4 ms·

The financial crisis was probably extremely dire.

by jaibot 13y ago

moocowduckquack 13y ago
I don't see how it is substantially improved by instituting a tax backed financial insurance policy for gambling losses.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  You mean the moral ideological alternative would have been better even if it caused the economy to implode? This is why I'll never vote libertarian.
  - AutoCorrect 13y ago
    So that is the price of your soul? Noted.
    - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
      Yes, I'm much more for avoiding economic collapse than ideological purity. I like not starving to death, while the tea partying libercrazians would destroy the whole nation just to see out their distorted principles.
      - fredgrott 13y ago
        the punch line is thee was no threat to economic collapse.. The FEd had full powers to ask that any bail out remove current bank leadership from power due to the threat of full Gov receivership of those banks by Fed..we were sold the idea of giving a free get out of jail card to banks based on lies
  - mgkimsal 13y ago
    it was already imploding some. We'll never know how much more worse it could have been, but... Bear Stearns had already closed and the world didn't collapse. If a couple investment banks had closed, would everything have stopped? The big boys would have found a way to keep going pretty quickly. As it stands, the 'fix' still ended up keeping most previously normally available capital for average people on hold for years, grinding many regions to a virtual standstill with respect to housing/travel/construction/etc. So... even with the massive bailout, the majority of average people got hit pretty hard, and many are still recovering as their regions try to fight back from the economic collapse, while we read about bankers bitching that their bonuses were only in the single digit millions for so many years.
  - moocowduckquack 13y ago
    Eh? There are a lot more choices available than that. And is not about moral ideology, it is pragmatic to take the view that declaring organisations as too big to fail, bailing them and then letting them carry on as before is pretty stupid. That's not running an economy, that's making excuses for an abusive relationship.
- tootie 13y ago
  It doesn't. A bailout was 100% necessary, but it needn't have been as generous as it was. Especially considering it severely curtailed Congress's appetite for heavier demand-side stimulus in the aftermath.
  - puppetmaster3 13y ago
    Sorry tootie, it was not necessary. More, it was not even wanted.
jessaustin 13y ago
That's an opinion you share with all investors who were made whole by the heavy-handed official response to the "crisis". The rest of us, not so much.
- notdrunkatall 13y ago
  That's because the rest of you don't understand what an all-out financial collapse would mean for you because as a result of the FED's actions, it didn't happen.
  - atmosx 13y ago
    What? What would it mean? Doesn't man nothing. It's just an excuse to hand over millions for free. The basic Liberal theory says that when a big player goes down, it's good for the market, because many smaller players will fill that gap. What is happening the last years throughout US and Europe is that when a bank goes down, the state turns communist and we share the losses. If the bank has huge earning, it's capitalism, so they can keep it because hey they worth it!. Joseph Stiglitz has an entire book on the subject. As Krugman said - and the economist also... go figure! - Obama should have put at least some rules to Wall Street giants when they were on their knees, not after he made them twice as big. Blah, I am not sure if the Congress or Obama CAN actually do anything to regulate WS giants at all.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    Yes. Idahoans also didn't understand why they should pay me mucho dinero to continue protecting Idaho from dragons. "But we don't have dragons in Idaho", they'd say. To which of course I replied: "See how effective I have been?". Plus, besides the disregard for the burden-of-proof in your argument, wasn't the economic crisis caused "as a result of the FED's actions" in the first place (deregulation etc)?
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      > Plus, besides the disregard for the burden-of-proof in your argument, wasn't the economic crisis caused "as a result of the FED's actions" in the first place (deregulation etc)? Deregulation was Congressional action, not action of the Federal Reserve (usually referred to by the shortened form, "the Fed").

The financial crisis was probably extremely dire.

by jaibot 13y ago

The financial crisis was probably extremely dire.

I don't see how it is substantially improved by instituting a tax backed financial insurance policy for gambling losses.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago
You mean the moral ideological alternative would have been better even if it caused the economy to implode? This is why I'll never vote libertarian.
- AutoCorrect 13y ago
  So that is the price of your soul? Noted.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    Yes, I'm much more for avoiding economic collapse than ideological purity. I like not starving to death, while the tea partying libercrazians would destroy the whole nation just to see out their distorted principles.
    - fredgrott 13y ago
      the punch line is thee was no threat to economic collapse.. The FEd had full powers to ask that any bail out remove current bank leadership from power due to the threat of full Gov receivership of those banks by Fed..we were sold the idea of giving a free get out of jail card to banks based on lies
- mgkimsal 13y ago
  it was already imploding some. We'll never know how much more worse it could have been, but... Bear Stearns had already closed and the world didn't collapse. If a couple investment banks had closed, would everything have stopped? The big boys would have found a way to keep going pretty quickly. As it stands, the 'fix' still ended up keeping most previously normally available capital for average people on hold for years, grinding many regions to a virtual standstill with respect to housing/travel/construction/etc. So... even with the massive bailout, the majority of average people got hit pretty hard, and many are still recovering as their regions try to fight back from the economic collapse, while we read about bankers bitching that their bonuses were only in the single digit millions for so many years.
- moocowduckquack 13y ago
  Eh? There are a lot more choices available than that. And is not about moral ideology, it is pragmatic to take the view that declaring organisations as too big to fail, bailing them and then letting them carry on as before is pretty stupid. That's not running an economy, that's making excuses for an abusive relationship.
tootie 13y ago
It doesn't. A bailout was 100% necessary, but it needn't have been as generous as it was. Especially considering it severely curtailed Congress's appetite for heavier demand-side stimulus in the aftermath.
- puppetmaster3 13y ago
  Sorry tootie, it was not necessary. More, it was not even wanted.

jessaustin 13y ago

That's an opinion you share with all investors who were made whole by the heavy-handed official response to the "crisis". The rest of us, not so much.

notdrunkatall 13y ago
That's because the rest of you don't understand what an all-out financial collapse would mean for you because as a result of the FED's actions, it didn't happen.
- atmosx 13y ago
  What? What would it mean? Doesn't man nothing. It's just an excuse to hand over millions for free. The basic Liberal theory says that when a big player goes down, it's good for the market, because many smaller players will fill that gap. What is happening the last years throughout US and Europe is that when a bank goes down, the state turns communist and we share the losses. If the bank has huge earning, it's capitalism, so they can keep it because hey they worth it!. Joseph Stiglitz has an entire book on the subject. As Krugman said - and the economist also... go figure! - Obama should have put at least some rules to Wall Street giants when they were on their knees, not after he made them twice as big. Blah, I am not sure if the Congress or Obama CAN actually do anything to regulate WS giants at all.
- coldtea 13y ago
  Yes. Idahoans also didn't understand why they should pay me mucho dinero to continue protecting Idaho from dragons. "But we don't have dragons in Idaho", they'd say. To which of course I replied: "See how effective I have been?". Plus, besides the disregard for the burden-of-proof in your argument, wasn't the economic crisis caused "as a result of the FED's actions" in the first place (deregulation etc)?
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > Plus, besides the disregard for the burden-of-proof in your argument, wasn't the economic crisis caused "as a result of the FED's actions" in the first place (deregulation etc)? Deregulation was Congressional action, not action of the Federal Reserve (usually referred to by the shortened form, "the Fed").