Article: How to Prevent the Next Wall Street Crisis
- Thread starter NJ-XC-Justin
- Start date
Nimrod
New Member
OK, it's Nixon's fault
Silly Shaggz!
Standard Red Team Mantra = Blame Bill Clinton.
When this fails.. backdate everything, and blame Jimmy Carter.
Unbelievably, this usually works
NJ-XC-Justin
KY-DH-Freddy
Awesome line Dan. And thanks for the well wishes Dave and and all, but no baby yet, just a crazy busy week with little time for the idiot box. This little girl is 9 pounds now, yet still not interested in checking out the world, so Christine may be induced on Tuesday. I can't wait to meet her, though I miss biking already.
Panhead
Well-Known Member
He's back! And I just read the housing mess will only cost a couple of trillion dollars. Where's the link, Justin ? Doc cleared me for riding in 4 weeks, meaning I'll miss the rest of the season so I'll have time to brush up on my specs and I'll finally know what tires I'm running. Good luck to you and Chris and make sure the Doc gives you a needle too.
. Good luck to you and Chris and make sure the Doc gives you a needle too.
mfennell
Well-Known Member
A little late to this but short selling does serve a purpose: it's a mechanism to profit on negative news. When a company is in trouble, short sellers notice no matter what bullshit may be in the yearly report. Short sellers exposed (and profited from) Enron's accounting fraud.
Wait, so were you the guy I met today?
MST.ESQ
New Member
Face it people, the tv pundits offer nothing but entertainment value and those in academia are wishful thinkers and pushing (either openly or unconsciously) their own political beliefs. For every twenty Larry Bartels - you can find 20 that say the exact opposite.
Just live within your means and squirrel some money away to cover the mortgage in bad times... I have friends on Wall Street who bought lavish homes and leased 4 luxury vehicles who joke about moving in with me now. Though I am not quite sure that they just joking at this point.
Just live within your means and squirrel some money away to cover the mortgage in bad times... I have friends on Wall Street who bought lavish homes and leased 4 luxury vehicles who joke about moving in with me now. Though I am not quite sure that they just joking at this point.
It's funny how those who make arguments seemingly based on fact back up and say that things are too complex to really understand, or that so-and-so is politically motivated when fact and analysis is presented that conflicts with their argument. If you can't prove anything, then how can you argue that tax cuts and trickle-down economics works?
Living within your means... that's something the US Government definitely needs to do as well. Forget tax cuts and pandering to the electorate, we need to slash spending (first up- getting out of this stupid trillion-dollar tax drain in Iraq), keep taxes where they are, let the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire as they should, pay down the national debt, and shore up our economic position as a country. We owe 9.6 trillion dollars to other countries and foreign banks right now (that's 75% of the US GDP). As a country, we're overleveraged, and just as a whispering campaign about bad debt blew up into a full-blown crisis that took down major investment banks that everyone thought were rock solid, so too could a possible run on America's debt (unheard of, but definitely possible) plunge this country into a worse depression than the first one. And there's no bank in the world capitalized to bail us out.
The next war could easily be an economic one rather than a military one, and we're giving Chinese bankers trillions of dollars in ammunition in that war.
mfennell
Well-Known Member
Yeah, that was me. I almost didn't reply to your post for exactly that reason.
mfennell
Well-Known Member
A great book is The Millionaire Next Door. It can probably be summed up as "spend less than you earn, invest the difference, and do it for a long time" but reading about the characteristics of the wealthy (who are often not the same as those who have a lot of nice stuff) is pretty interesting.
MST.ESQ
New Member
What? I did not argue in favor of tax cuts and trickle-down economics and did not make any particular argument (whether based on fact or not). I was just pointing out that statements purporting to show that tough times are bestowed upon us when a particular party sits in the oval office (as opposed to congressional control, etc) does not necessarily prove a correlation - and that for every study that shows one exists - I can find one that says otherwise...
The fact that you even mention "trickle-down" economics shows that your political orientation is well entrenched and far from center. I was trying to be polite and tactful with my posts by pointing out that much of the debate that we see in the media (tv and print) is not unbiased and neutral. People are already bashing Bush for a bailout (which I do not support in any form) that he has not yet signed but is being pushed through a Democratic Senate and House... I was not going to go so far as to critique the view of any particular party - or their supporters. But I guess I should have expanded my comments to include arguments like yours which appear to be formed more from party loyalty than the truth and that I would caution readers to ascribe as much weight to your argument as they would to James Carville or Rush Limbaugh.
... now its back to work for me. I can see the corner of Wall Street and Broadway from my office and cringe at what I see going on in the streets
That's an easy way of discounting *any* scholarship or research and encouraging people to make gut decisions. Rather than simply brushing off this well-researched piece, how about actually finding a suitable competing study that shows the opposite- that the middle and working classes benefit more from republican administrations- rather than discounting it in such a flippant way.
In the arena of politics, one thing is very clear- both parties have the same vision of government, and the only thing that differs is the constituents they serve.
Truth be told, I'm a big fan of Andrew Sullivan, a proponent of (mostly) free markets (minimal regulation primarily to insure transparency and minimize corruption), opposed to government subsidies (whether for democrat constituents or for republican constituents), opposed to government intervention in our personal moral lives, opposed to an interventionist foreign policy that gets us involved in wars around the world, opposed to massive military spending, opposed to socialist practices like the government (state or federal) getting involved in home insurance, or bailing out either homeowners or investment banks for their exceedingly poor decisions, a big fan of Darwin and the theory of natural selection, an entrepreneur who's started 3 businesses at various points in my life... you tell me, where do I fit?
I'm relatively liberal, part libertarian, and part fiscal conservative. Unfortunately, there's no single party for me.
I certainly agree with you there, however I'm not willing to throw out all research, scholarship and reporting because there are personal biases underscoring it. It certainly requires us all to be more active and skeptical in our digestion of all media, but if nothing can inform our views because nothing can be trusted, why even have discussions like this? At some point, people *do* make decisions based on what they see and what they read. Existence in the modern world requires some skepticism, but not a complete disengagement from all media just because there's inevitably going to be some bias in there.
I also oppose the bailout. Nationalizing AIG is something I might expect from Hugo Chavez, but not something I ever thought I'd see from a republican president in my lifetime. I don't support the bailout and I don't support the US incurring more national debt to shelter these companies from their terrible financial practices. Pain is a necessary part of life, and we need some additional pain in the markets right now to keep people from making these mistakes in the future. Let the market do its thing, and by god don't let these CEO's off the hook with million-dollar exit packages.
I think Congress is once-again falling in step with the president because they think this is what the people want, in the same way that democrats sided with him in going to war in Iraq. They'll regret it later, but are definitely showing their weakness by not proposing an alternate strategy. Still, I think there's serious outrage on the part of the average American to this plan to bail out the investment banks, and I hope democracy works and the legislators hear from their constituents who oppose this bail out, then vote accordingly. Unfortunately, as I've said before, politicians from both parties are generally very, very wealthy and will likely vote to protect their own interests and investments by bailing out Wall Street.
MST.ESQ
New Member
I'm relatively liberal, part libertarian, and part fiscal conservative. Unfortunately, there's no single party for me.
You win with that last reply... I don't think I could type that much without getting carpal tunnel and needing the services of socialized health care...
But seriously...
1. I applaud your passion for the subject. I used to be as passionate but have soured to the whole process lately.
2. I think we both have a similar identity crisis
3. I also think we both agree that neither major party is willing to stick to its claimed principles and push hard to get the job done - but instead are following opinion polls and campaign donations
mfennell
Well-Known Member
That was my gut reaction too (let 'em suffer!) until I read the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. The gubmint has offered FDIC-like insurance to money market funds to the tune of 300 billion dollars or so in loans. Apparently, money markets began to seize last week as investors pulled money from them.
FT.com said:
Chew on that for a minute.
I'll have to have my investment banker buddy explain it to me s.l.o.w.l.y in his best attempt at engineer-translation but I think the fear was that all kinds of transactions would start defaulting. ie: You use your credit card to buy something but the retailer doesn't get paid. Imagine how that would affect the economy.