President Barack Obama has recently completed the most successful foreign policy tour since Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. You name it, he blew it. What was his big deal economic programme that he was determined to drive through the G20 summit? Another massive stimulus package, globally funded and co-ordinated. Did he achieve it? Not so as you’d notice.
Barack is not the first New World ingenue to discover that European leaders will load him with praise, struggle sycophantically to be photographed with him and outdo him in Utopian rhetoric. But when it comes to the critical moment of opening their wallets – suddenly it is flag-day in Aberdeen. Okay, put the G20 down to inexperience, beginner’s nerves, what you will.
Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s just that they complain about it so much I couldn’t help it.
Apparently, the world “liking us” doesn’t look much different from them hating us.
Did the author just call TOTUS a “Surrender Monkey”? Why, I think that’s RACIST!!!111!1!! As are you for linking it, dontcha know. Denounce yourself immediately. This man’s rhetoric is unhelpful to the cause, and most inartful.
Let’s see, he butchered the Republicans in a national election a few months back, he’s since had to clean up the Republican fwee mawket toxic asset diarrhea that we splattered all over the world, and recently he’s re-introduced America to our European allies and in doing so returned honor and pride back to our country’s reputation.
I’d say our confident and energetic President Obama is off to a running start. Somewhere Winston Churchill’s bust is smiling.
Yeah that headline will surely have this man disappearing in no time.
Hey man, that’s like, my line. But he ain’t as magical as I thought. Don’t tell anyone at the LA Times I’m lurking over here.
Thor , don’t you miss Bush presidency ?
He would have bombed North Koreans , nuked the Iranians, and pissed off our allies.
Which European allies were we reintroduced to?
Wow sashal you can’t even come up with your own freakin comments.
“Oh, for the good old days of George Bush. If only he was around to blast Korean missiles, nuke the Iranians, and alienate all the allies. The Dubya policy of bomb first and don’t even think about the consequences worked so well.
Gerald has not realised that the USA is no longer a super power. The days when it could wage medium sized wars all over the world whenever it wanted to have gone. It is now totally dependent on both its allies and its enemies. It can neither: dare to upset the Chinese, the Russians, or the oil rich Arabs; nor can it go into another war without support of its allies.
Patrick
April 10, 2009
12:32 PM GMT
he butchered the Republicans in a national election a few months back
Stopped reading at the first lie.
Sorry.
A ham sandwich could have beaten McCain. Give that ham sandwich daily free TV time, over half a billion dollars in campaign contribution advantage, magazine covers with halos over his head on every grocery isle in America, and a pliant media aimed at destroying the ham sandwich’s opponent, and the ham sandwich would probably won by a larger margin than Obama.
Bush was easily manipulated by those around him, was an ineffectual inarticulate and hadn’t a clue of the state of our economy until it collapsed like a house of cards. His tenure will be remembered as a convenient 8-year marriage of greed and stupidity. Even after it was revealed the fuckheads at AIG sold $500-billion in naked credit default insurance sort of any money to cover it, any mention of market regulation was met by coward’s howls of Marxism from the party that was most responsible for America’s profound economic decline.
It’s fair to say, sashal, that it took Barack Obama to bring an end to the gang-raping of America.
Head like a hole.
Bow down before the one you serve.
You’re going to get what you deserve.
sort = short
“President Pantywaist” … perfect!
Hey, that’s good Pablo. We could have an Obama them-song contest. Although I think it’s hard to beat Living Colour’s ditty.
Give that ham sandwich daily free TV time, over half a billion dollars in campaign contribution advantage, magazine covers with halos over his head on every grocery isle in America, and a pliant media aimed at destroying the ham sandwich’s opponent, and the ham sandwich would probably won by a larger margin than Obama.
This also explains how such a clearly befuddled, incompetent idiot who can’t read his own driver’s license without a teleprompter, can be hailed as elegant, intelligent and worldly. Take the ham out of that sandwich, and the Presidential Imbecile Of Hope And Change might be able to stand up to the bread.
*I’d say our confident and energetic President Obama is off to a running start*
Sure. Then he ran straight into a wall known as “Reality”. And had some very strong words for it. He’s sent Hillary to open negotiations with this strange reality.
IN a related note, Obama is going with a White House Unicorn as opposed to a dog.
*He would have bombed North Koreans , nuked the Iranians, and pissed off our allies*
Whattya call bombing north korea, nuking the iranians and pissing off our “allies” ?
A good start.
*hadn’t a clue of the state of our economy until it collapsed like a house of cards.*
But Barney Frank, Chuck Schumer, Chris Dodd and Nancy Pelosi were alllll over it.
You cannot possibly believe the things you say.
She took that entire comment from someone else pretty much word for word. Is plagerism commonplace or something on the left side of the American political spectrum?
Thor, you provide a perfect example of what happens when alcoholism meets ignorance.
Reality meet thor…I will just let you two catch up as you have much to talk about.
Of course plagiarism is commonplace on the left. It’s their bread and butter, man! What I sometimes wonder is who actually comes up with the new material for all of them.
I had to have some fun with the photo in the Telegraph column.
Heh. Quintessential Obamaspeak.
Flaccid and passive.
H/T: Ace
#Comment by John Cheshire on 4/10 @ 10:40 am #
Please ignore the talking toad.
Thank you.
via Hot Air, Charles the Kraut:
“Our president came bearing a basketful of mea culpas. With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own people for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness, for genocide, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantanamo and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world.
And what did he get for this obsessive denigration of his own country? He wanted more NATO combat troops in Afghanistan to match the surge of 17,000 Americans. He was rudely rebuffed.
He wanted more stimulus spending from Europe. He got nothing.
From Russia, he got no help on Iran. From China, he got the blocking of any action on North Korea.
And what did he get for Guantanamo? France, pop. 64 million, will take one prisoner. One! (Sadly, he’ll have to leave his swim buddy behind.) The Austrians said they would take none. As Interior Minister Maria Fekter explained with impeccable Germanic logic, if they’re not dangerous, why not just keep them in America?
When Austria is mocking you, you’re having a bad week. Yet who can blame Frau Fekter, considering the disdain Obama showed his own country while on foreign soil, acting the philosopher-king who hovers above the fray mediating between his renegade homeland and an otherwise warm and welcoming world?”
I am sure the WH missed that remark by the IM of Austria. They can’t find any translators that speak Austrian.
Good lord. Thor’s comment at #11 has to be the one of the dumbest, if not THE dumbest, pieces of schlock I’ve ever read posted here. The boy was either drunk or off his meds.
Even after it was revealed the fuckheads at AIG sold $500-billion in naked credit default insurance sort of any money to cover it, any mention of market regulation was met by coward’s howls of Marxism from the party that was most responsible for America’s profound economic decline.
Even the vast expanse of concrete that passes for your imagination, thor, can surely see that any reserve requirement you could reasonably come up with WRT AIG would have been immensely insufficient to cover their liabilities once the government-created housing bubble burst. To suggest that some magical elixer called “Regulation” would have prevented AIG’s collapse is ridiculous.
#Comment by Nan on 4/10 @ 11:59 am #
Please ignore the talking slime mold.
Thank you.
#Comment by Jeffersonian on 4/10 @ 12:20 pm #
Please ignore the talking phallus.
Thank you.
Seems to me that AIG was awfully profitable before they got into the credit default business.
Look it up. Get yourself a clue.
And here you have it, folks. Today’s best example of the mud bunker ignorance that is responsible for the decline of our country.
Goldman Sachs, too. Big sillies.
Somehow in all my readings of Norse mythology I completely missed the part about Thor being the God of Hindsight.
Well with his head so far up his ass what else does he have but hindsight?
Navel gazing from the inside?
Hey, Bmoe, I don’t think you’re completely fuckin’ nuts; I’ll say the same about BJT, Ric, Dan, Jeff, etc…
What you are, collectively, is completely fuckin’ wrong. What you’re doing is allowing a failed and faulty political ideology to strangle your common fuckin’ sense. I couldn’t give a fuck, actually. Your life. Free will. But history will tell the tale of the tape, and your ilk is going to come out on the losing end, on the butt end, on the intellectually lazy end.
If you want to dissolve into a pod of panty-waisted liars, go ahead. No, I don’t stand with liars and predisposed waterheads. We can be friends, we can be friendly, but I’m not going along just to get along. Ain’t my style.
When all of our money center banks and Wall Street’s puking is finally mopped up, your stupid political party won’t be cleared. You’re guilty as charged, and the charges are gross malfeasance, willful ignorance, corrupt postering and purposeful culpability in the greatest economic collapse of America since the great depression. The Republicans are done, cooked, de-feathered and de-boned. What’s left of ’em of are amoral fucks hellbent on selling false narratives. Cheap, dumb, liars, cowards and crooks are what’s left of your base.
Over at Politico I read James Dobson booted some reference to Glen Beck’s book from his website with the explanation that Beck is a Mormon posing as a Christian. That’s who you run with, Dobson, Limbaugh and assorted mud bunker hick stock that proudly sit atop cases of anti-artillery black helicopter ammo, you know, in case the low-flying Marxist helicopters come for their guns.
You lost and will continue to lose, big. You don’t know where square one is. Democracy and capitalism, no clue as to these complex concepts. Conservatism has become a charade performed for ignorants living in the past.
IMHO.
the thorster sounds like chuck u shumer
Nice rant, thor, but since I am not a Republican, conservative or a Christian I have no idea as to why it is directed at me. My stated political and economic ideology is the one this country was founded on, if you consider that a failure I really don’t know what to say other than you are delusional beyond words. How can you blame the current melt down on the people here, when all of us have been advocating dramatic change in the way things are done for years? You are the one defending the status quo, Einstein, every day when you brag about how much you game the system and how we really just need even more government oversight and regulation.
You might think you are the big winner just because you picked Obama as the next President, I don’t judge my life on those terms. That would be as insignificant to me as the next American Idol winner but for the impact Obama can have on my life. That is going to suck whether I voted for him or not, or whether I say he is a swell dude or not.
As far as Rush Limbaugh goes, you should give up your precious French poets for awhile and listen to the man. He doesn’t have an MFA but he could teach you a few things about self expression. Maybe in a year or two people wouldn’t smell phantom cheap gin and piss every time they read one of your posts.
Who is Chuck Schumer to you, coward? He’s a politician, not a metaphor. You’d do well for yourself if you listened to him and agreed and disagreed with him based on what he says on differing topics versus what you think he stands for in your false flag-pin reality.
You’re a intellectual coward. Too intellectually lazy to rationalize without simplifying to the extreme through symbolism.
Hey, BJT, learn any new words in Chinese or Russian today? Five words a day is the easy way is what they say. Since you definitively and conclusively advance yourself as the one who knows what every leader of Russia and China has ever said while standing of foreign soil, I gotta assume you’re fluent in those languages, or close to it, eh. Maybe forward your archives of all past words ever spoken by said leaders to me as the proof of your intellectual authority in declaring such an idiot summation.
Why would you think you could speak for all Russian leaders? Is it your big bad American intellectual breeding? That’s it, I think. Without having set foot in either country, without being able to reel off those names of their past leaders off the top of your head, without speaking of word of their language and without a single quote on the tip of your tongue from either of those countries’ leaders, you know all that they’ve said!
Arrogance on steroids. Stupidity gone mad. Bullshit on a stick. Good drugs wasted.
You’d do well for yourself if you listened to him and agreed and disagreed with him based on what he says on differing topics versus what you think he stands for in your false flag-pin reality.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
I have never seen an irony meter read that high.
Maybe you should listen to Rush Limbaugh. He’s a conservative joke and a Republican, last I checked. And no, I do not want to step backwards into the literary mud bunker, I’ll take my French and Russian poets over Rush’s tomes every time.
Quit trying to run away from your ideological failure and hiding behind your empty interpretation of what the Constitution stands for, that act is akin to wiping your ass with the famed document if you ask me.
I challenge you to understand how the market and our regulatory system failed without mention of a person in either political party. When a building collapses you can get to the engineering failure sans simply and endlessly blaming the architect. There are facts, checks and balances and regulatory structures that failed. Get this. We failed. America failed. Fully Completely, Pure Failure.
Figure out why the systematic failure, brick by brick, the hard way, the way our founding fathers would have, assuming that collection of fine men who authored our Constitution weren’t intellectual cowards and panty-waisted finger pointers of the first order.
he’s a sleazy power hungry political whore who mouths the same bs as thor
I couldn’t give a fuck, actually
…
how nice that your sleazy friends: frank, dodd, waters, raines, gorelick, obama having their collective fingers in the freddie/fannie cookie jar get a pass. i fart mr. secretary in your general direction.
demorats: architects/engineers of financial collapse for political gain
I have never seen an irony meter read that high.
I like this one:
meet the new painty waist finger pointer on the block
Barack Obama: President Pantywaist – new surrender monkey on the block
maybe
… a …
~~…dittohead…splatchicka…wompwomp…~~
or something-something oompah from you is in order
Arrogance on steroids. Stupidity gone mad. Bullshit on a stick. Good drugs wasted.
What do the initials “CCCP” stand for?
Red Heads for $200 please, Alex.
Seems to me that AIG was awfully profitable before they got into the credit default business.
Indeed it was. Maybe Spitzer could have called off his jihad long enough to keep competent management at the helm there.
But you didn’t address my point, Thor: Are you seriously saying AIG would have been required to keep roughly 50% reserves on hand (I’ve seen estimates of their CDS losses at $250 billion) by some magical regulation? Can you point to some other federal guideline that requires such high fractional reserves?
This isn’t too hard for you, is it?
You do get the point of regulations, do you not? AIG would have complied with them, thus wouldn’t have written $500-bill of insurance they couldn’t cover. Such regulations would’ve kept them from such gambling addicted behavior. Are you following me, camera guy? Wasn’t it Warren Buffet himself who led the charge against Ace Greenberg which led Spitzer to investigate? That’s not too specific for ya, is it? I read the WSJ, I admit, have for years and years. Commodity Futures Modernization Act, 262 pages long, written by Phil Gramm and co-sponsored by Lugar, attached to a non-related spending bill, snuck it in, rammed it through the Repub House and Senate. Arthur Levitt, remember him? Gramm, pounding Levitt, threatening to cut funding altogether for the S.E.C.. ShamWoW!
Wow. AIG’s losses what they accrued are like almost a third of Baracky Soros’s deficit in just his first year.
so far
buffet obama guy leading charge against greenburg rethuglican enlisting spitzer demorat gotcha
“Goldman is extremely eager to shake off the restrictions and scrutiny that come along with TARP,†said Celent’s Schauerte. “A return of taxpayer funds would manifest the bank’s restored strength and set it apart from the pack — just as in better times.†Goldman Sachs raised $5.75 billion from a common stock offering at $123 each in September that started right after Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. bought $5 billion of preferred stock in the company. Goldman Sachs shares jumped 8.4 percent April 9 to close at $124.33, its highest since Oct. 3, amid a rally in bank stocks. The rally was sparked by Wells Fargo & Co., in which Berkshire is also a large investor, saying that it expects to report record first-quarter earnings.
nice 3rd world kleptocracy you demorats running
Baracky will show teh financial peoples how to manage teh finances and also prosperity!
Goldman Sachs is gay I think.
goldman another demorat outfit
This has pretty much ceased. The magazines weren’t selling. Back to Britney and Lindsay.
Great. I suppose the low bow is going to become the accepted greeting on the street now.
Not for me though. The Frontier Party bows to no man. It’s going to make it even easier to spot an Obama supporter. Chiropractic windfall!
Obama supporters come in three sizes. Hard plastic protector sold separately.
Prescient thor. Very prescient.
I challenge you to understand how the market and our regulatory system failed without mention of a person in either political party. When a building collapses you can get to the engineering failure sans simply and endlessly blaming the architect. There are facts, checks and balances and regulatory structures that failed. Get this. We failed. America failed. Fully Completely, Pure Failure.
Bullshit. It isn’t catastrophic. Yet. We fucked up because we created a massive moral hazard, people were making loans and investments they could profit from without bearing any responsibility if they failed. It doesn’t take a financial genius, or much understanding of the intricacies of finance at all to know this is a profoundly bad idea. Yet this was encouraged and subsidized by the government. The government who profited from it, and the government who is now stealing money from the responsible to pay off the fuck ups. The same government you think is going to fix the problem by doing more of the same.
Figure out why the systematic failure, brick by brick, the hard way, the way our founding fathers would have, assuming that collection of fine men who authored our Constitution weren’t intellectual cowards and panty-waisted finger pointers of the first order.
I don’t have time to do the research and give the exact cites, but it seems to me it started with the income tax, in particular corporate income tax. With that amendment, the government became partners with entrepreneurs and businesses, sharing in the profits. Any chance of responsible oversight went right out the fucking window. That is one of the big reasons I support the Fair Tax.
Quit trying to run away from your ideological failure and hiding behind your empty interpretation of what the Constitution stands for…
What ideological failure? You keep saying this, but give no indication of even knowing what my ideology is.
That “we” looks like a convenient fictional character to me, B Moe.
Sorry Thor, this mess has nothing to do with free markets and everything to do with monetary central planning. Also the Democrats were up to their eyeballs in it.
#40 router:
It sounds like a random phrase generator.
You do get the point of regulations, do you not? AIG would have complied with them, thus wouldn’t have written $500-bill of insurance they couldn’t cover. Such regulations would’ve kept them from such gambling addicted behavior.
What regulations are you talking about, Thor? How do you know what these imaginary rules would have said? Are you saying they would have outlawed CDS instruments altogether, would have established minimum capitalization levels for them, or would they have capped the overall amount AIG would have been allowed to sell?
You are aware, are you not, that CDS instruments are, effectively, insurance policies and that insurance is, well, AIG’s business? Are there any other risk hedges you’d like to effectively outlaw while you’re in your bull-in-a-china-shop mode?
As I said, there’s nothing wrong with CDSs so long as risk is accurately gauged and adequate capital held in reserve to cover that risk. The securities underlying all of these CDSs were generally rated quite high, thus it’s ludicrous for you to sit there and assert, a propos of nothing, that some omniscient bureaucrat would have written a regulation requiring a 60% reserve to cover a AAA-rated bond CDS. There were plenty of regulated institutions dealing in CDSs, and none of them were required to capitalize to that level, so why would AIG have been so encumberd?
Your explanations are as tiresome and threadbare as your more foul-mouthed posts.
You do know, do you not, that most insurance is regulated. That adequate reserves are required to write flood insurance, no?
You’re a wallpaper hanger in denial of fuckin’ reality.
AIG is in the businesss is insurance, is it not?” No, evidently AIG’s was in the businesss of selling paper that looked and read like credit default insurance but had no actual value in case of default.
Look, crayola boy, I get tired of writing the same fuckin’ thing over and over again. No, there’s nothing wrong with CDS insurance on it’s face (how many times have I said that, idiot?), unless you can’t cover the risk. And the wittle omniscient evil bureaucrats (Teh Great EVil PumpKinS! Do your words come with a dance? Do you wear a costume when you type this shit and do your dance?) make sure this doesn’t happen on flood insurance. And No, IDIOT, there were no regulators with access to Lehman’s, Bear’s or AIG’s credit default positions. Don’t you watch TV? Didn’t you see all the auditors from every major firm on Wall Street and beyond descending on Bear Stearn’s NY headquarters to see for themselves what exactly was on Bear’s books? Didn’t you see them all come out shaking their heads in disbelief? Did you not know that Treasury had to twist JPM’s arm and backstop their losses if they’d buy Bear because nobody – NOBODY IN THE ENTIRE WORLD – would bid on the company and assume its liabilities? You do know why the Treasury chose JP Morgan, no? Because JPM was Bear’s clearing bank and was on the hook more than any other bank. All this, in proper English, written about extensively.
Get this through your fuckin’ head: It’s called insurance fraud when you sell worthless insurance, when you create a shell game hiding your at-risk liabilities. It wasn’t a unpredictable snow storm, a one time event, a bad day, a un-foretold mishap, something nobody could have foreseen, just highly rated paper gone bad due to a extraordinary event! There’s extraordinary event clauses, extraordinary event insurance, there’s catastrophic event insurance, Warren Buffet’s insurance co.s sell it, and Warren himself tells his shareholders that it’s risky as hell and then tells the shareholders the amount, exactly to a penny, what Berkshire would owe if the catastrophic event does hit. It’s not rocket science. Insurance companies know how to price the event risk into their premiums. They’ve been doing it for hundreds of years. Simple math.
My explanations are tiresome because idiots like you keep posting dumb arguments without having read what I’ve already written, and yes, I’m foul-mouthed, fuckyouverymuch.
Get this through your fuckin’ head: It’s called insurance fraud when you sell worthless insurance, when you create a shell game hiding your at-risk liabilities.
What is called when government aids and abets fraud?
Progressive.
Excuse me Sir, but do Fuck Off, and keep fucking off until you grow up.
This has everything, in fact, to do with free markets, Good Sir, and with the hucksters, liars and crooks who sell product into said markets. This, in fact, has everything to do with leverage, misrepresentations of such, fear and greed, and the trading markets for such.
Bullshit. Coward.
Lehman Bro.s funded more sub-prime paper than anyone on the Street without intervention from the government and certainly no motivation from the government to do so, ya dumb-fuckin’ liar.
They did it to make money.
Lehman Bro.s by itself dwarfed FNMA and FHLMC in sub-prime funding. Know the facts. Quit lying. Stop you’re I-don’t-have-to-know bullshit. Rick Santelli isn’t correct, he was addressing the remedy, anyway. Rush Limbaugh isn’t correct, he knows nothing but how to stir your emotions. You’re being played.
“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.” Alan Greenspan
Want me to translate that? It means Ayn Rand was wrong. Dead wrong.
The market for credit defaults grew to $62-trillion dollars. That’s many times more than the value of all stocks on all our markets combined. There was many times more money bet on who would default than all the money in the stock market, GEEEEEEEE no regulator would’a seen a problem there, nooooooooooooooo.
“But it’s Bwarneeee Fwanks fault, duuuuuh.”
If you think I humiliated you people when Barack Obama won, wait until I hammer nails into your asses with your Barney Frank-bullshit.
I’m right. And I know it.
Great. Let’s see those numbers, finance boy.
You do know, do you not, that most insurance is regulated. That adequate reserves are required to write flood insurance, no?
That made me laugh out loud, so incredibly uninformed as it is. The National Flood Insurance Program, a government program which underwites all (or nearly all) flood insurance in the US, has been subsidized for decades and most certainly does not have reserves. From a Cato study on the topic:
(Emphasis mine) And these are the guys that are going to regulate financial institutions?
Despite your vulgar attempts to say otherwise, I’m well aware that reserves are required to back up insurance policies, CDSs, etc. That’s not the point. The point is how large those reserves are supposed to be. AIG’s CDS business was, according to you, about $500 billion. Reports that I’ve seen indicate that this business will ultimately lose on the order of $250 billion of that. Are you really suggesting that the federal government, had it regulated the CDS market, would have required 50-60% of one’s exposure would have been required on CDSs issued against AAA-rated MBSs??
Yes or No. If yes, then point to another federally-regulated institution that is required to keep on hand that kind of cash.
Lastly, I was to understand that insurance fraud is already contrary to federal law. If what AIG was doing was indeed insurance fraud, why the lack of indictments, prosecutions and convictions? Shouldn’t they be doing the perp walk instead of getting billions from us?
Try to pay attention, bright boy.
Want me to translate that?
Not really, but it is always fun to see you try.
Why did you specifically ask me not to name names, then base your entire response on names I didn’t name? Who is being the liar here? I made no assertion that the market managers or investors, or the government and its regulators, were behaving responsibly, in fact I agree with you that they weren’t. My question is how is bailing out the irresponsible and criminal going to prevent this behavior in the future, and how is a government in partnership with business going to be any more responsible or ethical? You continually refuse to address this.
Does being a conservative require being stupid, require being a denialist of reality, require peddling false narratives?
It must in your world.
It doesn’t in mine.
When the rethuglidums are beaten to the humiliating end and if at that end point they can separate fact from convenient fiction, then I’ll listen to them again. This country needs a healthy counter balance to the Dems, I’ve always said that, but in its current state what’s left of the Republican party is a display of its weakest underpinnings.
Lit theory won’t save you.
So you basically got nothing except profane laced I told you so’s?
Has he ever, B Moe?
Hiya. I live in Florida. Don’t think I know a little of the government’s role in flood insurance?
Got anything other than an opinion (emphasis mine) of adequate capitalization? Because one opinion doesn’t make a fact.
But dis Govwenmants dAh Evoooool! That’s what you sound like, a three-year old. There’s not enough private capital to cover the risk liability from our property insurance companies, that’s the why and what-fore of pooling the risk with the addition of government capital. Da eVol-est PeOple, gOveRnmEnT, help the market, they don’t create the market.
Learn what a CDO and CMO is and how they are structured and then the folly of your 50-60% reserve requirement comparison will stare you in the face. They’re not hegemonic debt instruments, crayola kid.
I can see you’re trying. Maybe keep up that effort until you get really pissed off. In the end it’ll be AIG who you’ll want to piss on, if you’re not a total coward hell-bent on forwarding a false narrative, that is. Insurance companies should know how to price risk, no? Ace Greenberg seems to think so.
Ultimately, it comes down to Thor thumping the tub for “regulation,” which he insists would have been sublimly perfect and would have either prevented the wicked at AIG from selling CDS instruments or would have required them to keep on hand $250 billion in liquid assets to cover the implosion of the federal govenment’s creation: The Real Estate Bubble.
Essentially, it’s a fairly tale filled with nasty trolls (AIG execs), fair damsels (taxpayers) and a stout-hearted hero (Sir Oprompta the Just) who will slay the villain with his mighty sword (regulation). And, like a fairy tale, it’s entertaining, but bears no relation to reality.
Round and round he goes. I think we may be wrong about thor being a drunk, I think he is just dizzy from all that spinning in circles.
Hiya. I live in Florida. Don’t think I know a little of the government’s role in flood insurance?
Obviously not or you wouldn’t have said such a stupid thing in #71.
Let’s make this simple, shall we?: If AIG had $500 billion in exposure to CDS instruments, and it seems that it will have to pay roughly $250 billion on the defaults generated by the government’s popped RE bubble, are you not saying that your mythical regulation would have required roughly that much in reserves? Yes or no.
I’m not upset at AIG one little bit. They invested unwisely and lost oceans of money. It happens. I’m upset that the government bailed them out.
Look, I have to go. We’ve got a date with drinks and real people.
This is a fair question. But in the end your questioned is answered by the intertwined nature of our banks and our banking system in general, and it’s not simply our domestic banks, it’s world wide. Also in how much of our industrial corporations are dependent on credit and credit management to fund their businesses.
What do you want me to do, write a book? Chemtura went Chap. 11 recently. If you read how they fell it’ll illuminate how dependent they were on factoring receivables.
“When the tide goes out you get to see who is swimming naked.” Warren Buffet, though I don’t think he was the first to say it.
Your question is a fair one but it ultimately has to do with deleveraging and our gov’t’s attempts to help the deleveraging process become an orderly process instead of a sudden cataclysmic melt down event.
If you can move beyond weak arguments of Progressivism and Democratic EVOOOOL, then we can talk. As I’ve said before, and I’m right, those in the stock market don’t give a flying fuck who is President of what the cap gains tax rate is. They look to make a profit, no matter the President, no matter how much they have to pay in taxes – THEY SEEK A NET PROFIT, THAT IS THEIR ONLY MOTIVE.
Well, Black Helicopter Coward, I think you’re example of flood insurance shows your apples to oranges
ignorance and you’re desire to simply everything down to your ignorance level.
Let’s not talk about AIG. You don’t get it and never will. They Gov’t really bail out AIG, now did they. They paid off AIG’s contra-parties so those contra-parties wouldn’t collapse, meaning banks, insurance co.s and borkerage houses around the world.
Whooosh, like a flying U.N. gunship, right over your head.
Gubmint Dah eVoLLLLLL (at least when it’s not run by repubs), keep telling yourself that, and argue with your black helicopter’s shadows.
They Gov’t really bail out AIG, now did they. = The Gov’t didn’t really bail….
Nice debating with those who relieve themselves of the responsibility to read.
Enjoy your evening.
I think you meant “your.” Sub-literacy doesn’t mix well with vulgarity when you’re angling for credibility, Thor.
If you’d like to read that piece from Cato, it’s here. It indicates that the flood insurance premiums on a lot of high-risk properties is about 60% of where it ought to be. This surprised me a bit, insofar as I’ve read other pieces that concluded it was closer to 30-35%. IOW, if you’ve got flood insurance, Thor, I’m helping to pay for it. You should be grateful.
I know exactly where that AIG bailout money went, BTW. I’m just puzzled as to why American taxpayers are bailing out those institutions by proxy.
What do you want me to do, write a book?
I would be happy with a couple of coherent paragraphs.
If you can move beyond weak arguments of Capitalism and ReThugliDums, EVOOOOL, then we can talk.
If you can move beyond weak arguments of Progressivism and Democratic EVOOOOL, then we can talk. As I’ve said before, and I’m right, those in the stock market don’t give a flying fuck who is President of what the cap gains tax rate is. They look to make a profit, no matter the President, no matter how much they have to pay in taxes – THEY SEEK A NET PROFIT, THAT IS THEIR ONLY MOTIVE.
OK, lets move past the weak arguments of progressivism. Lets also move past the weak arguments against conservatism too, Thor. That way we are not being intellectually lazy.
I have highlighted the portion of your statement above for a reason. One to point out how once again, you you fail to cross the finish line with all your arguments and try to fake the finish, by yelling and screaming obscenities at the cartoon figures that you have created to represent the fine people here.
Investments look at NET PROFIT as adjusted for risk.
You are some novice little daytrader who thinks he’s a financial genius. You do not understand that singular point. And net profit does not include the risk adjustment. Not the way you define it. If you knew investing, you would have carefully parsed that sentence to accomodate the notion that $1 of net profit is not the same across different investments or portfolios.
The failure in the banking and insurance sector is not because of progressive or conservative policies per say. It is true that there is a lot of evidence to tie specific public policy that created the conditions that magnified this situation. Mostly progressive policies. Enacted by both sides of the aisle.
The failure was not greed, again per say. Greed is a feature of the system in free markets, not a bug. However, greed is tempered by fear. Fear is tempered by assessing risk.
The failure was in assessing risk. Something that you cannot put at the feet of George Bush. That would be intellectually lazy.
Why didn’t a lot of hedge funds get caught up in this mania? Because, as pure free market creatures, the best of them spend and inordinate amout of time a resources figuring out the RISK of investments, more than looking for investments. A lot of them profited handsomely from the situation.
Banks, on the other hand are the slow and the dimwitted. Kinda like government. Always chasing the latest fad, always a day late and dollar short. In this case we had a massive insurance company out there emulating the government model. Trying to be everything to everyone. And all of them looked at the housing market and kept slicing the pie into thinner and thinner slivers, using leverage to amp up the returns. Not creating anything really new, just making copies of the original over and over again.
Funnily (not really) they all followed the same formula for risk assessment. Diversification. Yes. Spread you exposure around enough and you can tell yourself that no matter what happens in one area, won’t simulataneously happen in another and with all that “diversity”, you will still make net profits that beat keeping your money in treauries. Although examples of fat tail events, black swans, catastrophic correlation errors had shown themselves with alarming frequency (albeit localized) in the recent past. The Russian currency crisis, the East Asian meltdown, the 1987 stock market crash, the dot com bubble.
The Greenspan quote is money. Here is a guy who is perplexed at the actions of banks. The same guy after whom the term, “Greenspan Put” was coined. Perplexed. Shocked. The government bailed out bad actors in the past (see LTCM) and it seemed that the only requirement to execise the option was to be “sufficiently big enough” if you fuck up, so that the NY Fed called you in for your bail out. How could this possibly lead to this behaviour? Shocking.
The banks adopted the governments business model. Make bad decisions (policies), screw up, run to the Goverment (tax-payers) for a bailout. Color that old fart Greenspan perplexed.
Yell at republicans and democrats all you want. Bush didn’t cause it. Obama isn’t helping out much either. He actually seems to be trying to take advantage of the situation to further the same muddled policies that set the stage for this perfect storm. Say what you want about Limbaugh. He pays lip service to the concepts of what is needed here. Massive pain of letting the system work out the toxins.
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Comment by Jeffersonian on 4/11 @ 8:49 pm #
I think you meant “your.†Sub-literacy doesn’t mix well with vulgarity when you’re angling for credibility, Thor.
If you’d like to read that piece from Cato, it’s here. It indicates that the flood insurance premiums on a lot of high-risk properties is about 60% of where it ought to be. This surprised me a bit, insofar as I’ve read other pieces that concluded it was closer to 30-35%. IOW, if you’ve got flood insurance, Thor, I’m helping to pay for it. You should be grateful.
I know exactly where that AIG bailout money went, BTW. I’m just puzzled as to why American taxpayers are bailing out those institutions by proxy.
You smoke crack from a pipe shaped like a man’s dick. This I suspect. Flood insurance? Down to your level of
cheap negro-sold crackignorance, read what I said earlier.Ooooold Texas Tuuuuuuurdkey.
You embarrass white people.
No.
Seriously.
You do.
You smoke crack from a pipe shaped like a man’s dick. This I suspect. Flood insurance? Down to your level of cheap negro-sold crack ignorance, read what I said earlier.
What you said was either verifiably wrong, irrelevant jargon or characteristically insulting and profane. You also refuse to answer a pertinent question about this regulation that you say would have solved everything.
I’m starting to think you’re a waste of time.
OTT
Now really. What did you expect?
A blade of grass, poking through the endless expanse of asphalt; a triumph of hope over experience.
#96 for #90
Old Texas Turk, I know more a lot than you. Bernanke, Greenspan, Paulson and Geithner know more a lot than me. Your talking as if you’re on the level with Fed Chairmans and Treasury Secretaries makes for a cute display of narcissism, but I’m pretty sure you’re better off letting over-educated adults handle Fed policy, especially seeing how you know not-too much about it outside of Crayola theory.
“letting the system work out the toxins”
Hey stupid, it’s called the federal banking system for a reason. It’s not called the Rush Limbaugh banking system, now is it. That’s because he’s clueless of how our banking system works.
You’ve never been worth anyone’s time. The gov’t’s flood and wind damage insurance programs have been seen as huge successes, retard.
You wouldn’t recognize a CMO and CDO if they were tag teaming your wife.
You’ve been exposed for what you truly are, a mindless child whose only metanarrative is teh gubmint is tah EvoOoL.
AIG has collapsed as has the Republican party. Both are failures that didn’t know their business.
I know a lot more than you when it comes to the securities markets. Get over it.
Old Texas Turk, I know more a lot than you.
You don’t even know what we are talking about, dude.
Hey stupid, it’s called the federal banking system for a reason. It’s not called the Rush Limbaugh banking system, now is it. That’s because he’s clueless of how our banking system works.
Fucking brilliant.
Old Texas Turk, I know more a lot than you.
I like the comeback. The point by point dissection of the argument combined with the precise dismantling of erronious assumptions.
Such an intellect.