(01-21-2014 06:27 PM)Artifice Wrote: (01-20-2014 11:35 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote: (01-20-2014 11:17 PM)Artifice Wrote: ...so regulated that it caused the economic collapse that we are all now paying for
Exactly. Most of the problems were caused by regulations.
This is such a ridiculously fallacious argument. The financial collapse was caused by greed (again read the story). You conveniently ignored the rest of my post. When Glass Steagall was revoked, it removed the wall of protections against reckless, manipulative greed.
But your entire attack point ignores the jist of the article. The greed of these wealth addicts is destroying the economy and our middle class. Words that you love to use to discuss poor people, such as entitlement, apply to exponential degrees with these ********. The hubris that they show in demanding the lowest effective tax rates, their attitude of entitlement to massive compensation while contributing absolutely nothing to society, and the utter churlishness of dictating a memo on how to survive on less than subsistence wages while taking massive bonuses is reprehensible.
You started off your next post with' I love this leftist". Right there, you lost the argument and any respect any thinking person would have for you. If this forum is to be anything other than an ideologue circle jerk, then you have to address these discussions with the intent to actually engage - not to just spout dogma. It's mostly wasting my time to even try to get you to engage, but I realize you are one of the few intelligent people here. So I foolishly hold out hope.
The article describes reprehensible behaviour, to be sure. But it provides no explanation of causation. Your reasoning is like A, we have people acting terribly, and B, we have a crisis, and therefore A must have caused B.
There is this talking point mantra that repealing Glass-Steagall opened the floodgates for Wall Street to come up with all these ways to steal money, and that caused the crisis. Only that isn't how it happened.
The financial collapse was caused by too many bad mortgages getting into the system. Once that happened, it was inevitable that those mortgages would default and be foreclosed at some point, and that foreclosures in that number would provoke a financial crisis. And yes, regulations played a major role in creating the problem, on several fronts, and all of the actions that did create the problem were reviewed and blessed by regulators and staunchly defended on the political front by the two criminals who ended up co-authoring the bill to "fix" the problem.
Wall Street certainly behaved like sharks smelling blood in the water, making big bucks crafting derivative "solutions" that were designed to isolate the financial system from their folly, but in the end did not work. Bottom line, no blood on the water (no bad loans) would have meant no opportunity for the sharks (Wall Street). On the other hand, had the mortgages somehow magically and mysteriously performed a little bit better, the devices put in place by Wall Street would have worked to avert possible danger and those huge paydays for Wall Street would probably have been deserved.
But of course, like the damage control systems on the Titanic, those measures did NOT work because the were not designed to anticipate the threat level actually experienced.
I find it ironic that when those who complain the loudest about the greed of Wall Street were forced to come up with a solution, they decided to bail out the greedy Wall Street and screw Main Street. We literally screwed George Bailey to bail out Mr. Potter. Both establishment D's and establishment R's were lock step in favor of this. The only people opposed, the only people saying to fix the mortgages and let Wall Street lose their Maseratis, were the original TEA Party. Not today's teabaggers, co-opted by republicans and demonized by democrats, but the original Taxed Enough Already movement.
You want to claim that it was Wall Street greed that caused the problem? Fine, start by explaining how the actions of Wall Street would have caused the problem WITHOUT the mortgage failures. And then explain how the problem could have been avoided WITH the mortgage failures. Those two exercises should leave little doubt.
Blaming this problem on Wall Street is like blaming the damage caused by Katrina on the guy who was selling flashlight batteries for ten dollars apiece after the storm blew through.
