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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 "th
by 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 agoPretending 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 agoWasn'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.
- logjam 18y agoYou've got to be kidding. Please explain how these "models" informed the ethics of what remains basically a shell game. What you mean to say is the "models" provided cover...rationalization for wild speculation and accounting tricks with other people's money, sans almost any equity. "Models" have nothing to do with regulation, or with the lack of ethics that has brought us to this point, other than the curious coincidence that these "models" supported and aligned so well with unbridled greed.
- orib 18y agoWhat if people honestly believed that they were actually going to make money if they shuffled things around in the way that they did? What if they thought that the risks from the bad loans were acceptable because of bad simplifications in their models? What if this is explainable by stupidity and not malice? People are stupid, but they're not (usually) deliberately self-destructive.