(12-28-2017 09:28 AM)Marc Mensa Wrote:  

(12-28-2017 08:51 AM)VA49er Wrote:  

(12-28-2017 12:31 AM)Marc Mensa Wrote:  

(12-27-2017 11:41 PM)stinkfist Wrote:  

(12-27-2017 11:25 PM)Marc Mensa Wrote:  and this is how I remember the origins of the mortgage crisis...

that's the end result......it's not the why.....

if you don't understand credit ratings and how they were manipulated, you're ******* clueless....wall st. only cares about the residual and reacts accordingly....

were their blind eyes with a patch on both.....dayum spiffy.....

however, yes, the big banking honchos did create a market that exposed their weakness within that ponzi schema.....that's the irony of the ignorance across the board....

jfc son............

Wall Street was flush with foreign money... money looking for safe investment... and there was no safer investment than the US housing market. At the same time, Fannie and Freddie were both on the sidelines during this period as a result of an accounting scandel, which freed Wall Street up to step into their place. Call it a perfect storm, call it what you will, but it was hardly Democratic political policy that prompted the crash. It was unadulterated greed.

The crisis was caused by, in no particular order....stupid business, stupid govt, and stupid individual citizens...all driven by greed. To blame one and not the others is silly.

while I agree with your statement, this is an occasion when government gave the banks exactly what it wanted and thats zero oversight. Derivatives fell inder the purview of the toothless CFTC and Rubin, Summers, Snow, Bernake, Greenspan, Clinton, & Bush received in exchange an artificially inflated bubble economy and kudos for their economic acumen. Greenspan is the one constant and later said his mistake was thinking capitalism would protect itself. Well, this is one case when it obviously did not. No, this was a case of laissez faire gone wrong... because all the players (borrowers, mortgage banks, wall street) were using and losing someone elses money.

“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organisations, specifically banks and others, was such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders”.
Alan Greenspan

Mr Greenspan accepted that the crisis had “found a flaw” in his thinking but said that the kind of heavy regulation that could have prevented the crisis would have damaged US economic growth. He described the past two decades as a “period of euphoria” that encouraged participants in the financial markets to misprice securities. He had wrongly assumed that lending institutions would carry out proper surveillance of their counterparties, he said. “I had been going for 40 years with considerable evidence that it was working very well”.

I made the statement in my initial post on this topic....

Quote:who in their ethical right mind would loan money to someone with a credit rating relative to ZERO

I put this one in the tulips category of ponzi....the exception is many more were negatively affected that exists to this day....

ANNNNNND essentially, nobody went to jail.....

there's a reason the scion fund was disbanded and ol' boy moved to the boonies....sometimes making money on the short is too much for some to handle when they look in the mirror....