The 15:1 leverage rule on investment banks was written in a way so as to be unenforceable. The change to 40:1 was part of a (recent) compromise that also made it enforceable. Since the previous standard in practice did not exist, the rules became stricter, not looser. ACTUAL banks, the kind that take deposits and are regulated by the FDIC, have always been under strict capital adequacy rules and regulations, and can be taken over by the FDIC if they let their capital ratios fall below a certain threshold (this is the regime that the big investment banks have been put under by becoming bank holding companies or being bought by them). It irks me when people so self-righteously blame "deregulation" for the crisis when they so obviously don't have a shred of knowledge about what they are talking about.
      - gnaritas 18y ago
        > The 15:1 leverage rule on investment banks was written in a way so as to be unenforceable. Citation please. And excuse me, but I do believe that even knowing about the 15:1 to 40:1 change, does qualify as a shred of knowledge.
logjam 18y ago
Uh, no. "Clinton did it" ain't gonna cut it (right wingers are even trying desperately to blame CARTER...whose presidency ended almost thirty years ago) for "the mess". This is merely political spin that nobody is seriously buying. The game's up. The excesses absolutely rampant in an unregulated, financial industry (and in business in general) is the cause of almost all of this mess. Using unsecured real estate paper en masse in a shell game to leverage extremely unethical, naked derivatves bets was a wonderful game while it worked, and banks and the slimy MBAs who run them lived high for a while, then parachuted out rich. Masters of the universe, I think they called themselves, right? Republicans have had eight years, six of those with both the presidency and more of those years prior to 2000 in control of the legislature It was profitable to them and theirs to deregulate, and they did it with a vengeance. Now many of the fundamental flaws of unregulated capitalism return to roost for the thousandth time. Capitalism doesn't really allow for the simple truths that we are all interconnected, what harms you almost always comes back to harm me, and bad decisions eventually harm all of us. And here we are, watching credit dry up and the DOW plummet again on a Friday afternoon, looking downstream at a horrible impact on an entire generation of young people, brought about by the greed of a few. Cooperation, codified via sensible regulation, is always a higher good than competition.
- astine 18y ago
  Pretending that the current administration and bankers are not responsible for the current problem would be wrong. But is true that the Clinton administration put into place many of the laws which gave banks the incentive give out the bad loans in the first place, and so also share a good amount of responsibility.
- DanielBMarkham 18y ago
  Wasn't there an article posted on HN in the last two weeks about how these things worked from inside the IT part of the industry? The computer models were perfectly fine at managing the complexity of the fractional mortgage instruments but in the heat of trading nobody updated the splits and the models were managed by institutions who had a conflict of interest. That doesn't sound like a deregulation problem to me, it sounds like a mis-configured regulatory system.

by pxlpshr 18y ago

jobeirne 18y ago

Why would you still vote for the guy assuming you understand he had a hand in this current mess? That doesn't make any sense to me.

SwellJoe 18y ago
Because the other option also had a hand in this mess? Damned if you do, Palined if you don't.
DougBTX 18y ago
Not everything is black and white, he could still like him for other reasons, or even just like him more than the other guy.
pxlpshr 18y ago
Because I believe people learn from their mistakes...

gnaritas 18y ago

Bad loans did not create the mess, they are a symptom of the mess. Excess credit caused by some serious deregulation is what created the mess. Once the excess credit was available, banks wanted to leverage it and that started bad loan crap because they can't profit of their newly available leverage if they don't loan it to someone. The dems are not to blame here, mostly the republicans are. The housing market was just a convenient place to dump all the excess credit, had that not been doable the investment banks would have just found some other sector to lend to, problem would still have occurred.

hugh 18y ago
I don't think it makes sense to talk about "deregulation" as the problem. The problem is mis-regulation. No doubt some aspects of banking were over-regulated and others were under-regulated, but the real problem is that the regulations which were in place were the wrong ones. The danger in talking about "deregulation" as the problem is that it makes it sound as if we can solve it for the future just by putting more regulations in place. Unless the new regulations are exactly the right ones, it'll only create new problems.
- gnaritas 18y ago
  Changing the rule that held banks to a 15:1 leverage and allowed to them to loan out at up to 40:1 in some cases can absolutely be called deregulation. Fractional reserve lending is already a seriously fucked up concept as is, let alone at such ridiculous ratios. 3 of the 5 companies that were allowed to do this have now sunk, the proof is in the pudding.
  - Prrometheus 18y ago
    The 15:1 leverage rule on investment banks was written in a way so as to be unenforceable. The change to 40:1 was part of a (recent) compromise that also made it enforceable. Since the previous standard in practice did not exist, the rules became stricter, not looser. ACTUAL banks, the kind that take deposits and are regulated by the FDIC, have always been under strict capital adequacy rules and regulations, and can be taken over by the FDIC if they let their capital ratios fall below a certain threshold (this is the regime that the big investment banks have been put under by becoming bank holding companies or being bought by them). It irks me when people so self-righteously blame "deregulation" for the crisis when they so obviously don't have a shred of knowledge about what they are talking about.
    - gnaritas 18y ago
      > The 15:1 leverage rule on investment banks was written in a way so as to be unenforceable. Citation please. And excuse me, but I do believe that even knowing about the 15:1 to 40:1 change, does qualify as a shred of knowledge.

logjam 18y ago

Uh, no. "Clinton did it" ain't gonna cut it (right wingers are even trying desperately to blame CARTER...whose presidency ended almost thirty years ago) for "the mess". This is merely political spin that nobody is seriously buying. The game's up. The excesses absolutely rampant in an unregulated, financial industry (and in business in general) is the cause of almost all of this mess. Using unsecured real estate paper en masse in a shell game to leverage extremely unethical, naked derivatves bets was a wonderful game while it worked, and banks and the slimy MBAs who run them lived high for a while, then parachuted out rich. Masters of the universe, I think they called themselves, right? Republicans have had eight years, six of those with both the presidency and more of those years prior to 2000 in control of the legislature It was profitable to them and theirs to deregulate, and they did it with a vengeance. Now many of the fundamental flaws of unregulated capitalism return to roost for the thousandth time. Capitalism doesn't really allow for the simple truths that we are all interconnected, what harms you almost always comes back to harm me, and bad decisions eventually harm all of us. And here we are, watching credit dry up and the DOW plummet again on a Friday afternoon, looking downstream at a horrible impact on an entire generation of young people, brought about by the greed of a few. Cooperation, codified via sensible regulation, is always a higher good than competition.

astine 18y ago
Pretending that the current administration and bankers are not responsible for the current problem would be wrong. But is true that the Clinton administration put into place many of the laws which gave banks the incentive give out the bad loans in the first place, and so also share a good amount of responsibility.
DanielBMarkham 18y ago
Wasn't there an article posted on HN in the last two weeks about how these things worked from inside the IT part of the industry? The computer models were perfectly fine at managing the complexity of the fractional mortgage instruments but in the heat of trading nobody updated the splits and the models were managed by institutions who had a conflict of interest. That doesn't sound like a deregulation problem to me, it sounds like a mis-configured regulatory system.