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PoliGAF 2016 |OT4| Tyler New Chief Exit Pollster at CNN

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I

ivysaur12

Banned
So someone just posted this in regards to Krugman's piece. Does anyone know if it's correct? I'm genuinely curious, because sometimes Krugman can be a bit of a partisan:

I think the piece is misrepresenting the financial crises. It's actually surprisingly misinformed.

Countrywide Banking and Loans (now owned by BofA), was indeed lending a lot of subprime mortgages, but the subprime mortgages were only a small portion of the problem. The bigger banks needed more mortgages for their mortgage backed security products, someone needed to provide the mortgages, so they started entering subprime territory.

Lehman Brothers wasn't big. Well, not JP Morgan, BofA, big. But still 600 bil big. Bear Stearns was also overleveraged and shut down. Washington Mutual too. Lehman wasn't the only bank playing the game. They just lost before the bailout. The big banks got the bailout then picked up more acquisitions in the ensuing fire sales.

JP Morgan now owns Washington Mutual and Bear.

BofA owns Merrill, Countrywide and more.

Wells Fargo owns Wachovia.

The banks are larger than they've ever been. And to place the blame on only Lehman and Countrywide is pretty silly. Lehman and Countrywide were feeding the larger beast the was the Mortgage Backed Security, specifically the Collateralized Debt Obligation. Which the big banks have begun trading again.
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K

Kangi

Member
Sea Manky said:
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H

hawk2025

Member
ivysaur12 said:
So someone just posted this in regards to Krugman's piece. Does anyone know if it's correct? I'm genuinely curious, because sometimes Krugman can be a bit of a partisan:
Click to expand...


It's pretty much correct, IMO -- well, as correct as a description of something like this in a few hundred words can be, of course.

Krugman oversimplified it far too much, to the detriment of the argument.
 
I

Ignatz Mouse

Banned
lastflowers said:
*sigh*

The psycho behind the sandy hook killings which utilized an instrument manufactured by a company.


It is not the same person who deliberately made broken financial instruments and then sold it to people/groups/businesses around the world which essentially knew nothing about the products they were buying because it was deliberately comprised by these financial institutions to obfuscate what lay within. They relied on the financial ratings agency's ratings. This system was beholden to the bank instead of the people.

They took advantage of the contemporary regulatory ratings guidelines on a vastly complex instrument to build packages that would rate as AAA despite being full of shit so that they could sell them to institutions that only take AAA investments. Often these are funds that take over Pensions and/or people's retirement accounts. Fun times telling people to put money in their 401k.

It's immensely shitty behavior by an industry that is known for its consistent fraudulent activity, and which shifted immediately to High Frequency Trading post-crash...which I think is just another bundle of fun. I'm planning on doing some more deep reading on the Crash and HFT in the near future, but what I've read thus far is only disturbing.

You can blame incompetence on the money managers for not reading what lay exactly within these complex financial instruments, or lay the blame at the financial regulators. You can say maybe we couldn't do anything legally, but I call it too much fear that we'd make our economy too unstable. Essentially, I think Obama was stuck between a rock and a hard place. But I think there needs to be much more public education and discussions around these topics.

But I can and damn well will put the vast majority of the blame on these financial institutions who made it as hard as possible for anyone to analyze what lay within the financial instruments, who encouraged subprime growth, and who also benefitted widely after the mortgage crisis through big bonuses and payouts. And I damn well will blame the current administration, the previous administration, Greenspan, et al for essentially giving everyone a big 'pass'.

For the record, I'd rather us ban all guns in this country--but that's an opinion I know no one cares about.
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I'm only mobile, tagging this for reply later, regarding how completely wrong it is. Totally misunderstanding the financial industry.
 
V

Voysa Reezun

Banned
The first half of that post seems pretty much correct, but the stuff about HFT seems off. I'm pretty sure even the smaller firms that were originally making heavy profits from HFT have shifted away from it, but I can't recall the reasons.
 
Y

Y2Kev

TLG Fan Caretaker Est. 2009
Voysa Reezun said:
The first half of that post seems pretty much correct, but the stuff about HFT seems off. I'm pretty sure even the smaller firms that were originally making heavy profits from HFT have shifted away from it, but I can't recall the reasons.
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I think it is an uncharitable view of securitized products, personally.
 
S

shinra-bansho

Member
pigeon said:
If foreigners who don't understand American politics but talk about them on the internet anyway could vote in the primary, Bernie would win in a landslide.
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Well... I wouldn't vote for him.
neurosisxeno said:
I don't understand the logic behind holding gun manufacturers liable for crimes committed using their guns. It seems very reactionary...
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As already highlighted, the crux isn't why should they be sued it's why should the industry have special protections.

Because also as highlighted, litigation can improve design safety and thus prevent entirely unnecessary deaths.
 
Y

Y2Kev

TLG Fan Caretaker Est. 2009
I think it would probably expose real problems with her campaign electorally which so far has performed as expected.
 
S

Spoiled Milk

Banned
ivysaur12 said:
So someone just posted this in regards to Krugman's piece. Does anyone know if it's correct? I'm genuinely curious, because sometimes Krugman can be a bit of a partisan:
Click to expand...
It's wrong in the implication that things are the same. The new rules make failing banks become public entities, so things are different now.
 
Y

Y2Kev

TLG Fan Caretaker Est. 2009
B-Dubs said:
It would also expose some issues with the polling since all of it shows a pretty comfortable win.
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We're still a week out. Polling can tighten. If she can't win in her home state with a huge minority population then there is really a problem.
 
B

B-Dubs

No Scrubs
Y2Kev said:
We're still a week out. Polling can tighten. If she can't win in her home state with a huge minority population then there is really a problem.
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I don't think we'll see a 20-point swing in a week. Clinton's campaign would really need to fuck up badly for that to happen. If anything after Bernie's Daily News fuck up I expect it to widen a bit.
 
N

noshten

Member
Macho Madness said:
Depends on the state.

Missouri got some play over the past 24 hours. If they're pledged, they have to vote however the primary played out. But some states have uncommitted delegates that are selected through other means. It's basically a complicated crapshoot.
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Sounds so backwards, primaries were supposed to be the chosen ones

Holmes said:
The only New York-related news stories I've seen for Kasich involve him eating food.
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He is targeting the ever important "I'd like to have a sandwich with him" vote
 
R

RustyNails

Member
Hillary's campaign HQ is in Brooklyn. Voters elected her twice and she won it in 08 over Obama. There's nothing to suggest she will lose NY.
 
H

HylianTom

Banned
B-Dubs said:
I don't think we'll see a 20-point swing in a week. Clinton's campaign would really need to fuck up badly for that to happen. If anything after Bernie's Daily News fuck up I expect it to widen a bit.
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Yeah, this latest round of polls to come out doesn't factor-in any changes from QualifiedGate. I don't think we're in for any sort of Michigan-style surprise.

I really should've taken the day after New York off from work. Dammit.
 
I

ivysaur12

Banned
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/bern...fied-president/story?id=38258722&cid=abcn_tco

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders explained in an interview with ABC News today how in the span of just a few days he suggested that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, was both qualified and unqualified to be president.

“In a sense it’s both,” he told ABC News' Cecilia Vega while touring the neighborhood in Brooklyn where he grew up.

Sanders questioned Clinton’s judgment on several key issues, including her vote in favor of the war in Iraq, what he called her “dependence” on super PACs and Wall Street money as well as her position on trade agreements like NAFTA.

“Is that person who has that kind of bad judgment qualified to be president of the United States?” Sanders asked. “Well, qualified is a broad word, but I think that judgment lapse suggests that, you know, she might not be the best president that we need.”
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Sanders added: “On the other hand, if you look at her resume, if you like, at her experience, this was a woman who kind of broke the mold as first lady, and I think a very good job in that respect.”

Earlier today in an appearance on ABC’s “The View,” Sanders acknowledged that Clinton was “obviously” experienced enough to be president -- a departure from comments he made two days earlier at a campaign event in Pennsylvania, when he said: “She has been saying lately that she thinks that I am quote-unquote, not qualified to be president. Now, let me, let me just say in response to Secretary Clinton, I don’t believe that she is qualified.”

Should she become the nominee, Sanders told Vega that he would do “everything” possible to make sure a candidate from the other side of the aisle doesn’t end up in the White House.

“It would be a disaster for this country to have a Donald Trump or some other right-wing Republican in the White House,” Sanders said.
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Z

zou

Member
ivysaur12 said:
So someone just posted this in regards to Krugman's piece. Does anyone know if it's correct? I'm genuinely curious, because sometimes Krugman can be a bit of a partisan:
Click to expand...

but the subprime mortgages were only a small portion of the problem. The bigger banks needed more mortgages for their mortgage backed security product [...] started entering subprime territory
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That's not only wrong but also contradictory. He's also quite eager to point out that Lehman wasn't all that big, when that's exactly what Krugman said as well. As for the rest of the piece, the author seems to believe that "big banks" getting bigger after the crisis is somehow evidence of their wrongdoing? Or maybe that's just incoherent rambling.

JPM generally didn't have much to do with subprime mortgages or securization (other than coming up with the process back in the 90s). They were encouraged to take over Bear Stearns by the Fed, and bought out WaMus deposits after the OTS shut them down. Bank of America was pretty much fine until their Countrywide takeover, they tried to walk away from the ML merger after discovering tens of billions in losses, but were more or less forced/extorted by the Fed and Treasury to go ahead with it.

So there's really no basis to claim the big banks were somehow responsible for the crash, rather they were used to help stabilize the system. The likely alternative would have been more Lehman-like failures.

Edit: I guess the author could have made the point with Citi. Though they were still dwarfed by the investment banks and mortgage companies.
 
S

Spoiled Milk

Banned
Reich replies to Krugman.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t pick on a particular columnist but I respect Paul Krugman. Also, his perch at the New York Times gives him broad influence – especially just two and a half weeks before the important New York State primary. But his piece today (which I’ve attached) is shot through with errors.

1. The biggest Wall Street banks did indeed precipitate the crisis on Wall Street in 2008 because of their gambling in newfangled financial instruments and fancy derivatives even they didn't understand.

2. Their size did make a difference because they were so interconnected with other financial entities both in the U.S. and around the world that they were "too big to fail." Today's biggest Wall Street banks are much bigger than they were in 2008.

3. Size also has a bearing on their political influence. The reason the Glass-Steagall Act was scotched by Bill Clinton's administration, and the Clinton administration wouldn't agree with the CFTC to regulate derivatives, had a lot to do with the influence of Wall Street over the Clinton administration and over Congress. The political power of the biggest players on the Street is even larger today – as evidenced by their capacity to whittle back significant parts of Dodd-Frank in the regulatory process.

4. Breaking up the biggest banks isn’t a radical idea. In fact, many experts – including the current president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (who’s a Republican and a former executive of Goldman Sachs), and the former head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas -- have called for exactly this.

5. Bernie's other ideas -- for a single-payer plan, and for free tuition at public institutions of higher education – are sensible, and also backed by many experts. It’s well-established that a single-payer plan would be far less costly and deliver far better care than our own system, which is based on private for-profit insurers. As to free tuition in public universities, we were well on the way to this goal in the 1950s and 1960s. It was and is a logical extension of free K-12 education.

6. Finally, the current brouhaha over who's "qualified to be president" was arguably started by Hillary Clinton. Personally, I think neither she nor Bernie should be calling the other unqualified, but to blame Bernie for this exchange is simply incorrect.
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I

ivysaur12

Banned
6. Finally, the current brouhaha over who's "qualified to be president" was arguably started by Hillary Clinton. Personally, I think neither she nor Bernie should be calling the other unqualified, but to blame Bernie for this exchange is simply incorrect.
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Good thing she didn't.

It's so sad that Hillary is such a trickster that she baited Bernie into saying this!
 
I

Ignatz Mouse

Banned
lastflowers said:
*sigh*

The psycho behind the sandy hook killings which utilized an instrument manufactured by a company.


It is not the same person who deliberately made broken financial instruments and then sold it to people/groups/businesses around the world which essentially knew nothing about the products they were buying because it was deliberately comprised by these financial institutions to obfuscate what lay within. They relied on the financial ratings agency's ratings. This system was beholden to the bank instead of the people.

They took advantage of the contemporary regulatory ratings guidelines on a vastly complex instrument to build packages that would rate as AAA despite being full of shit so that they could sell them to institutions that only take AAA investments. Often these are funds that take over Pensions and/or people's retirement accounts. Fun times telling people to put money in their 401k.

It's immensely shitty behavior by an industry that is known for its consistent fraudulent activity, and which shifted immediately to High Frequency Trading post-crash...which I think is just another bundle of fun. I'm planning on doing some more deep reading on the Crash and HFT in the near future, but what I've read thus far is only disturbing.

You can blame incompetence on the money managers for not reading what lay exactly within these complex financial instruments, or lay the blame at the financial regulators. You can say maybe we couldn't do anything legally, but I call it too much fear that we'd make our economy too unstable. Essentially, I think Obama was stuck between a rock and a hard place. But I think there needs to be much more public education and discussions around these topics.

But I can and damn well will put the vast majority of the blame on these financial institutions who made it as hard as possible for anyone to analyze what lay within the financial instruments, who encouraged subprime growth, and who also benefitted widely after the mortgage crisis through big bonuses and payouts. And I damn well will blame the current administration, the previous administration, Greenspan, et al for essentially giving everyone a big 'pass'.

For the record, I'd rather us ban all guns in this country--but that's an opinion I know no one cares about.
Click to expand...

So, a few things now that I am at a keyboard.

1) The whole banking industry is not complex-instrument-making villains. In fact, most of the institutions and people making those instruments THOUGHT THEY WERE GOOD! Hence so many of the banks being in deep trouble because they themselves invested in those instruments. There certainly were some people who figured it out and still pushed these instruments, but the majority of the banks were also victims of the bubble's collapse. Generalizing the industry to all bad-actors is simplistic stuff that makes a good stump speech but makes lousy policy. You know what else the financial industry does? Takes care of your retirement funds. Lends money to businesses to create jobs. If you really want to make bank reforms that help people (beyond what's been done in Dodd-Frank), then pass laws to limit credit card rates that used to be illegal, and put a reasonable cap on ATM fees and overdraft fees. And have the government take over the ratings agencies (and fund them).

2) HFT is not some boogeyman. There's good and bad in it, and the bad is front-running and algorithmic risk-- but mainly, HFT is taking tiny fractions of trades in exchange for market making and liquidity, which are good things. Most HFT people are the equivalent of people who collect deposit bottles that other people threw away. I worked in HFT for a long time and it's mainly a tech arms race with some potential risk, than some fraudulent behavior.

3) Banks didn't go from one to another. Banks are vast and full of different businesses and areas of focus. Banks engaged in bond funds, CDOs, and HFT and a lot more and will continue to do so. The only thing that's changed is people's perceptions, and HFT being a hot item to scrutinize because it's boomed. It actually fell off a ton for a while after the collapse, because it requires market volume, and trading slowed to a crawl in 2009. Bad times for HFT.
 
R

RustyNails

Member
Ugh why did Reich do fisking of Krugman's article. It's so amateurish for columnists to engage each other like that. Just write a different article instead of a point by point defend piece.
 
P

Piecake

Member
6. Finally, the current brouhaha over who's "qualified to be president" was arguably started by Hillary Clinton. Personally, I think neither she nor Bernie should be calling the other unqualified, but to blame Bernie for this exchange is simply incorrect.
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Someone sure is feeling the Bern...
 
Z

zou

Member
Regarding Reich: GS, MS, ML, Lehman and Bear Stearns weren't Banks, so either he's being disingenuous by referring to them as banks, or wrong by ignoring them. Either way not a great rebuttal. And Taibbi seems to be confused by Krugman's column: Just because the big banks didn't cause the crash, doesn't mean they weren't involved in shady, shitty deals.
 
S

shinra-bansho

Member
ivysaur12 said:
So someone just posted this in regards to Krugman's piece. Does anyone know if it's correct? I'm genuinely curious, because sometimes Krugman can be a bit of a partisan:
Click to expand...
I think it's weird that someone would point out how some of the banks have gotten larger. And not also note they basically did so at the government's behest.

I think somewhat ironically the enforcement of Glass Steagall separation would have prevented some of these forced mergers that stabilised the fin system.
Ignatz Mouse said:
The whole banking industry is not complex-instrument-making villains.
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Lies.

Benghazi.

FUCK.
 
Y

Y2Kev

TLG Fan Caretaker Est. 2009
Oh and now to the attention trough is Matt Taibbi. Wondering when he'd show up since someone said the word bank.
 
M

Mael

Member
T'Zariah said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2muNVQm24hg

If you can make it to 2 minutes I'll applaud you.
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5sec...
I have a rule for political discourse, 3 bullshits and you're not worth the sound coming to my ears.
I lasted 5 seconds.
I think that's a new record.
Last record holder was Marine LePen when she discussed her economic plan, lasted something like 15 seconds.

Since we're on the subject of banks, is the view of banks the same as congressmen?
I mean "they're all shit but mine is awesome"?
 
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